Admissions Beat

“I’ve Never Heard of It…”

Episode Summary

“I’ve never of it is…” is a frequent reaction from students and parents as college options are introduced, but there is real opportunity when a student is open to options that aren't fully “known.” AB host Lee Coffin welcomes Clark University’s Emily Roper-Doten, Ben Baum from Saint John’s College in Annapolis and Sante Fe, and college counselor Kate Boyle Ramsdell from Noble and Greenough School in Dedham, Mass., for a conversation about fit versus familiarity, honoring potential, and the intentional introductions that arrive in your inbox or mailbox. Coffin advises, “Instead of saying ‘I’ve never heard of it,’ ask ‘why haven't I heard of it?! Let’s learn about it.’ Sometimes discovery leads you someplace unexpected, and that’s where you’re supposed to be.”

Episode Notes

“I’ve never of it is…” is a frequent reaction from students and parents as college options are introduced, but there is real opportunity when a student is open to options that aren't fully “known.” AB host Lee Coffin welcomes Clark University’s Emily Roper-Doten, Ben Baum from Saint John’s College in Annapolis and Sante Fe, and college counselor Kate Boyle Ramsdell from Noble and Greenough School in Dedham, Mass., for a conversation about fit versus familiarity, honoring potential, and the intentional introductions that arrive in your inbox or mailbox. Coffin advises, “Instead of saying ‘I’ve never heard of it,’ ask ‘why haven't I heard of it?! Let’s learn about it.’ Sometimes discovery leads you someplace unexpected, and that’s where you’re supposed to be.”

Episode Transcription

Lee Coffin:

From Hanover, New Hampshire, I'm Lee Coffin, Dartmouth's vice president for admissions and financial aid. And this is Admissions Beat.

(Music) 

“I've never heard of it.” My friends who work in schools tell me that's one of the most frustrating parts of putting together a college list, where counselor, student, maybe parents work on the best fits for the interests that have been shared. And inevitably there's a name or two or few that doesn't ring a bell for either the student or the parents and that, "I've never heard of it..." is a signal that the family is looking for a little more bling on the names on the list. And yet a lot of the places that quote you've never heard of are really wonderful.

I always lament the idea that there are thousands of really wonderful colleges, and the same handful always wander into the spotlight. And I happen to work at one, but I'm also very aware of the pretty wide landscape. And so today we're going to meet a couple of deans and a college counselor who are going to help us think about the opportunities that might be overlooked when someone, and by “someone” I'm looking at you, kids and parents, resisting the idea that they should explore, never mind apply to or enroll at a place they've never heard of. And so what I hope we do over the next hour or so is convinced you that that's a sweatshirt you might want to buy. So we'll be right back.

(music)

Well, we're back with two returning friends of the pod and a new friend, actually an old friend of mine, but a new podder, first time guest, Ben Baum, who is vice president of enrollment at St. John's College in Annapolis and Santa Fe. So yes, one's in Maryland, one's in New Mexico. We'll talk about that. Ben, welcome to Admissions Beat. It's fun to have you finally on the pod.

Ben Baum:
Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

Lee Coffin:
Yeah. And you're joined by returning podder, Emily Roper-Doten, vice president for undergraduate admissions and financial assistance at Clark. Hello, Emily.

Emily Roper Doten:
Always the pleasure to be back, Lee

Lee Coffin:
And one of the original podders, Kate Boyle Ramsdell, director of college counseling at Noble and Greenough School. I forgot how many times you've joined me, Kate, over all these seasons, but it's always fun. It's been a while and it's always fun to have you joining us for these conversations.

Kate Boyle Ramsdell:
Oh, thanks. And good to be back for a great conversation.

Lee Coffin:
So let's start with you, Kate. So you heard my intro and the I never heard of it. Do you hear that from families as you're putting lists together?

Kate Boyle Ramsdell:
I mean, whether or not you believe what I'm about to say, it's true. I was walking down to lunch today.

Lee Coffin:
Oh, today.

Kate Boyle Ramsdell:college if they want to continue to play football. And one of our seniors is really focused on a particular geographic region in a particular set of schools, and he's not getting as many bites there as maybe he would like to. So we've offered up another great set of small liberal arts colleges that happen to be six or seven hours away from where we are. And the first thing that the student's mom said is, "Well, I've never heard of any of those." It's so fascinating that this happens to be the topic for today. And that's not the last time I'll hear that. It's certainly not the first time I've heard it, but I do hear it all the time.

Lee Coffin:
Yeah. When you hear it, what do you say?

Kate Boyle Ramsdell:
Sometimes I try to take a step back first and think to myself, I try to go to my empathy place and say, why is this particular person asking this question in this moment? And I think it's different for everybody. I try to think about the context, but then typically what I'll start to talk about is the fact that we live in a world where marketing is super powerful, for better or for worse. And we've been marketed this idea that really selective colleges are luxury brands. Their scarcity is powerful. And so when we have families for whom they come to this college process with all kinds of experiences, I think one of the things that's truly in a lot of their hearts is, I just want what's best for my kid. I want my child to have the best thing that they can have, whatever that looks like. And so I think selectivity becomes proxy for best. And so we do try to take a step back and run them through a really comprehensive process. But I think that's one of the first things I'll try to tackle.

