"Information" floods a college search from many spigots, not all of which are reliable or helpful. Each September, social media feeds erupt with advice and comment from various "expert" sources while parental social gatherings and pick-up lines at school are hot spots for admissions news and commentary. This week, four longtime college counselors from Fairfield County in Connecticut, Fort Lauderdale, Baltimore, and Denver join AB host Lee Coffin for a listener-inspired conversation that redirects the chatter and debunks some myths. "We spend so much time undoing misinformation,” one of the veteran counselors notes. Her colleague adds, "Lots of the hysteria and anxiety are rooted in outdated misinformation that is just wrong.”
"Information" floods a college search from many spigots, not all of which are reliable or helpful. Each September, social media feeds erupt with advice and comment from various "expert" sources while parental social gatherings and pick-up lines at school are hot spots for admissions news and commentary. This week, four longtime college counselors from Fairfield County in Connecticut, Fort Lauderdale, Baltimore, and Denver join AB host Lee Coffin for a listener-inspired conversation that redirects the chatter and debunks some myths. "We spend so much time undoing misinformation,” one of the veteran counselors notes. Her colleague adds, "Lots of the hysteria and anxiety are rooted in outdated misinformation that is just wrong.”
Lee Coffin:
From Hanover, New Hampshire, I'm Lee Coffin, Dartmouth's vice president and dean of admission and financial aid, and this is Admissions Beat.
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We've done almost 150 episodes of Admissions Beat, and this is the first one that has been completely designed by a listener. That listener—I will call Jane—Jane is a mom in suburban Northeast U.S. where her kids go to a suburban public high school, and she's frustrated by the things she hears on what she calls the suburban social circuit. Two moms chatting in the pickup line, people on the side of the soccer field, a cocktail party, et cetera. Everyone thinks they know everything, and Jane knows they don't. And so she has proposed an episode called Misinformation on the Suburban Social Circuit. So I thought that was a delicious title.
And I've invited four longtime college counselors from suburbia to chime in and answer Jane's questions. So Jane and her husband, Charlie, again, pseudonyms for the people I'm keeping on the DL. But they've asked some really good questions that my four guests and I will answer and give parents and kids around the world who hear things the ammunition to say, "Wait a minute, who told you that? What does it mean? Are you sure it's true? Trust your source." So we come back, we'll say hi to four friends of the pod who returned to Admission Beat for this wide-ranging conversation. We will be right back.
Hi, friends.
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Darryl Tiggle:
Hello.
Lee Coffin:
Hi.
Jen Simons:
Hi.
Vanessa Montorsi:
Hey everybody.
Darryl Tiggle:
Hey there.
Lee Coffin:
It's like a game show of long time Admissions Beat pals. Today I've invited four college counselors, one from a public suburban high school in Connecticut, one from a religious school in suburban Baltimore, one from the largest independent school in suburban South Florida, and one who's at large suburbia writ large. We'll start with her. Jen Simons, welcome back to Admissions Beat.
Jen Simons:
Thanks as always for having me, Lee.
Lee Coffin:
Jen is the recently retired director from Bright Horizons College Coach where she's offered college counseling and financial aid advice to employees of organizations big and small around the U.S., and she would help guide families through their college search. So you've seen a lot in this at large representation of college counseling.
Jen Simons:
Oh yeah.
Lee Coffin:
Jen is currently in suburban Denver. So in addition to her former gig at Bright Horizon, she's now a suburban mom herself in the shadow of the Rockies. Joining her is Vanessa Montorsi, the director of counseling at Fairfield Ludlowe High School in Connecticut. Hi Vanessa.
Vanessa Montorsi:
Hey Lee. Thanks for having me back.
Lee Coffin:
Oh, I love having you back. For listeners, Fairfield is about an hour outside of New York City in Fairfield County, and Fairfield Ludlowe is one of the two public high schools in Fairfield, Connecticut.
Marcia Hunt joins us from Pine Crest School where she's the longtime director of college counseling at the largest independent school in South Florida. So hi Marcia.
Marcia Hunt:
Hi Lee.
Lee Coffin:
Great to see you. Great to see and hear you. Nice to have you back. And rounding out the quartet this week is Darryl Tiggle, director of college counseling at the Friends School of Baltimore. Hi Darryl.
