The national admissions beat is abuzz with fast-breaking stories as the next admissions cycle gets underway. “The fundamentals are the fundamentals,” AB host and Dartmouth Dean Lee Coffin tells recurring co-host and former New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg. “But some policies are in motion.” The AB duo is joined by Matt DeGreef, longtime college counselor at Middlesex School in Massachusetts and a former admission and financial aid officer at Harvard, for a conversation about how best to consume recent news about higher education as you make and shape your college list.
The national admissions beat is abuzz with fast-breaking stories as the next admissions cycle gets underway. “The fundamentals are the fundamentals,” AB host and Dartmouth Dean Lee Coffin tells recurring co-host and former New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg. “But some policies are in motion.” The AB duo is joined by Matt DeGreef, longtime college counselor at Middlesex School in Massachusetts and a former admission and financial aid officer at Harvard, for a conversation about how best to consume recent news about higher education as you make and shape your college list.
Lee Coffin:
From Hanover, New Hampshire, I'm Lee Coffin, Dartmouth's vice president and dean of admissions and financial aid, and this is Admissions Beat.
Last week we kicked off season eight with a back-to-school conversation that helps seniors pivot from discovery to applying as they move from junior year to being rising seniors, to being seniors in high school with application deadlines coming closer and closer by the day. This week we're going to add another layer to that pivot from discovery to applying as we ponder the flurry of headlines and the questions those headlines are generating as this admission cycle starts to roll forward.
I would say as a dean that the admission beat with a little “a” and a little “b” is pretty active right now. Almost every day there seems to be a story covering the work we do in college admissions. I keep wondering, do these headlines help students and their parents make sense of what's going on or does it generate more worry? I fear “worry” is probably more true than “help.” This week, my recurring co-host Jacques Steinberg of New York Times fame rejoins Admission Beat to help me think about the headlines through that journalist's eye, and we'll be joined by Matt DeGreef, a longtime college counselor in suburban Boston, and as close to an expert on admission trends and policy as I know. When we come back, we'll say hi to Jacques and Matt.
(music)
Hello, Jacques and Matt.
Jacques Steinberg:
Hello Lee and Matt.
Matt DeGreef:
Hello Lee and Jacques.
Lee Coffin:
Jacques, it's nice to see you.
Jacques Steinberg:
It's a pleasure to be back.
Lee Coffin:
Listeners, you might have caught a big story by Jacques in the New York Times recently where he did a story about Dan Rather, former anchor of the CBS Evening News now living in Austin, Texas. Jacques got back in his journalist swing for a conversation with one of the titans of broadcast journalism. How was that Jacques?
Jacques Steinberg:
It was fascinating. For listeners who are under the age of 35, Dan Rather was the anchor of the CBS Evening News for more than 20 years—one of three people who did that job and sort of brought the news of the day to the nation. He's somebody I wrote about when I was a journalist at the New York Times many years ago. He's now 93 and he is still chasing the news, writing three times a week for a newsletter. It was an honor to tell that story.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, Matt, I call Jacques one of the founding fathers of the Admission Beat nationally. His work, the New York Times in the late nineties, early two thousands when he wrote The Gatekeepers and edited The Choice and he was one of those first journalists that put our work in the national spotlight. I know you and I followed that pretty closely, but you are also a big consumer of all things admission newsie. Listeners, Matt is the Dean of College Counseling and Student Enrichment at Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts and has been in that role for 24 years.
Matt DeGreef:
Unbelievable, 24 years.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, that really is a long gig in one school in this college counseling perch. You've seen a lot.
Matt DeGreef:
I've lived through a lot. I've seen a lot. Just moving from Cambridge to Concord, I feel like I've been blessed to live in such beautiful spaces and work with such incredible people. Concord is a hard place to leave. Raised my family here, four kids, and it's been a real tremendous opportunity professionally.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Listeners, he mentioned Cambridge; that's because Matt was an admission and financial aid officer at Harvard College for 13 years before he switched to the other side of the desk, as my admission colleagues often say, and went from being an admission officer to a college counselor. I think you've thrived in both roles, Matt, but I wanted you to come on to this particular newsy pod because you and I were having a chat about the things that are keeping you up at night as the new school year starts. I thought you're a good foil for Jacques to bring the headlines home. Jacques, I'm going to pass the mic to you as host for this episode, and Matt and I will play roles of college counselor and dean of admission, helping our families make sense of the headlines. I hope, listeners, this is a bit more reassuring than alarming as you hear Matt and I think about what's in the news and how do you keep your wits about you as the college admission process plays out among that noisy landscape. Jacques, it's all yours.