Lee Coffin:
Ben and Emily, as you heard Kate and I saying that, what's your two cents from the college side?

Ben Baum:
is a real niche. I mean, we read great books and we have these small discussion-based classes. Not everyone in the world wants to do that. But when the fit is so evident and yet the student hasn't heard of us and they're focused on other places where the fit might not be as evident, I'll often ask why. It's not uncommon to hear it's because they've heard of these places, because it's circulating within their own community, because they're the most selective places, because they've been featured in places like The New York Times. That kind of visibility can outstrip the really better fit that might come from a place like St. John's or a number of other great small liberal arts colleges.

Lee Coffin:
For people who are hearing Emily for the first time, she was previously the dean of admissions at Olin College of Engineering. So talk about a niche, about a really powerful curriculum, but same idea. It's not always the first name that pops to mind when you're thinking engineering, and yet something wonderful happens there. So what's your experience on the same topic?

Emily Roper Doten:
Olin was such a unique place, but you knew for the right person and for Olin, it was the makers and the breakers. It was the students who were making things. They were in the maker spaces, they were coding, they were doing robotics. They were the one who took your toaster apart, that made their parents crazy. There was a very specific action kind of oriented, problem-solving kind of kid that it was perfect for. And I think even at Clark that I think certainly has more name recognition than Olin, but it sort of sits in a group of schools that are a little bit beyond that kind of coveted group. And yet there's an opportunity at a place that is a small national research university and can bring an experience and faculty relationships and a focus on experiential learning and a really incredible interdisciplinary focus that when people hear that, when you get them in the conversation long enough, you start to see on their faces. “Oh!” And you hope, right? You hope when you're having those conversations that “oh” sort of moment stays with them beyond that particular moment. So it happens a lot, yeah.

Lee Coffin:
Well, I mean, you're describing recruitment. I mean, both Ben and Emily work for places that have to lean into the storytelling of “here's the place we represent.” And I think that the power of conversation means you have to get them to listen to the conversation. So for the audience, some of you may be seniors, or the parents of seniors, and we're airing this very early November. The deadlines are still weeks away. So the lists are being refined, and I think the opportunity for you is to include or keep places on the list that are going to expand your options later. We'll come back to that. And for juniors to the college class of 2030, as you come around the bend of the holidays and start to go into discovery mode, you're going to start making lists and exploring. And I think for you, the opportunity is don't close the door before you walk through it.

Kate, for seniors, let's start with the more immediate cohort. Maybe lists are still gelling or people are asking you, "I don't know if this is the right balance." How do you wiggle into contention this college we're describing, which is not top of mind? I think some of it is size. I mean, a lot of the places we're talking about tend to be on the smaller than larger side. Some of it is a curriculum that's really specific. Some of it is athletics. I think about my relatives and the colleges they quote know it's usually because they're on TV or they're in the Ivy League. And that seems to confer awareness.

Kate Boyle Ramsdell:
So one of the mantras that we've had in our office for a really long time, and this works with seniors much more than it works with younger students, is “say no later.” In our minds, that means that as long as you're not applying to a binding program, you can put the college on your list and learn about it. That's one phase of say no later. Then you can decide that actually it might be a pretty good fit and apply. And then we say, "That doesn't even mean you've gotten in. So let's pause there." But then when you do get in, you have even more time to investigate it. And then we are lucky, we had about a hundred college reps visit us this fall, and we say yes to everybody who wants to come to our campus. And I know that that's not the case with all schools. And we're lucky, we're staffed well and we can make space and we can allocate our resources so that somebody's always talking to that rep who shows up, which I think makes it more worth their time.

And so you guys on the college side have an opportunity, I would say, if you partner with the guidance counselors and college counselors and CBO folks to just say, "How can we get somebody in front of somebody?" I have a student who now lives in Hanover, New Hampshire as a freshman at Dartmouth College. I would say that those were sort of her goals and her family's goals for her all along, kind of aligned with that. And yet, we had somebody visit from Hope College, which is a tiny school in Michigan. And this young person, her faith is so important to her. And she sat with the woman from Hope for 40 minutes. And at the end of it, she said, "If I were just picking a place purely based on its mission, that's the kind of school I should be at." But again, that never would've happened if this really dynamic young admissions officer who just knew the story of the place so well hadn't been able to share it with her in person.

Lee Coffin:
Ben and Emily, as the admission leaders at your schools, does that put a premium on storytelling? Do you have to be even more nimble around representing the place where you work and making sure that those conversations one-on-one and also in groups matter?