Darryl Tiggle:
Hello Lee and hello fellow podcasting friends. Looking forward to the conversation.
Lee Coffin:
So Darryl, when I invited you to join this episode, you said yes as you always do. And then you said you told your colleague you were doing this episode and she cheered. Why did she cheer?
Darryl Tiggle:
Because we're, I think maybe on that circuit which Jane and her husband describe and our parents go to cocktail parties and the grocery store and the like, and we are often telling them as kindly as we can after they tell us where they get information, please only listen to us moving forward. Get your information from us because I think a lot of the hysteria and anxiety is rooted in the misinformation, the outdated information and just the stuff that's just totally wrong. So having a platform where we can have some experts shine light on the truth is necessary and good service.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. And Marcia, you similarly, I texted you and said, will you come back on Admissions Beat? Here's the topic. And you just had two words, oh yes.
Marcia Hunt:
Well, tagging onto what Darryl said, Monday mornings are brutal after people have been out on the weekend and picked up all sorts of information at social events, athletic events, and then of course being in the car line on the way to school. I just worry about kids, their emotional wellbeing with all of the pressure that this information is exerting on them.
Lee Coffin:
I see it too. I mean, I pick up my phone and my newsfeed, especially this time of year, is overwhelmed with all sorts of posts from all types of experts offering advice on college admission. And I don't know if it's because I'm a podcaster in this space, I'm the Dean of Admission, maybe I've clicked on too many links, but it just keeps coming at me. I feel like Max Headroom from the 80s with just blowing my face off as I keep reading things and saying, "Well, who are you? That's not true." And Jen, you see that all the time, right?
Jen Simons:
So Lee, my pet peeve is when parents are considering themselves experts because they've been through the process with their children. I don't understand. I would never go to a doctor and then say, "Well, I learned all these things on Google or on TikTok or whatever about what medicines I should be taking." You wouldn't take flying lessons from someone who had never actually flown a plane any more than you would get advice from a sex therapist who is a virgin. You don't want to go through this process looking for expertise from people who haven't either sat on the admission side of the equation and made decisions or on the college counseling side year after year to see those results, to see how things have changed. I think the more that you actually know, the more that you've sat in admissions committees, the more that you've seen, like my colleagues here, decisions being made, the less you can predict because you realize that it's not a science and we can try to give the information we think we know, but if you've really been through this process, it's very hard to predict what's going to happen.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. And Vanessa, what bubbles onto your radar in suburban Connecticut? The same thing?
Vanessa Montorsi:
Yeah, exactly the same thing that Jen was saying. These parents and guardians, they see a kid got in and they think, "Oh, well, that's the formula." And it's no, it just happened to me that was the formula for that kid at that school. They hear certain data or stats and they make an absolute and they make it a one size fits all when as we know, that's certainly not the case because schools have different priorities and every kid's different and then every high school they're coming from is different.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Okay, so let's turn the script over to Jane who started this episode as a concept with the following message and then we'll go from there. So Jane wrote in June, "Hi, can you do an episode of your podcast about admission facts versus myths and fiction? We went to a neighborhood get together yesterday and there were a group of dads who work in finance and IT talking among themselves about the admission process and they were sharing their assumptions about how it all works. They all have a very entitled way about them and my husband Charlie left the conversation in a funk. I realized that people like them might not listen to the podcast. However, people like Charlie do, which means there must be others out there who feel the same way we do when we hear this stuff. No one at that party has had a kid go through the search yet, but they all seem like experts. Plus they were all trying to one up each other and it got me wondering about some of the myths that are out there."
So that was her opening. So I responded and I said, "What were they saying?" And she came back and said, "All sorts of things, that the town's zip code puts their kids at the top of the list as colleges know that they can pay full tuition, that certain consultants they can hire have a surefire way in a certain set of colleges that will get everybody in, that paying to have your kids in multiple extracurricular and club teams makes them more attractive, et cetera, et cetera. It drove us crazy."
Did you hear that opening from Jane, and then she's got some actual questions she wants. What's your immediate reaction to Jane's experience at that get together this spring?