Jacques Steinberg:
It's a pleasure, and thank you both. Let's imagine our audience of high school seniors and their parents and the other adults in their lives. Let's imagine an audience of your peers, high school counselors and admissions officers. Let's imagine how the developments of the last few months, especially as emanating from Washington D.C., feel from where they're sitting. We're going to walk through a handful of those developments in a moment. Before we do, in the spirit of your charge to us, Lee, at the 30,000-foot level, can you both provide some reassuring perspective on this fall's application process?
Lee Coffin:
Yes, because I always start from a position of optimism and I'm humble to add my own arithmetic to Matt's 24 years. This is my 31st year as a dean of admission, my 10th at Dartmouth. I share that right now because the more things change, the more they stay the same, as the old saying goes. As the first year class arrived, as the leaves are turning here in New Hampshire, as my admission colleagues head out around the world to meet the high school class of '26 in their schools, there's a lot of parts of this that they're feeling really normal today, 10 years ago, 20 years ago.
I think for students and parents who are getting ready to actually apply the reassuring thought is the Common app, the Coalition app, the QuestBridge app, the Institutional app, those applications are still, as they were a year ago, two years ago. You have an opportunity to tell your story. Your transcript will share your performance in your high school. We will read your file when it's time to read files and we will shape a community campus by campus that sniffs out the merit in that file and shapes a class to the best of our ability from that big pool of talent. That hasn't changed. I think some of the questions you're sure to ask us may poke around some of the policies that orbit around the process that I lead and have led for three decades, but those fundamentals are still fundamental.
Jacques Steinberg:
Matt, if you were to read the news and just pay attention to headlines, what Lee said might not register with how it feels inside, literally how it feels to be a student or a parent or a counselor or an admissions officer, you are sitting in the office of a high school. Do Lee's words of reassurance ring true to you as a counselor? Is that good advice to parents and students right now?
Matt DeGreef:
Many of the things that Lee said about the beginning of the school year and the beginning the cycle— we're seeing that at Middlesex. We have a hundred colleges coming to visit us. I have emails from lots of colleges who want to engage with us. Our kids are excited to apply to college and engage with them. Then they have issues around, I want to tell my authentic voice in the Common Application, but AI clouds that conversation. How do I know the colleges actually believe it's my writing? You have concerns about testing and testing's gotten a bit messy this fall. Those little things create anxieties. I think there's a lot of questions around financial aid, and we can talk more about this, but where is financial aid going to be in the spring versus the fall as budgets evolve?
I think there are a lot of things that families, a lot of them are first-time customers, so they don't know what's coming. I can see those things that are coming and that's why I have my long list of concerns and things that I'm mapping. Then international students, we're a boarding school at Middlesex, we're deep into that space as well. The normal things are happening, and then there's these other layers of things that I think people are subtly starting to understand and build upon. So many of these families are first-time customers, so they don't know what's coming.
Lee Coffin:
The fundamentals are the same. I think what Matt just shared are all true elements of the story. There's the macro and the micro, and I think the macro is holistic admission in a selective environment continues. The micro, testing and financial aid and internationalism and AI, those are real. None of that is an imagined set of questions.
Jacques Steinberg:
I've got each of those points on my list of questions for you both. Before we dive in, one last question. Matt mentions first-time customers. For those who are listening, and this is your first go-round as a student applying to college and parents, your applications were many years in the past, let's just define, Lee and Matt, the holistic admissions process you've mentioned. It indeed is a process that is largely the same as it has been for many decades. In that regard, it doesn't change this fall. Holistic is the whole person taking the measure of the whole person, but how would you Lee and you Matt, for a first-time customer, define the holistic admissions process?
Lee Coffin:
Holistic admissions has been the standard we use for over a hundred years with various policies coming and going through that holistic review. Holistic means you are the sum of many parts. My predecessors would say it represents your full range of talents. You are an academic, you are someone who does things outside of a classroom. You have a voice that animates a classroom, a residence hall, a campus. You have passions. You have qualities that aren't measurable but still count and you fit into this campus landscape that we are constructing. As we build the landscape on our campus, we're also meeting you where you are. How do we include the environment that produced you as part of your story? It's storytelling, it's data analysis, it's knitting together all these different pieces into the whole that is you.