Ben Baum:
Absolutely, and I mean, I think it's no coincidence that Kate just mentioned Hope College. Hope and St. John's and Clark all share something in common, which is we’re part of an organization called Colleges That Change Lives. And this is a group of some of the best liberal arts colleges in the country that are a little bit off the beaten path. And it might have some niches that are a little bit different than many of the better known colleges out there. And yet the reason that all these places have been mentioned is because the work we do is so good and the fit can be so palpable for particular students. And yet we have to work doubly as hard to put ourselves on people's radar. And so Colleges That Change Lives is one way we can do that storytelling. We can get out there as a group and say, "This is a group of colleges that you should be looking at that you may not have heard of before. But as a group, maybe we have more power than any one individual college could."

But I think it extends well beyond Colleges That Change Lives. Places like St. John's, once we get them in the room, when I can sit down with that student who a college counselor has referred to us, we have a great conversation. I can put them in touch with alumni and faculty and directly with students. I can share stories about the kinds of students who share the exact same interest as that person who's sitting in front of me. We can really build those connections. But the challenge actually isn't that moment of storytelling. The challenge is getting them to that moment of storytelling. And so whether that's Colleges That Change Lives and doing a college fair that brings them in the door, or it might be something like the kinds of emails that we're sending out.

I mean, we put a lot of work into crafting creative messages that will kind of break through the noise of the college admissions process. And so an example of this would be at St. John's where we read all these great books, we send emails that look like they're coming from Jane Austen. So Jane Austen appears in your inbox and she has something to say about literature, about love and about St. John's. And similarly, we don't just mail brochures that say St. John's on them, we mail a copy of Plato's Meno, one of the Platonic dialogues. And so students get an actual book in the mail. And again, it's designed to break through. We can't tell our whole story in that one little moment, in one email or one publication, but we can capture them at the door and hopefully that pulls them in so we can have those more substantive conversations down the road.

Lee Coffin:
Well, and I love the idea that Jane Austen is sending emails from heaven.com. As I'm listening to you, Ben, it strikes me that as an admission office, you have to be even more creative than not. I mean, everything you just described is really thoughtful and intentional and proactive. Emily, are those words you would grab as well?

Emily Roper Doten:
Oh, 100%. And I would add authentic and bold enough to stand out. You have to be bold enough to sound different than other places in ways that you need to be able to own. And so I think it's easy sometimes for students to think about the college experience in somewhat of a fixed way, whatever their expectations are. And so they ask questions about that fixed set of expectations. And so it might be, well, do you have study abroad? Do you have this? Can I form my own club? So the questions sometimes that we're getting, even when we begin that conversation, we always have to be able to yes, and that conversation. We have to answer the question, but then lead them to where they actually really need to go and what's underneath that question.

And so part of that goes back to what you were saying, Lee, about the staff and the importance of storytelling and being able to not just answer the question but also understand a bit of what's the nuance behind that that allows you to tell the specifics of your institution in a way that might grab that student. And so it's often turning those questions into the stories that you can tell for that particular student.

Lee Coffin:
Yeah. And Ben, you took me to Colleges That Change Lives. How do people find out about Colleges That Change Lives? Is there a website?

Ben Baum:
Ctcl.org.

Lee Coffin:
Okay.

Ben Baum:
And so some people might stumble across it on the internet. Some people just like as we heard from Kate, may stumble across it because their counselors are putting them, are telling them this is a group of colleges they should be looking at. It's now maybe a little dated, but Colleges That Change Lives got its start in a book, a book written by a pretty well-known New York Times columnist, Loren Pope. And that book started in the '90s and there's been a few different editions of it since. But those books are still circulating it. So people might discover that book itself as an entry point. But increasingly, I think the way students find Colleges That Change Lives is through the college fairs that we do. So we do college fairs all across the country. We'll have anywhere between 40 and 45 of our member institutions there at any one of these college fairs.

So it's such a good opportunity to get a real sense of incredibly diverse institutions. We all share in common this focus on undergraduate education, this focus on a student centered experience. And yet we include both single sex institutions and co-ed institutions. We have one of the only all male institutions in the country as a part of this organization. We have religious institutions, we have institutions known for certain kinds of ideological bents and others that are very open to all different types of thinking. We have places of the graduate programs and without, very small places, St. John's might be among the smallest of them at about a thousand students to some larger liberal arts colleges. But the idea is you could walk into this room and you could learn about really different kinds of places that are all there to serve this undergraduate experience. And that's, I think, a special opportunity that you find at a college fair like that.

Lee Coffin:
Yeah.

Kate Boyle Ramsdell:
I just want to say a quick thing about what Ben said, which is we gave a rule to our juniors this past spring when they had a college fair to go to. And the rule was you have to go to the tables of the colleges that you know very little about. They actually found some places that they never would've thought of. And we helped them tee it up. But I also think that regional ACAC organizations and NACAC do huge college fairs and do a lot of online programming for kids. And I also know Emily's part of a consortium, or was at Olin that focused primarily on STEM and engineering. And so you show up for a fair for that and you get lots of schools maybe you haven't heard of.

Lee Coffin:
For listeners when Kate's mentioning ACAC, she's not quacking like a duck. She's referring to the regional Associations for College Admission Counseling, ACAC. So there's New England, the Mid-Atlantic, et cetera. And then what's the STEM consortium Kate was just mentioning?