Marcia Hunt:
I'm just wondering how everybody's blood pressure is, who's on this podcast. We're spending so much time undoing damage. And I think one of the things that is the most troubling is that for profit vendors are getting to kids in fifth and sixth grade, trying to get them to develop their passion project, which are two words I hate. And I think that parents are feeling the pressure to hire folks for a seven or an eight-year package. When our friend Sean Abbott from Tulane says, "We don't even believe that you're born until ninth grade," which I think is really good advice. But this concept of the passion project is the person has to decide what their passion's going to be and stick with it and develop all of their life around it from the time they're in eighth grade is very bad advice. And I think you, Lee, from an admission point of view, would probably have to agree with that. When you see those words, what do you think?
Lee Coffin:
Well, I hear those words and I think I don't need everybody to have a life that is so scripted that they go from A to B to C to Z in a very deliberate, intentional way as opposed to just being a kid and discovering where life brings you between ninth grade and 12th grade. But there are so many voices and I think they're the voices for hire. There are also, I saw a video on Instagram the other day, it was a young college graduate opining into her phone about how to get into the different colleges. I was reading a novel and the author talked about the lower tier Ivies and somebody's path and getting into them if you have a parent and I though the lower tier Ivies. So it's all out there. I mean, Vanessa, you're also wincing as you hear all this.
Vanessa Montorsi:
Yeah, there are just so many things to hit on this. What I've been trying to tell my families that it really doesn't matter about the title of the school, but finding that right fit, because a lot of kids don't know what they want to do. And I cringe when Marcia was talking about those independent counselors that are trying to get kids to have this passion project so early on, because I'm so proud to be in a public school, and when I make my pitch to kids that are looking at do I go to a private high school or do I go to a public high school, one of my biggest pitches for the public is because we have so many electives, we have so many different courses, this is where you can really find yourself. And I think to Marcia's point, people do start finding themselves more in high school and they start to figure it out because life is not linear. It goes sideways, backwards and everywhere else. So we need to give times to kids to foster what they really enjoy and who they are.
Lee Coffin:
Darryl, are you triggered?
Darryl Tiggle:
Yeah, I am, and I've got some ammunition. So “passion project” for me has become a four-letter word. I know it's a lot more than four letters, but it's one of those things when people ask me about it, I go, "They're not looking for that necessarily in the admissions office." And the project that you do, if you're passionate about it, I guess it can be called a passion project, but it's not really something that's a deliverable that they're waiting for in admissions.
Lee Coffin:
Can I just tag on just before I forget to say it, Darryl?
Darryl Tiggle:
Mm-hmm.
Lee Coffin:
I've been a dean for 32 years. I have never heard someone in any of those admission committees use the phrase “passion project.”
Darryl Tiggle:
Amen.
Lee Coffin:
I don't think I've ever even written it in an evaluation. So it's not listeners, it's not the way admission people think about your kids.
Darryl Tiggle:
And truth be told, because I think now I don't even use the word “passion” in recommendation letters anymore for fear it might be misconstrued. And then I think some of these things, the language that emerges, passion project or the one I love, because I don't think this group knows that there's a JV level. The little Ivies, where are they and do the big Ivies know that there's a Little Ivy group?
Lee Coffin:
Who says that to you, Darryl?
Darryl Tiggle:
Lots of people say it. If it's a school in New England that's hard to get into, I'm not going to call any names out, they call them the Little Ivies.
Jen Simons:
Or the New Ivies.
Lee Coffin:
The New Ivies, Jen.
Darryl Tiggle:
They're also in a league. They're in a league that everyone knows up and I say, no, they're a totally different group. And I don't think they consider themselves that.
Lee Coffin:
No. And Jen, you started to jump in with New Ivy. That popped up in my newsfeed a few times this summer from media outlets, not independent consultants. It was like journalists saying, "Here are the New Ivies," and then listing several places that I thought, "Yeah, these are great places." But what do you say when a family says, "Oh, we're a New Ivy"?
Darryl Tiggle:
Well, I often say the Ivy League is not taking new members. It's hard to get into that. And we do a beautiful thing in class because I think maybe like me at 17, I kind of thought Ivy League meant it was a beautiful place with Ivy on the buildings. I didn't know, and we do the little example in class. It started off as division four, and then I say, "Hey, give me the Roman numeral for Division IV." And as it's coming out of their mouth, they're like, "I-V. Oh my goodness." So I think helping them understand the real language will help us maybe water out some of that new language that isn't really relevant.