Jacques Steinberg:
Matt, anything you would add?
Matt DeGreef:
Well, I would add, I was raised in a holistic admissions process at Harvard where you had area people who went and visited the schools, knew the kids and the counselors and understood their territories, represented the students, and brought a full story to the committee table and the committee voted. That process is still very true at Harvard, but every school has a culture of decision making. Part of me as a college counselor, I try to study and understand how does an admissions office make decisions. I know at the highly selective schools, the holistic read is there. There is a whole different world going on out there with big data. That process is really hard for families to understand.
My charge with my students is how do you tell your complete story on every inch of your common application? How do you make sure you're articulating what's important to you and how that's going to match with an institution authentically? That's exciting, that's fun. It helps kids really understand why they want to go to a place like Dartmouth or go down to a school like Middlebury just down the road. There's a lot of opportunity to build a holistic process on my side of the desk as well.
Jacques Steinberg:
I talked about the 30,000-foot analogy as if you were flying in a plane. Some of these headlines, to carry the analogy, are the turbulence. I want to take a series of these headlines and sort of take them apart again from the perspective of a student or a parent or a counselor or an admissions officer. Matt, you mentioned testing. Let's start with testing. Before we talk about ACT, SAT, let's just talk about standardized testing requirements and where things stand this fall.
Matt DeGreef:
I mean, there has been a shift towards highly selective colleges, many of them in the Ivy League and whatnot, who've moved back to requiring testing or expecting testing as part of their process. There are a lot of different terms out there in terms of what people want in terms of testing if they're test optional. I think that's where there's a lot of confusion going on for families in terms of understanding, do I represent my testing? How does my testing help my process? How does it articulate my strengths as a student? I think that's where we spend a lot of time trying to help our students align their testing profiles with the schools they're applying to. There are a number of schools that are test free and are very committed to that.
Jacques Steinberg:
Lee, Dartmouth was in the vanguard of schools that reinstated standardized testing following the pandemic when most schools suspended those tests in part because at least early on it was hard to take the tests. For somebody listening who's applying to a school that is either test required or test optional, how do you know if you have what's constituted as a good score? How does Dartmouth determine whether something is a good score?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. The lesson of the pandemic as it relates to testing was connecting the testing to the local context, not just the campus context. Historically you would say we have an average SAT of X, and the range is Q to Z. Students would sit down with their counselor and say, "Is my score near that average? Is it in that range?" That was the interpretation of competitive. I am hoping the pandemic taught us that we can be more elastic in the way we meet data and understand it. For example, a student should go to the guidance or the counseling office and say, "What are the average score profile from my high school?" Then how does your score relate to that local factor? This is especially true in a public high school where the class is more heterogeneous than perhaps a school like Matt's where there's been an admission process that actually sets that cohort. If you find that your score is above the high school average or above the 75th percentile, that's a really good score. That's a competitive score from your high school.
Whether it's an optional process or a required process, those test scores add to the data narrative in your file. If you don't include testing, you're leaving the data narrative open to whatever your grade point average is. I think my advice for everybody is as you move through the fall, having a set of scores is helpful. Take them one more time if you can this fall. If your scores seem in the zone or above the zone locally, those are worth sharing. As admission officers, we are reading your scores through that local lens. Give you an example from Dartmouth is the class enrolled this fall, we did not share an average score for the class of '29 as they arrived. We said 90% of that class had a test score in the top quarter of their high school. I hope that's a more helpful way of thinking about testing as we go forward.
Jacques Steinberg:
Matt, as we think about the ACT and the SAT, any particular changes in those tests that are worth flagging for students and families?
Matt DeGreef:
Well, I think the SAT is moving well along the line as a digital test. I think more and more of our students are leaning towards the SAT and preferring the digital test. The ACT is now shifting to a new enhanced ACT this fall. It's going to have fewer questions, it's going to be a better paced test in a lot of ways, but there's a lot of questions about the scoring of the new ACT and how that's going to play out. The other factor is that the science reasoning section is going to be optional for the students to take and then also to report to the colleges. That optional aspect of the science reasoning will also impact the super score that the students have. That creates a lot of confusion because many colleges don't have real clear policies on their websites about what they want and don't want and how they're going to super score the old and new ACTs.