Emily Roper Doten:
So that's CACHE, it's the College Admission Collaborative Highlighting Engineering and Technology.

Lee Coffin:
I never knew that.

Emily Roper Doten:
Yes. And the name gives it away. Every school that is part of CACHE has to have an engineering program, so they're not all completely STEM focused. So there were institutions that... Like Olin is only engineering, but then WPI actually has more than just. And MIT, they have more than just engineering, but they do have that more kind of STEM related kind of mathematical core that they're really thinking about. And then you have places like Trinity that has an undergraduate engineering program, but it's a house in a liberal arts college. Again, sort of like CTCL in a way, because even though there's a unifying piece there, there's a pretty wide range of size and location and just how STEM are, they certainly is a piece of it. And that's a group that subsets of that group will travel together. They'll host events.

They do a lot with making sure that that storytelling is getting to counselors. I think one piece of the I've never heard of them for many of us on the enrollment side, is making sure that counselors know us in really deep ways to be able to suggest us. Because when you've got that trusting relationship and someone suggests our institution to a student, that can be really powerful. And so CACHE, I know that CTCL does this as well, when we travel together, we host breakfasts or afternoon coffees or different events for college counselors, CBOs, community-based organizations, access organizations that are working with students outside of their high schools to help them in their college search process. But really bringing those folks together to hear from our different institutions to ask their questions. So that when they're sitting there counseling a student and having those conversations about what do you want? What are you looking for? How do you want to grow that they can say, "You know what? This institution is a place that you should be thinking about." And so keeping that conversation constantly going with counselors too.

Lee Coffin:
One of the ways St. John's and Clark and all of us introduce ourselves is we by names, from college board and ACT of students who hit certain parameters. So I'm guessing, Ben, you're not sending Plato or Jane Austen is not emailing just any old kiddo. You have identified them in some way. So for people getting their inbox full of messages from British authors or you open your mailbox, and I remember my search getting just brochures just tumbling out as soon as I took the SAT, and I didn't really appreciate how that happened. How does it happen?

Ben Baum:
This is a space that's changed dramatically in just a few years, in fact. And it's grown. Probably the most famous source of names, maybe infamous source of names is the college board. And so if you're a student who signs up for an AP test or to take the PSAT or to take the SAT, there's likely a little box which you may or may not have noticed, but that you can check to say you would like to receive mail from colleges. And if you check that box, it allows all of these colleges like St. John's and many others to go onto a platform and choose to purchase your contact information to send you mail, email, paper mail, potentially text messaging, calls were is just one source of these. There are many different companies that do this and they come from different places. And so many of us will have a diverse range of these kinds of sources.

And what we're trying to do in any particular source is not to buy every name in the universe. The goal is to find those names that might be the best fit for our particular institution. So for a place St. John's looking for students who may be flagged particular academic interests. They said something like an interest in philosophy or an interest in literature or even interest in physics. We study the sciences through reading great books at St. John's. And so we're looking very specifically at those. And someone who expressed an interest in engineering, just one example, likely isn't a fit for what we do at St. John's. And so that would be a name I wouldn't want to focus on. But there's all different ways of doing this depending upon the platform. And in fact, some platforms are extraordinarily sophisticated.

There's one for example called Encora, which develops its own multi-variable model designed to identify students who are most like your own students so that you could reach out to those. And so instead of just choosing a major, they might be using dozens of different factors that identify you as more likely to be interested in a St. John's or a Clark than some other institution. So it's a big industry and once we acquire those names, those are the students that we are reaching out to typically by email, but also by sending some letters in the mail too.

Lee Coffin:
Kate, do your students appreciate that the mail they're getting, the increase they're getting are intentional?

Kate Boyle Ramsdell:
I'm not sure they're fully aware of the fact that it's intentional, so I'll start there. But I think kids get overwhelmed. And so the honest answer is just as your institutions are sending beautiful, curated emails, so are hundreds of other places. And I think that's my primary worry for kids is when they get overloaded, they just select all and delete. Not every kid and not every circumstance and not every school, but I think because of that machine, it gets harder and harder for them to figure out what matters. But I think in a more positive way, they're getting lots of information now in a way that they used to have to work much harder to get it.

And so I just kept having probably the quote that's jumped the shark by now, but the Ted Lasso, "Be curious, not judgmental." When you see a name of a school you don't know, open it at least once. Read, see what might be there for you. And I think that's a piece of it is kids have short attention spans and sometimes don't take a huge amount of agency to open things they don't know about. So again, like a helpful guiding hand or just coaching to know that, hey.