Lee Coffin:
Okay. So let's go back to Jane because I asked her for some examples of what she and Charlie were hearing. So in no particular order, she says, "Here's what I hear people say. Some of them may be true, but they just sound a little too ridiculous sometimes, and I don't know how to argue." So number one, nobody applies regular decision anymore.
Jen Simons:
That's ridiculous. I mean, that's an immediate... You can look that up, Jane. Girl, come on. But there are things. I'm actually glad you started with such a ridiculous one because the zip code thing that she mentioned that you mentioned in the initial text of the email, I have to tell you something. I could make an argument both ways that schools do searches based on zip code. I mean, that we know that's a fact, right?
Lee Coffin:
What does that mean, Jen, that they do a search?
Jen Simons:
Thank you. Okay. So basically when you get mail, for example, from a university, it's based on criteria that they set. So for example, the most obvious one is SAT or ACT scores, but they also target certain majors, certain genders in some cases. The most basic is you have a women's college that takes men out of the search completely or male-identified students completely, but they might search by zip code because the guess is that if you live in a very, very high-wealth zip codes, if you live in Silicon Valley, if you live in Wellesley, Massachusetts, you're going to be able to afford full freight.
However, I have heard multiple times from suburban parents the exact opposite, that they feel disenfranchised because the colleges are visiting the "inner city schools" or their kids will have a disadvantage because they'll be seen as privileged. Whereas the kids that come from more difficult times or difficult areas or however you want to say it, the kids that don't live in fancy zip codes are going to be given an advantage. And so you can make exactly the opposite argument for almost anything except the things that are really obvious, like kids do apply regular decisions, so don't worry about that.
Lee Coffin:
So what do we think that means though? Marcia, why are some families scratching around the idea that nobody applies regular? I think it means because ED is now the dominant round.
Marcia Hunt:
Right. So at certain schools, we know that they're taking 60% of their class early decision, and maybe those families are hearing that in regular decision, students who come from schools that might be considered privileged would be disadvantaged in the regular process. I just wanted to go back to the zip code thing. There was a story going around South Florida that if you were looking for merit scholarships and you lived in a expensive home, that you should not put your zip code down, you should instead live at the UPS store.
Lee Coffin:
Oh, come on.
Marcia Hunt:
I talked to some counselors whose kids literally were putting an apartment number and a UPS store or somewhere else where they could pick up the mail and not put in their home address.
Lee Coffin:
Seriously?
Marcia Hunt:
Uh-huh.
Lee Coffin:
See, listeners, even I am surprised sometimes. I hear that and I think, really? Wow.
Jen Simons:
Are they also not putting what the parents do for work or where they-
Lee Coffin:
I, actually, Jen, I've noticed over the last few years, more and more applicants leave it blank.
Jen Simons:
Yeah.
Lee Coffin:
It's not required. You're erasing your story.
Darryl Tiggle:
Yeah.
Lee Coffin:
There's not a correct. I think the message I would communicate is you are who you are, and altering that identity in whatever way is giving you a disadvantage. You're ignoring something that's true about you.
But I think to stick to this question just for a second, no one applies regular decision anymore. I think it's a headline around the early rounds. So college X admits enrolls a certain percentage of the class through early decisions. I had something in my feed over the last month and it listed all these colleges that are easier to get into an early decision versus regular decision. And as you looked at the numbers, yeah, the ED number was larger than the RD number, but I say this every time ED comes up or early action comes up as a topic, there's nuance in that number. So everywhere I have worked, the athletic recruiting funnels those people into the early rounds because the coaches have done their pre-recruiting, they've been vetted, and they are signed up and guided into that process.
Dartmouth and many others are a member of an organization called QuestBridge, which is a very robust matching program for students from low income, high achieving backgrounds. They go through a completely separate application process, but once they match, they go into the early pool as enrollees. That is skewing the acceptance rate. If we match 50 out of 2,000, we're not telling you about the other 1,950, we're talking about the 50. So anyway, so I think that's where people are getting tripped up is these stories, or in this case, a post that was encouraging people to see early as the easy access rounds, and I think that's what Jane is hearing at the get together.
Okay, number two, same idea. All of the spots at the top schools are filled early. So same idea, different way of looking at it. Marcia, true?
Marcia Hunt:
No.
Lee Coffin:
No. Jen?