Jacques Steinberg:
We just, for purposes of definition, for somebody who's new, let's define super score.
Matt DeGreef:
Super score. With the ACT, the old super score would be your best. There are four subsections and you take your best four subsections from the different test states and you combine that to get your super score. Maybe you took it in April and June and you combine your best English, reading, math and science reasoning to get your best score. Now you can take the science reasoning out and just do English, reading, and math to get your best super score. The new test has a, it's a different test. The hard thing for the students is that on the Common application, the way it's reported, it's your best English, reading, math, and composite score. The students want to report their best super score.
Lee Coffin:
What's interesting is I'm listening to Matt describe that, is I know that's what happens in schools. There's a lot of fussing about a lot of details, and the word optional is probably the most wicked word in college admissions because while the colleges think, oh, we're giving you the choice to include something or not, where that ball bounces, whether it's an optional SAT, ACT and optional sub score on the ACT and optional essay and optional interview, people say to me, optional means required. I said, "No. If it were required, we would say required." Those aren't synonyms, but people don't believe us. There's this worry that optional is a must, it's not.
I would say the news you could use piece of this is on the college side, we don't spend any time second guessing your decision to include or not include something. If there's an optional essay and you don't share it, it doesn't look bad. If there's an optional sub score in the ACT in science and you're majoring in English, I wouldn't give it a second thought. Honestly, as we move into this cycle with this piece of news as a new thing, I don't think a lot of us are going to spend very much time at all as we read pondering, was the science score in your ACT composite and does it change your super score? Probably won't.
Jacques Steinberg:
All right. Moving on to another subject. Matt, you mentioned AI, artificial intelligence. Let's talk about it from a student's perspective and admissions officer's perspective. Matt, start with the students. Our world is changing so rapidly as AI inserts itself into tasks and activities that were unimaginable as recently as a year ago or even more recently than that. To what extent are your students wrestling with AI as a tool vis-a-vis their college applications? What sort of counsel do you give them?
Matt DeGreef:
We had our Common App boot camp and we met with the seniors and we talked about how the colleges want to hear their authentic selves, they want to hear that verb, the teenage language, the spin that only teenagers can put into a college essay. Tufts just came out with a great piece. You can use AI maybe as a thinking partner or a brainstorming tool, but not as the author of your essays. I think that's the critical part.
I think from my years of reading essays, and I'm sure Lee would as well, when you read a kid's essay, you can tell within the context of their grades, their school, their testing, is this essay actually aligned with what I see in the file. It's almost like you're a detective, you're understanding, you're putting together this kid's narrative, and if the essay doesn't align, mom wrote the essay, they had an essay consultant, it doesn't align it, it just doesn't feel right. I think with AI, the way it writes, it just writes in a way that just doesn't sound like a teenager. We want them to have that zip that a teenager has. I think it's so important that it's also within the context of what the rest of the folder says.
Lee Coffin:
I love that sentence, Matt, “the zip that a teenager has and AI doesn't have it.”
Matt DeGreef:
It makes a huge difference. It could be a funny phrase, it could just be a bad punctuation moment, but there's an element of there's these moments these kids have and sometimes you have to pull it out of them because they don't feel like their story is unique or special, but it is. When you get to that point with the kid, it's so wonderful.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Jacques Steinberg:
Yeah, I come to it from the perspective of a writer and it's all about voice. I've sat with Lee and colleagues as they've read so many essays and they have an unbelievable ear for voice. I think they can tell when that voice is not authentic or when that voice is filtered.
Matt DeGreef:
I would say from my years of reading admissions files at Harvard, I have one essay that I saved from a girl from Saginaw High School who type wrote the essay about growing up in Saginaw. Her dad worked at the GM plant and read her poetry and he never went to college. It was a very blue collar non-college background. She wrote one of the most beautiful essays on typed paper. She had one of the few 800 verbals in the state of Michigan that year, and she was lucky to go to Harvard and she's now a reporter in Michigan. There aren't that many essays. I always tell students, very few essays get you into college, a poorly written essay can get you out.
Jacques Steinberg:
All right, so I've got an actual headline to bounce off you both. This is from the Wall Street Journal, August 29th by Jeffrey Selingo, a renowned education writer, author. The headline is “The Elite College Myth.” Here's the sub headline: “Panicky parents often think their children's success in life depends on going to a prestigious school. In reality, there are many paths to achieving great things.” I'll just read one quote from the piece, "Attending an Ivy League university does open doors, but it's not the guarantee of extraordinary success that parents seem to think, nor does attending a different school preclude you from achieving great things."