Lee Coffin:
Well, and to parents and guardians who might have slightly longer attention spans. You're opening the mailbox, you see all of these brochures arriving, if not the emails, and now you know that that came to your address on purpose. So to Ben's guidance, you've got a little wink coming from Clark or St. John's or wherever, that that piece of mail was deliberately delivered to you. Read it. So I want to talk a little bit about selectivity in two ways. Earlier we talked about selectivity as a proxy for best. The idea that the low acceptance rate, that admission outcome that's so hard to get must inherently be one I must have. I pooh-pooh that as a place with a 5% in it, right? And I say you know it's just a function of the arithmetic. It's like size of the class, the number of people who've applied, I can't take everybody. But, Kate, is it legit? Is selectivity animating a lot of this conversation in ways that it should not?

Kate Boyle Ramsdell:
I think probably some combination of selectivity rankings, marketing is creating a lot of this, I think enduring reputation, whatever that might mean to a particular family. I certainly have parents from all different backgrounds come into my office and sort of do the wink, wink, nod, nod, "Well, come on. We really know this does mean something. More selective, the place the better. So, you, Kate, can tell me that really the college experience is going to be what my child makes of it." Which I still believe, but the name at the top of their resume is really going to be the thing that we're going to focus on right now.

And I really try to push against that because I think it's maybe an increasingly outmoded way of thinking about this process. And also there's a lot of pressure on kids to get into places that may be 20 and 30 years ago when we applied to college, they could have, but the truth of it is today they can't. And so I think it's really irresponsible of me as a college counselor to suggest anything otherwise. I don't want to set up my kids for failure.

Lee Coffin:
I did a presentation a couple of years ago for the alumni group at Dartmouth and I talked about selectivity and I said, "Okay, so here's acceptance rates." The lowest was three or four from Harvard or Stanford, and then you went across the access and University of Colorado at Boulder had an admit rate, then remembering like 78%. I don't know that that's still true, but it was not 5%. And I said, "Do you think Boulder is a fantastic place?" People were like, "Oh, yeah." I said, "Well, there you go." So that means it's not impossible to get into and it's a fantastic state university, flagship university that you might consider and your odds of admission to be good, but this connection between a reach must be great or selectivity means best. I think this is a bigger point. And I'm wondering Ben and Emily or Kate, what are the other markers of quality that you would encourage families to consider? 'Cause they're consumers, they're looking for guidelines and guidance. What are the other data points? Because people like data.

Emily Roper Doten:
I would say looking at outcomes. So what happens with someone enrolls, they become a student, they have this experience, and then where do they go in the world? So a lot of institutions are going to be able to provide either within their admission materials, it might be on their website in some other format. You can ask these questions, but thinking about even if it's looking at what sorts of industries and sectors do the alumni go into, what do those alumni say or reflect upon their particular experience? So I think about we have a piece of data at Clark, which is 96% of our alumni say that they believe that they're doing meaningful work in their professional life.

And that we really do believe that that ties to a mission of challenge convention change the world, that the experience, the undergraduate experience that we intentionally create for students allows them to make choices for impactful work and that they're able to feel like they're doing something like that. And so being able to sort of say, yes, you can check off a lot of boxes about, yep, I can do this, I can do that, I can do this, I can do that. This type of curriculum, okay, they've got the major, but what are they doing with it? Where do those alumni find themselves out in the world? And so I think that can be something that can be really helpful for folks because it may also give you a sense of what network will you eventually join.

Ben Baum:
I love that because I do think... Things that drive me crazy in this process would be selectivity as a proxy for where people should enroll. And those rankings, those two things, in some ways they're the same kind of thing. You're basically forfeiting your own agency and allowing other people to tell you where you should go to college. And the reality is that everyone's different and everyone should be looking for the place that really has that right fit for them. And so selectivity is a silly metric for a variety of reasons, but one obvious reason would be because not everyone's interested in the same thing you're interested in. At St. John's our admit rates are roughly 50%. And yet if you look at who we're enrolling by any other measure, you can talk to the individual students, you could look at average high school GPAs or test scores if you wanted to, but you look at any other metric, we're enrolling the highest quality student body that you could find at any college in the country.

And similarly, if you look at US News, which often dominates these conversations around rankings, so much of that ranking is a popularity contest. It's a vote by other college presidents about which one of these colleges is like the most. And that I guess tells you something if that's what you care about. But if what you care about are small classes as just one example, US news doesn't measure small classes. That's not part of that ranking. And so there are other places you could turn to in order to get maybe that third party testimonial or third party accolade for what this particular college does that's a right fit for the kinds of things that the particular student's actually interested in.

Lee Coffin:
Well, and Ben, you just made a really interesting point too about your curriculum is a really specific course of study. It's not going to attract massive applicant pools. And the admit rate is a function of number of applicants for a number of seats. So you have a 50% admit rate because your pool is a more finite universe of high school seniors that are going to want a great books curriculum for their undergraduate experience. But when they're in that pool, they're pretty serious about it. And so you admit them and they come and they're qualified. So audience, the acceptance rate could tell you lots of different things.

Someone with a really tiny admit rate could be bloating the pool, denying everybody and they look selective but not so much. And a place with what seems like a less selective acceptance rate might just have a more precise pool. So that's a really interesting way of thinking about that. Emily, you said something in a previous episode you were on that I want to repeat back to you. You had worked at some places that were, quote, "Excruciatingly selective." I still work at that place and you said places that are less so have an opportunity to admit students who are not finished products and it gives us the opportunity to acknowledge potential.