Jen Simons:
No, but I'm not saying, to be fair, that I haven't encouraged students to take advantage of early decision. I think I've done that on this podcast sometimes or I've said. But absolutely not, and you do so appropriately. But no, of course, that's not true.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, it's not true. Jane says, "Certain college advisors that you pay for their services are networked into certain schools. So if you want to get into a particular school or group of schools, you have to find a specialist college advisor who has those connections." So I think that's an independent space.
Jen Simons:
Lee, I couldn't even talk to you. I would never, I would never call you or email you or reach out to anyone. I take advantage of my colleagues when I need to know a deadline and they tell me to look it up and go away. I think it's really the opposite. I think that in a good way, we're really concerned post varsity blues or whatever about giving people access that shouldn't otherwise have it. So I would say that that is untrue.
Darryl Tiggle:
I'd have to see a list of said college counselors who have this magic entry to certain schools, because I've also done this a long time. I'm on this podcast with some of the best college counselors around, and I don't think any of us have a direct bat phone to the deans of admissions. So that's why I think-
Lee Coffin:
I think it's remembering an era that's long gone where there was more back and forth between admission officers and college counselors, especially in independent schools where the pools were smaller, the stakes didn't seem quite as dramatic, that's gone away. I mean, Jen references Varsity Blues. I would say in the contemporary landscape, the amount of calls I get during application season from guidance and college counselors is as low as it's ever been.
Marcia Hunt:
I can generally tell if somebody is working with somebody outside the school when the family asks me to make an advocacy call. The word advocacy is something that we don't make those calls, and plus colleges aren't going to take them for the most part. So I think that people who are advising families to ask the counselor to make an advocacy call is dealing with very dated information, as you said, Lee, a bygone era.
Lee Coffin:
Mm-hmm.
Vanessa Montorsi:
Yeah, I was just going to say, to your point, I think you're going 30, 40, 50 years ago when many of the kids were applying to just a handful of schools in a localized area, but now our kids are applying worldwide literally, so we just don't have those contacts and it just is not possible.
Lee Coffin:
Okay. Jane also heard that you are late if you haven't started touring schools in the summer before your junior year.
Darryl Tiggle:
No, also incorrect.
Lee Coffin:
Incorrect. Yep.
Darryl Tiggle:
Also incorrect. I've got students taking off next week to do visits that are in my 12th grade. I think whenever you can see a school, whenever you can get a chance to put yourself on a campus that might be a good fit for you, that's a good experience. But I think students are discovering places, A, they hadn't heard of or didn't know they'd like until they visited as 12th graders, as rising 12th graders the summer beforehand. But I'd say yeah, the more you can see, the better, but there's not necessarily a ticking clock on when you should start your visits.
Lee Coffin:
Well, Marcia, I mean, you're a K-12, so you're dealing with kindergarten families all the way up to seniors. Do you have to tell those lower grade parents it's too soon? I mean, does a 10th grader going out on college visits really know what she's looking for at that point?
Marcia Hunt:
I think a lot of our kids will go on trips even very early with a sibling who's-
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, that's different.
Marcia Hunt:
The University of Miami is 45 minutes from here. You can go down there in 10th grade just to get an idea of whether or not that's something you might like. If you like that size school or some of the designs of that, you might like USC or you might like Syracuse or you might like Northwestern. I don't think we have kids in middle school going to visit schools unless they're trailing along, but I know our 10th graders are definitely visiting.
Lee Coffin:
And do you recommend that?
Marcia Hunt:
I don't think it's a bad idea. What I think is a bad idea are families who take their kids on aspirational college trips. So they go and visit eight schools that they can't get into, and I think that that's sort of growing and you say, "Well, what is your likely school?" And then they'll say, "Oh, I like them all."
Lee Coffin:
Vanessa, Jen, Darryl, “aspirational college visits,” I just wrote that down because I think it's a really interesting concept around you only visit the places that are impossible to give into based on your profile. You want to have aspirations, you want to dream a little bit, but where do you have to balance that dream with pragmatism?