Lee, let's start with you. Among other tasks and activities that families are engaged in right now is refining their lists, making sure that their college lists are balanced with aspirational schools, sort of target schools, schools that might seem a little more comfortable. They're wrestling with this notion of schools like Dartmouth that are quite hard to get into in terms of selectivity, and other schools that may not have the same selectivity but may not have the same profile nationally. What do you think of Selingo's basic premise, an Ivy League university does open doors but is not the guarantee of extraordinary success that parents seem to think?
Lee Coffin:
That's a tricky question for the dean of admission at one of the Ivy's to answer, Jacques. I'm going to agree.
Jacques Steinberg:
Wow.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, I mean we are, there's eight places in the country that fall into that league. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of places around the United States and Canada and the UK and Australia that offer really wonderful undergraduate programs. I think one of the conundrums of my work is the frenzy that swirls around a tiny subset of those options and hearing people say, "If we don't get one, we will have failed." I know lots of people, myself included, who did undergraduate work outside the Ivy League and have lived really lovely, productive, successful lives.
Having said that the places are special and deserve to have the spotlight we have as opportunities, doesn't mean they're the only opportunities. I think it's keeping that perspective. The one thing I would add to Selingo's assessment is for people like me who needed financial aid to go to college, these campuses have really remarkable resources that they share to expand access to higher ed to students from families that don't have the means to do it. The upside of, I'll say the campus where I work is, we enrolled a class of 1200 students and offered them almost $42 million in scholarships. It's a remarkable amount of money for such a tiny class.
That's also true, is that Matt mentioned financial aid and budgets as one of his worries. At a point in higher ed, that's not a worry. Are we paying attention to financial aid? Of course. Are we changing our aid policies because the economy is wobbly, our endowment is not taxed? No. Are there some places that must? Perhaps. I think it's being an informed person around what are the policies and resources campus to campus. As you move into the spotlight part of the list, aid is usually not a question mark. Getting in is a question mark. Getting the scholarship you need once admitted is not a question mark. Matt, does that sound right?
Matt DeGreef:
I would say the ability to fund students at levels that are extraordinary because most of the Ivy League schools are even beyond federal methodology. They are able to really make it I mean even better than when I was a student, life changing opportunities financial aid-wise. Part of my work is building these balance lists, helping students stretch and go for their dreams with eyes wide open about the opportunity costs.
I wanted to offer another perspective. I'm from St. Louis and in St. Louis, the question they always ask you is where you went to high school. That's how they define you. They want to know where you went to high school. They can tell a lot about you in that. I always say to my students in Boston, they ask you where you went to graduate school. You're going to be a lifelong learner. Where you go for your master's or whatever, your professional degree or your PhD, may a more definitive stamp on your life than just going to college. I think there's the other opportunity to think about it, it's beyond just a four-year experience.
Lee Coffin:
I think the trick of this is being pragmatic and marrying your romance with reality. As the list comes into focus over the fall, it's not top-heavy. To the Selingo article, in some zip codes and in some high schools, there's a really tiny list of options that make sense. Years ago when I was at Tufts, we had a student transferring out after her first year and we always did an exit interview and the dean said to her, "Why are you leaving? What was wrong?" She said, "I love it here." The dean said, "I'm confused, why are you transferring?" The students said, "At my high school, success means one of the eight Ivys. I came close but didn't get it. To be legitimate, I have to go to an Ivy." That's a sad way of thinking because she loved where she was, but some standard overrode that, and these are individual choices. You go where you can because it's your choice.
I think it fuels this worry in many places and among many people that the odds are long at this tiny group and that's where the stress comes from, versus I have lots of examples of students who realistically set their list around their credentials and they got in everywhere. That's a lovely outcome that allows choice to happen throughout because it wasn't a top-heavy list. It was a list where the college counselor said, "This feels like a realistic shot if you tell your story well."
Jacques Steinberg:
Matt, you talked about financial aid. Let's come back to that subject. The free application for federal student aid goes live on October 1st. It has been in the headlines. Imagine a family that is going to need to apply for financial aid, a student who's going to need to apply for financial aid. Just a few quick pieces of advice and counsel as they head into that particular process in this particular fall.