Emily Roper Doten:
Yeah.

Lee Coffin:
Let's talk about that. So for the seniors and juniors in high school who are getting all twisted up around, got to get into X number of places, or parents, you might miss the idea that every 17, 18-year-old is not a cake that's finished baking and sometimes these degrees of selectivity, these places you have not heard of are entry points to something great. Kate, is that what you see?

Kate Boyle Ramsdell:
Oh, I totally agree with that idea. If you know enough about yourself today to say, these are the kinds of people I want to be with, these are the handful of things I think I might want to study. Gosh, I know it's really important for me to have relationships with my teachers to be at my best. I feel a sense of belonging when this, this, and this are true. Then I think you can find lots of colleges that are good fits.

Lee Coffin:
Emily, talk a bit about acknowledging potential.

Emily Roper Doten:
I agree with Kate that even at the places that I've worked that are sort of excruciating, you can take some chances. You can find those students that are maybe not looking like that finished products, but when your admit rates are lower, you just have less wiggle room for that. And so I think when you have just more of an ability to say yes, you are able to say, you know what? Freshman year in high school stinks for everybody. I don't care that you bombed it because I'm seeing you turn it on when you need to be. Or you're the person who didn't know that you needed to be in every theatrical production in your high school to commit yourself to a particular kind of extracurricular profile that you were someone who was figuring out who you were. And so you dabbled in lots of different things or I think that there's just when you have a little bit more freedom to say yes more within the pool that you receive, there's just something really sort of wonderful about it.

And I think the potential comes from how is the student talking about it? What kind of reflection are you hearing in their essays or what are you hearing from their recommenders? Oftentimes we know that student is turning it on because their counselor tells us or because their teacher tells us, "At the beginning of the year, those drafts were terrible, but I watched this student wrestle with how do you edit. By the time they got to the end of the year, they developed this thing." And so I think that being able to see that kind of growth or being able to see the beginning even of that growth that then my faculty get to take on, they get to catch them in that moment. There's something really lovely about being able to be in that space.

Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Well, you're reminding me of many, many years ago when I worked at Connecticut College and the acceptance rate there was in the thirties, which then was pretty selective but still open enough that we would have conversations about late bloomers, was the term we used. And they were more often boys than not who adolescence was on a slightly slower train to get from being a boy to being a guy. But the late blooming, there was evidence in the file of potential to Emily's point. Sometimes the grades were not as shiny as they might've been. I remember it was often paired with maybe sometimes testing where it's like, oh look, the score is telling us something that the grade point average is not, like that this kid is showing a flash that hasn't yet manifested itself on a transcript. Or the teachers would say in the recs there's growth here. Sometimes the student is frustrating in terms of completing assignments or answering the questions I ask on the test, but when the hand goes up in class discussion, something wonderful pops out of the mouth. Ben, does that sound familiar?

Ben Baum:
Yes, it does all the time we see this. We see all the time, particularly boys as you say, who have more checkered academic records officially on that transcript. But then I talk to the counselor or I read it in the teacher's rec that this is the kid who is enlivening the discussion in the classroom. This is the kid who didn't do their assignment because they were too busy reading books for fun on the side. And so that might not have made them the most successful in their particular high school environment. But when I think about what they're going to do at St. John's where we want them to be reading all the time, we want them to be having these exciting, vibrant conversations in the classroom, those are exactly the characteristics that would make them thrive at our particular institution.

And so we're digging in all the materials that we get from the student to find that fit. And sometimes that's evident on a transcript, but more often than not, it's in those other places that we're finding that institutional fit. And where we can take a risk on a student where we think in fact, the St. John's experience could be transformative for them. And so the idea is that we're not just bringing in someone who's perfect on the front end and releasing them into the world in that same state of perfection. We've in fact transformed them through the experience they're going to have at the college.

Lee Coffin:
Yeah. I'm nodding as I listen to this because for listeners, what I'm trying to highlight in this episode is the opportunity for you to be more inclusive of these options as you start to apply. Because what Ben and Emily just described as opportunities in their work, I have less of where I work, and I say that not with any glee in my voice, it's just a function of the volume. I have a pool that's jammed at the top of the curve and the selectivity I have to manage doesn't mean we don't recognize potential and include it, but there's much less capacity to do so because we have so many precise decisions in that top span. As you move across the place and sometimes that college you've never heard of is representing a really impactful opportunity where you have more room both to grow but also to be admitted.

And I think that gets overlooked. Let's talk a bit about financial aid because having just said what I said, I think one of the other challenges sometimes as you move a little bit outside of the bullseye of college admission is financial aid gets a little more scarce. A need-aware admission policy is often common as opposed to a need blind one. So what does that mean? What's need-aware as an element of college admission?