Jen Simons:
I suspect that the aspirational colleges, the reach colleges, the places that you might want but have very, very low acceptance rates are also not the ones that care if you visit or not. And it's not that they don't care, but they're not tracking what we call demonstrated interest. So to go back to the original, original comment, you're not in an advantage necessarily or a disadvantage not visiting. I think that comment comes from a lot of stress that I'm seeing now in September because people think they're behind no matter what. I think that that's really important. You could have done everything and still think that you're behind, but visiting aspirational colleges, absolutely not. Start and find a place that you know according to your school counselor that you can get accepted to and fall in love with that and then have everything else compared to that.
Lee Coffin:
Well, Darryl, you've been on the pod making the case that you should start with your foundational options.
Darryl Tiggle:
Yeah. Yeah. Starting with the places that…where are you a really good fit? And the fit, for all other things being equal, it has to fit your academic profile, your academic prowess. And I often say to my students, and this is metaphorical, I go, "When I was growing up, we'd go to the park and we'd want to play basketball, and there might be four or five courts of people playing, and I wanted to play. So I'd look at where LeBron and friends were playing. I was like, No, I don't think I can play on that court, but I'd want to go where the competition fit my ability." And that's what I try to get through to my families and my students. I go, "Go to a place where you will be successful, where you can thrive, where you will shine."
And even if they pretend not to know, most of my students know what kind of student they are. They know their academic prowess. And I had a really great conversation today with one of my students who said, "You know what? I went to one of those aspirational colleges and it did not feel right to me at all. I just didn't feel like I, for lack of a better word, belonged there." Right?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Darryl Tiggle:
Where they mentioned other places where they said, "I'm a really strong applicant here and the visit to those places were amazing." And I said, "Thank you so much. Good timing for this podcast I'm doing later on this morning," because I think that really is it. Getting the fit and making sure the fit is both academic, personal, spiritual, what have you, and playing on the courts where you can get some minutes and you can contribute is really important.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. So Jane's been raising a bunch of topics she heard with Charlie. What do all of you hear? Marcia referenced Monday mornings as a particularly fraught time in your work life. Why? What Jane-like questions are coming at you and you think, oh my God, where'd you get that?
Jen Simons:
I don't like the expression that I see influencers use a lot or parents use. “It's a lock.” When somebody says doing a certain summer program or doing passion project or whatever, “it's a lock.” There's nothing that's a lock.
Vanessa Montorsi:
We have kids that are fantastic at our school and so many of them have over 4.0s. So they're wondering, "Well, I have a 4.0 or I have this great SAT. Why am I not getting into this high level school?" So they think, to Jen's point, they meet certain criteria, but they don't realize you're not actually that special coming from our high school that you meet those certain criteria.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Or what's hard to see is how do you step outside of that high school and you join a queue from around the world that all have that data? If a high school has a valedictorian, you are conceptually the best student in that class, but there could be thousands of valedictorians in an applicant pool for a class that only has a thousand spots. The thing that I push back on the most is that assumption that the data, your GPA and your testing, when testing is an element, is the start and stop of your eligibility. Those are foundational elements, but we read the whole file and there's going to be a lot of information that isn't just captured on your transcript that helps us sort the pool of 4.0 applicants from suburbia into those we want to consider and those we don't have room for.
Marcia, what was in your doorway a couple of days ago?
Marcia Hunt:
A parent of a younger student who said they knew that they needed to do this really fancy summer program. The fact that most summer programs and most colleges don't help except for maybe the University of Chicago these days. But I had a parent who wanted her child to go halfway around the world to work with orphan kangaroos, and then she was going to write her essay about finding her flock in college.
Darryl Tiggle:
Oh, what the flock is going on there.
Lee Coffin:
So she had the essay concept sketched out before she even did the program?
Marcia Hunt:
Yeah. It was the whole plan.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. And parents, kids, you don't need to. Darryl, what do you hear? I mean, you're at a Quaker school, so I hope that means you have a bit that egalitarian impulse swims among you, but what are you having to push back?
Darryl Tiggle:
So I'm often asking, so what is the secret? What are the secret components of getting in? I said, look, by virtue of it being a secret, only the person who has that particular secret knows it. So you tell me what your secret skill or talent or ability might be, and then that's something we're going to reveal in your application. But there's not a box of secrets that the colleges have in mind that say, all right, they meet that one. So I say, think about authenticity, think about who you are, but the secrets or the gaming or those other pieces, I think you're overthinking them because they don't necessarily resonate or exist in the evaluation process. So the searching for secrets when you've got lots and lots of great treasure in your computer and in your head is where I want them to focus. But sometimes it's looking at the TikTok and Instagram and other secret suggesting feeds.