Matt DeGreef:
One of our big goals with our families who are first time applicants for financial aid is to create their federal student aid ID number. You need to go in and the parents and the students need to create their own FSA IDs. That's an important before you get into the FAFSA, and that's where in some cases if you have any issues around citizenship status or wherever you are in that process, you can catch those issues and solve those problems before you get into the application.
The FSA ID is hugely important as the first step. When you get to the FAFSA, it's actually from someone who's actually filling one out himself for a child, it actually works fairly well because it pulls in the IRS data. A lot of the information kind of naturally gravitates in. I've found the new FAFSA, once they got the kinks worked out, to work really well and it actually does not take a lot of time. The CSS profile on the other hand takes a lot more time to fill out, but for us it's getting our families aligned with the first step and then everything else works really well.
Lee Coffin:
That's the good news though, Jacques, the last couple of years there were snafus in the rollout of the new FAFSA and that seems to be behind us. The promise of the reforms is now here.
Jacques Steinberg:
I've got two more topics then I'm going to ask you both if there's any topic I've forgotten, and then I'm going to toss back to Lee to close out. The first one is the role of race and ethnicity in this year's college application process. For listeners who are new to all this, several years ago the Supreme Court said that admissions offices could not consider race as a factor in a student's consideration for admission in terms of sort of checking a box and having the very checking of that box sort of elevate your application in the process. But at the same time, Chief Justice John Roberts said in the same decision that students could talk about their identity and their lived experience in their essays, including if they wanted to talk about their racial identity and how that had informed their lives and experiences. It's the fall of '25, Lee, particularly for listeners who are students of color, any tweaks they should make in their approach as they apply to colleges that use the holistic admissions process.
Lee Coffin:
Jacques, I'm going to broaden your question and say, for all students from all types of identities and backgrounds, the opportunity is the same. Tell your story in your own words and introduce yourself in whatever way that matters to you, and give us the narrative that helps us imagine you and your perspective on this campus and the classroom. If it is in fact your racial identity that you want to highlight and celebrate, do it in a way that doesn't just say, "I am a Mexican-American student," but, "I'm the Mexican-American living in suburban Pennsylvania," and blah, blah, blah. Broaden it to say how your identity has informed your person, your experience. That's valid as part of our holistic review.
What we can't do—there was a story last year in the New York Times where the students said something like, "I just need to make sure they know I'm a black guy from the Bronx, that ought to do it"—We can't use that. That's not life experience, that's just identity. The ruling requires colleges to focus on the experiential piece, not the identity in and of itself. That's the big shift. I think we were always doing life experience even before the Supreme Court cases against Harvard and Chapel Hill. After the court ruled, the guidelines changed, the emphasis on race neutral, the emphasis on celebrating all types of background. Anyway, Matt, I'm curious, as you work with students, how well do they understand what I just said?
Matt DeGreef:
I think there's a general understanding that there's been a change in how the colleges are discussing, talking about and evaluating students who are BIPOC. I think students have to have a level of comfort talking about particularly their racial identity and their application. Some students feel that can be performative and can be not true to themselves. There are a lot of students from lots of different backgrounds, first gen, transgendered, gay, who may feel vulnerable in the process. Even I think there's worry that the Supreme Court or maybe the Justice Department is interested in essays now as we move forward in terms of how colleges are using them in their evaluation process. I think our goal is to have students really tell their full story without them feeling like they're compromising their integrity. I think most students are willing to tell their story in a really powerful way.
Lee Coffin:
So in the last six to nine months, there have been lots of topics that have started to shift and open, and Matt outlines a bunch of them. There have been a couple of executive orders that land squarely in the space where I work. Our counselors have said to me, "When there's an executive order, we need to start to pay attention," but many of them don't take effect immediately. They signal direction more than an immediate change, of course, and sometimes they're overturned. I think if you're an applicant moving through these next weeks towards the application deadlines, my advice is do what you're going to do. Don't let the story from outside of the college admission process alter the way you introduce yourself. Remember, anything that's happening in Washington, D.C. or wherever is not changing the way you as an applicant use the application. It may change the way the college constructs its application in the future or the way we evaluate that application, but as an applicant, you're not the direct actor in the change. The Common App is live and it is set for the class of 2026. Fill it out.