Kate Boyle Ramsdell:
Need-aware is a school that needs to consider its total budget and admitting its class. And so it will allocate money probably for need-based financial aid, sometimes for merit-based scholarships. And then some certain percentage of that class is going to have to pay the entire sticker price. So as decisions get made throughout the cycle, obviously you're mission driven and you want to fill your class with the kids that you want there and who are going to be great fits for your program, but there will come a point where a student's ability to pay will have some impact on their ability to be admitted. We talk about that from the outset of a process.

So whether a family has high financial need, middle financial need, or very little financial need, we'll try to help them also set up a list of colleges where college will be affordable, whatever that means for that family. And from my perspective, I don't really almost care what the name of the school is if you come out of college with an enormous debt burden, you're not doing yourself a service. And so I often will have kids actually who get maybe even financially squeezed into choosing a school that wasn't at the top of their list at the outset. And yet if we've put together a good list, those kids are so happy and often will come back and say, "I am so glad you made me think about it that way. So glad that I don't have a huge amount of debt because my friends do, and now they don't know what to do."

Lee Coffin:
And then sometimes in this affordability space at the place you've never heard of, the college has merit scholarships that I don't have a merit scholarship being an award based on merit, academic, athletic, artistic, whatever that falls outside of your need-based financial aid. So Ben, Emily talk about merit aid as a way of helping families feel like oh, here's a whole another opportunity that I hadn't dialed into.

Ben Baum:
Yeah. I think in many ways, places that are a little less selective may offer opportunities for affordability that can exceed those more selective peers. It depends particularly on the circumstances, but a lot of the way this happens is through these merit scholarships. And at a place like St. John's we have quite a few students who show us through their application that they are exceptional applicants. We want to encourage them to enroll at St. John's rather than other excellent institutions they may have also applied and been admitted to. And so we are giving them a merit scholarship to give them that extra encouragement to come to St. John's. And I see it all the time where a student is debating between multiple institutions where we've significantly reduced the price tag for often a middle-class family for whom these are really tough decisions in affordability.

And the merit scholarship is what has made all of the difference for them. Because the reality is when you look at the price tag for private colleges across the country, in many cases, they're approaching a hundred thousand dollars. And even very well-to-do families will find that price tag a huge challenge. St. John's because of merit scholarships can often be half that amount. And so this is a real opportunity for families for whom finances are a concern when it comes to the college admissions process to look at a broader range of colleges to find more affordable options.

Lee Coffin:
Yeah, no, that's really well said.

Emily Roper Doten:
Yeah, I would agree that it's certainly a way to acknowledge what the student has done to bring them to our door, to be able to signal to them that we're interested in them becoming a part of our community. Merit awards are often combined with need-based aid if it needs to be for that particular family. And I think it is something where you always ask the question, right? Ask about, well, how does it get awarded or what are my options? Making sure that you're understanding what are the potential merit options at a particular institution. Some of us have some fairly standard things we can tell you about. We have five different levels of merit, and this tends to be how things come out. So you can have a sense. We may also have some really specialty merit programs. We have a presidential scholarship for students that's tuition, room and board.

We have a neighborhood scholarship, so there's a set of streets right around our campus. And believe it or not, there are students who live right around our campus who they know that Clark exists, but they don't know enough about it. So we just hosted on our campus the other night a neighborhood event because for those students who live in that neighborhood or in the neighborhood around our campus, they can get a full tuition scholarship to enroll at the college. But we have to make sure that it's walking them into that conversation again to say, what might it mean to actually go to school down the street without them having... They don't have the sense of who we are at that point. They're not able to figure out, well, why would I do that other than just this price tag? But let's have a conversation about what that means. And I do want to just piggyback on something that Ben just said a second ago is I think one of the other metrics that people use for quality is price tag.

Nobody wants to pay the full price tag, but sometimes there's a perception that a more expensive institution is a better institution. And I think there are lots of places that have tried not to raise their tuition room and board as high because they're hoping to be able to communicate that we want to be affordable and accessible. And so I think that it's something to be thoughtful about what is your net cost. What might it cost for your family, not necessarily what the price tag is or what does a higher price tag imply? Are you giving it too much credit for what it implies about the institution?

Lee Coffin:
Before we wrap, I want to give both of the college reps a chance to make your pitch. So Ben, tell us about St. John's College in Annapolis and Santa Fe and its great books curriculum.

Ben Baum:
St. John's is probably the most distinctive college that you'll find anywhere in the country or maybe the world. We are, in fact, the third-oldest college in the United States. We date back to 1696, and yet what we're famous for is not even all of these many, many years of history. What we're famous for is this great books curriculum where every student comes to St. John's and they're reading about 200 of the best ideas ever shared in writing over the last 3000 years. And so you study philosophy by reading Nietzsche. You study politics by reading Plato, you study physics by reading Einstein's actual papers. Every student is doing the shared experience of reading the great books together.