Lee Coffin:
Well, what about kid to kid? So Vanessa, what do you hear among your juniors and seniors where they're cross-pollinating each other with worry and false information?
Vanessa Montorsi:
Yeah, so I don't have a caseload, so I hear a lot of this from my counselors. I think they share stories of, "Hey, I heard this college is looking to fill seats in this particular major." So then the rising seniors will be like, "Well, I'm going to apply to this school in this major with the hope that I get in and then I'm just going to switch majors when I'm in there." When we're like, "Well, no, that's not always possible. And just why would you want to get into a school into a major that you're actually not interested in?" So we've been hearing that's kind of been the buzz a little bit in our neck of the woods here.
Jen Simons:
I will say sitting from my perch right now, what I'm feeling is that I spent a lot of time talking to parents about computer science because there are some places that were much more difficult to get into for computer science. And now those kids have graduated or about to graduate and they don't have jobs and maybe they wanted to do computer science and they obviously fought for it, but I can't imagine that there wasn't a lot of career interest behind that decision to go into computer science. So just in the spirit of you can't control. The Buddhist would say anything, but I will say most things, you just have to follow your heart. I'm sorry, that's so cheesy, but you do. Don't major in something because you think you can get in for that major because the jobs might not exist. I mean, that's the worst case scenario.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. But how do you turn it... I mean, we're giving all these examples of what people hear and talk about and it's not true or it leads them in the wrong direction. What's the news they could use? How do we advise listeners to take a pause, step back, turn it off?
Vanessa Montorsi:
I mean, we tell our parents, ironically tonight I'll be meeting with senior parents in a few hours to talk about the college process. And one of the things that we have on our slides are we have about 85% of our kids are getting into their top three schools that they apply to the following year. And that to me is a pretty. I'm proud of that statistic because it's showing that we are actually building a well-balanced list of schools and they're listening to us and they're applying and they're actually getting in. So I think kids will get into colleges. There are colleges out there for everyone, and I think if they approach it with an open mind and don't have necessarily a name or certain names of schools, but approach it with an open mind, find the right fit, kind of like Darryl was saying earlier, I think they're going to be okay. I really, really do.
Darryl Tiggle:
Yeah, I think that data piece really is important. If your school's fortunate enough to have a platform like SCORE or Naviance or the other ways in which it puts into context how your students do, not the aggregate for the world, that's where I find a lot of buy-in from my parents when they can sit down with them, parents, and now I've taught my students to use it well now, but looking at the data and getting an idea of how competitive they are on the surface numbers-wise, and then seeing the historical data, like Vanessa says, "Look, our students are doing wonderfully, getting matched to really good places." And then I had a funny conversation with a parent once. We were showing them, I go, "Look, and everywhere you see schools that are their admit rate, our admit rates are going to be two or three times that school's published admit rate regardless of a selectivity." And then they said to me very cynically, "Yeah, because you're counseling to schools where they should get in." And I go, "Yeah."
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, no, it's true. Well, I've heard kids say selectivity represents prestige… it creates something that they want. It's hard to get into, so I want it. It's like a lottery ticket.
Darryl Tiggle:
On the Quaker side, the way I'm able to spin that, I go, look, selectivity could also mean exclusivity, and our ethos is inclusiveness, so let's get some places where you'll be included and think about that in terms of hard to get in means lots of people can't come. So that might be a good thing in terms of prestige, but maybe not in terms of other things that satisfy you.
Lee Coffin:
I like that. Well, let's talk just quickly about what flows from a phone. I mean, I opened the episode talking about my newsfeed and I've trained myself not to click because when I do, more stuff shows up in my newsfeed. It's like I was looking for something related to my old dog, and all of a sudden I was like, oh my God, if I get one more post about people saying goodbye to their old dogs, I'm like, "That wasn't what I was asking." I think controlling your information flow is a way of managing the misinformation. I saw one the other day, it was innocuous, but it was like top schools with the happiest students was the post. But I was looking at the list and I though, says who? How do you measure that? Thousands of people liked it and then were commenting on it. And so there's some catnip here where it's drawing this conversation together. How do you stop that?