Jacques Steinberg:
Last headline, international students and some of our listeners, Matt, are students from locations outside the US. We've also got students in the US who are looking forward to going to school with students from international backgrounds. A lot of activity from D.C. on this subject, new hoops that international students need to go through. Can we generalize about the state of international student attendance to American universities this fall?
Matt DeGreef:
I know that my international students for the first time and since I've been at Middlesex, have been adding more international schools to their college list. Schools in the UK, in Asia, Australia, not many, but they're adding a diversity of schools to their list to have more opportunities, and Canada for example as well. I think there's some intentionality by international students to make sure they have a better portfolio of options as they move forward. I think the international students are still a priority for many colleges because they bring incredible talent, revenue, and opportunity for many colleges and universities have relationships with cities, countries, institutions that they want to maintain and develop and grow. There's a lot of historical aspects to these relationships with international students. I think it's important just to make sure that if you're applying widely, that you have a broader range of schools on your list that are not in the United States.
I think for international students who need financial aid, I think it's going to be an even more competitive marketplace than it's ever been in terms of students who need financial aid. I think the full-paced students will still have more opportunities, and I think that's institution by institution. I mean, Lee's in a position where he can fund the international students he wants to, but not every dean of admissions has that luxury. We have some Ukrainian students in Middlesex who are amazing and they're students who need a lot of support. So far we've been blessed that they've all landed well. It's something that keeps me up at night when I'm working with students who are international who need financial aid.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Jacques next week's episode will dive deeply into this topic of international admissions in the fall of 2025 because it is a shifting landscape with a lot of questions. It's interesting when I get asked by our local papers on our international enrollment, it was steady. All of the students we admitted got their visas and they're here. That's a reassurance. I wasn't sure a few months ago that that would happen. It did. I think there's a proof point of we could worry or we can continue to look forward and react when it's time to react. I think the danger of the noise that chirps all around us is people preemptively react and sometimes you miss out on an opportunity because you ducked and you didn't need to.
Jacques Steinberg:
Last question for you both sort of a lightning round as we bring this to a close, Matt, starting with you, is there a headline that you had wanted to talk about that I missed that you think would be important for the students and families and counselors and admissions folks in our audience?
Matt DeGreef:
Well, one of the things I've been watching carefully are the budgets on college campuses. I have concerns about what's going to happen this spring around regular decision and some colleges, not all, with their ability to fund students. I think for families watching and reading about the institutions and what's going on with their budgets, it's something that's important and is important to make sure that you have a good, if you're in the regular decision marketplace, make sure you have a good range of schools where you're high in profile and you're highly desired because you might get better funding.
Lee Coffin:
Part of the process from a parent perspective is to be an educated consumer, to let your applicant explore, imagine, fall in love when that happens while you study the policies that may be shifting, and then nudge the romantic a step towards the pragmatic as you need to. As you imagine changes in the fiscal health of a campus, yes, it then manifests itself in questions around program affordability that a family will need to think about as a list is constructed. Those are the parts of college admission that aren't as fun and warm and fuzzy, but they're important. There's a lot of moving parts here.
These are the things people and schools are thinking about. If you're not in a school with a person like Matt who's thinking about it, you've heard him think about it. Raise the question in your school and see what the answer is. Any last thoughts from you, Jacques? I mean, Jacques, I have a question for you before we wrap. You're chatting with Dan Rather, you're chatting with Matt and me, you're a student of higher ed through the media prism, what's your take on what's happening?
Jacques Steinberg:
Yeah, I mean, I'm aligned with you both. I am a realist. These developments are serious and they're important and they are going to have potential impact on the college choices and experiences of at least some of the folks who are listening to us today. I've been quite literally following around in a journalistic capacity, people, you both and other colleagues since the beginning of the 2000s. That holistic admissions process has largely held, and the people who engage in that process, Matt, on his side of the desk, you on yours, Lee, so many others, are committed to the integrity of this process and its values. There are folks who could be doing lots of other careers in lots of other settings with a lot less aggravation, and yet they're committed to this point of access. I hope, and not in a Pollyanna-ish way, that provides some hope to our listeners at this fraught moment in the life of our nation and our world.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. In speaking of world, as I mentioned, we'll be back next week with an episode on international admissions. Matt, Jacques, thanks for joining me on Admission Beat.
Matt DeGreef:
Anytime.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, for now, this is Lee Coffin from Dartmouth College. Thanks for listening.