And every class will be a small discussion, 20 students or fewer, about the books. And so this interdisciplinary model, this discussion-based model, this great books model, is something that you really won't find anywhere other than the fact that we have these two unusual campuses, one in Annapolis, Maryland, our original campus that dates back to 1696. And the other in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the other side of the country in the Rocky Mountains. And students can actually move back and forth between the two campuses.

Lee Coffin:
And Emily, tell us about Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Emily Roper Doten:
Well, Clark is far younger than St. John's,being founded in 1887. So Clark was actually originally founded as a graduate institution. We were one of two... We were sort of founded on the Stanford model, which originally sort of a graduate institution, which I think what the thread that is for our students is that we are a place of knowledge creation and knowledge practice. So we really focus on experiential learning opportunities for students, whether that's our problems of practice courses where students are getting out in the Worcester community in order to learn directly from practitioners, to work with the community members to be able to apply and understand different concepts in the world. Internships, our capstone program where students are really taking things they've learned from their major, combination of majors, majors and minors and those sorts of things and really being able to stand it up in the world.

We are a university, though the focus is the undergraduate curriculum that feels much more like a liberal arts college in many ways. But it does mean that we're able to have these incredible centers of gravity on our institution, like the Becker School for Design and Technology, which houses our game design program. We have a School of Business, we have a College of Arts and Sciences, and the fall of 2025, we're opening the School for Climate Environment Society, which is going to house environmental science and policy, geography, sustainability, and social justice and economics. And so really sort of thinking about how do we help students to become practitioners of the things that they're learning in the city of Worcester. The campus community, the students are very much committed to being partners with the city of Worcester. So not that it's our laboratory in any kind of way, but really thinking about how our students can be active citizens that are using their education to advance the lives of the community around us as well.

Lee Coffin:
Okay. Listeners, you've now heard of two fantastic options that you might not have heard of an hour ago, and you have proof points to start typing and learning more. But behind door number three, I'm going to invite producer Charlotte Albright to turn on her mic and tell us about her alma mater Bennington College. So I would put Bennington in the same category of little mighty schools. Hi, Charlotte.

Speaker 6:
That was a surprise.

Lee Coffin:
I know, that's right.

Speaker 6:
You surprised me, and you knew that I'd have this sort of thing at my fingertips 'cause I talk about Bennington all the time. Just a quick story about that. I was at a boarding school. Both of my parents had died, but my sister had gone to Bennington in 1953, had been yanked out of the school for reasons having to do with my father's Rotarianism and general Republican leanings. But anyway, she never got to finish. 16 years later, I'm ready to enter school. No parents, but a headmaster who knew me pretty well called me into his office and said, "Look, but I've been watching you here and I want you to know about this school. I'm sure you've never heard of it. It's called Bennington College." He didn't realize that I would be finishing the career at Bennington College that my sister didn't get to finish.

It was a fit. Bennington was a place in 1968 when I got there, that prided itself on being highly experimental. It enrolled students who loved the arts. I happened to love literature. I was an acting major for a while, but its niche was not only that it was an arty school. We had an environmental studies program and still do. And it's changed a lot since I've been there, of course, in 40 years, 50 years. It's become, I'd say a little bit less of an outlier, but not because it's become more conventional, but because other colleges have become more like it. There are many schools now that don't require a student to take a certain number of courses. And our advisors, our faculty advisors, always advised us to take a course that we'd be bad at. For me, it was dance. I'm just going to leave it there. So I still love Bennington and I think it's a real option.

Lee Coffin:
Thank you, Charlotte. Kate, last word to the juniors, seniors, parents who've now listened to all this, what do you hope their takeaway was?

Kate Boyle Ramsdell:
I hope their takeaway is to stay curious. I hope their takeaway is to lean into openness and kind of understand that you don't know a lot and there's so much out there that you might just turn over that one rock and all of a sudden you discover this real exciting place that you might want to be. And lean into this not from a place of fear. Lean into it from a place of openness and excitement and opportunity. I don't know. I get excited for them. And I said this to Lee, he admitted my brother to Connecticut College in 1996, which neither one of us had realized until last week. And I would say that he landed there not because it was his first or his second choice college.

And I would say that he would look back on that time in his life and say probably some of the best four years he had, but also launched him into a really successful career. And he has lifelong friends and some of his friends are my friends now. And so, so much good can happen. He was probably that slightly unpolished boy who was ready for a really cool place to take him and make him into who he is today. So proud of you guys who do this good work for kids and of people like my brother and tons of other kids I've worked with who taken full advantage of it.

Lee Coffin:
Great words from our guests this week. Catch yourself if you're about to say, "I've never heard of it," say, "Why haven't I heard of it?" Let's learn about it and then make your decision. And just remember, sometimes the discovery brings you to someplace unexpected, and that's where you're supposed to be. So listeners, it's also Election Day here in the United States. So my good citizenship plug is if you can vote, please vote. We'll be back next week for an interesting conversation with Maria Morales-Kent from the Thacher School, who will join me for a conversation about the history of selective college admission, which I think is going to be a really interesting conversation that will surprise a lot of you. So until then, this is Lee Coffin from Dartmouth College. Thanks for listening.