Vanessa Montorsi:
To your point, where are they getting this data? I think so much on social media is subjective, so definitely be careful what you're consuming.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Jen Simons:
I just want to add that I don't think, and I can't believe I'm saying this, but I actually don't think it's all bad in terms of what students are creating regarding their own college search processes. Obviously, my... And Lee, I think this is a topic for another show, maybe get some students on, but I've actually really enjoyed not the prescriptive, like I got into X college because I did this, but this was my college journey, and then they take videos and pictures. I sort of like that because it's informational in a way that you find someone that you feel like you could connect with and you see where they're applying and everything. So it's not all bad, but as soon as someone says to you, "You're not going to get in if you don't visit before junior year," it's like, "Why do you think that?" I would just push back whether you're a student or a parent.
Lee Coffin:
Let's end the episode with some advice to Jane and Charlie and their kindred spirits. So suburban parents trying to make sense of what they hear. What's the reassurance to Jane and Charlie? I think Charlie was more upset by the conversation. Jane got annoyed. I think Charlie was really just, "What have we done wrong?" Marcia, what do you say?
Marcia Hunt:
Well, two things. One thing that I was going to add to the previous conversation was there's a list available online of where first year law students went to college from Harvard, and it's every school in the book. And then I looked one time at where the… I don't know if it was Cleveland Clinic, one of the big hospitals…and where their doctors went to undergraduate school and to med school. And there's some really, really helpful information there. Something that I just say to parents all the time is, "Don't listen to the noise. I bet I say it a hundred times a year."
Lee Coffin:
But they do. They do. At the most selective part of the spectrum, those tiny acceptance rates seem impossible. So that desire for that outcome fuels the quest to solve the puzzle. But Darryl, what's your advice to Jane?
Darryl Tiggle:
I say, especially suburban parents, I live in the suburbs, there's lots of information out there and we want to drown out some of the noise, but I think in the same way we consume other advice, like when my car breaks down, I go to my trusted mechanic. With college admissions, there are experts that are. If you're fortunate enough to have a college counselor at your school or if you're fortunate enough to have internet access where you can go and log on here, getting the best information that you can, not the easiest information that's available, I think is really important. So in this work especially, find someone who's well versed in the truth about the work, not people that are just posting and publishing stuff about it.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Vanessa?
Vanessa Montorsi:
I think to me is just be honest about who your child is as a student, as a learner, what they want, and then that will help guide the colleges you're going to apply to. And I think that's going to help set them up for success in the future.
Lee Coffin:
Last word from Jen.
Jen Simons:
I want Vanessa to be my college counselor. I want her to be my life advisor. But I think that you need as parents to separate your children's accomplishments from your own. Where your student goes to college is not a reflection on you as a parent, and I think that you need to separate that. Charlie, I hope that you feel better about. I hope you didn't feel bad about yourself or feel that sort of competition that we all feel. Do not compare. Do not compare yourself to other parents. Do not compare your kid to other kids. This process is specific to them, and what you perceive as their success or failures is not a reflection on you, and it's not the end of the story for them. This is the beginning of the story. We go from here and we make our lives what they're going to be, and where you go to college is not who you are.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, and I would say that Jane and Charlie and others, you will breathe more easily if you have the discipline to walk away from the conversation. In that get together that started this whole chain, if people are being know-it-alls and they don't have the reference to be informed, just excuse yourself. If you're online, don't subscribe, don't follow, don't read. And my fourth grade teacher used to say to us, "M-Y-O-B, mind your own business." She might have said that to me a bit more than others, but I remember mind your own business. Keep your focus on your search, and if you need advice, trust the source.
That's a plug for Admissions Beat. This is episode two of season 10. We will come back every Tuesday with another topic. I promise, as the episodes unspool, I will not gaslight you. I am not here to make you upset. I may tell you some things that make you go, "This is harder than I thought," but we're not going to spin it in a way that makes it sensational. My goal every episode is to break it down, give you some news you could use, debunk what I can where I can, and empower you to be someone who can enter a college search with confidence. So Jen, Vanessa, Marcia, Darryl, thank you all for joining me again on Admission Beat at the start of this new academic year. And to our listeners, we will be back next week with episode three. Till then, I'm Lee Coffin from Dartmouth College. Thanks for listening.