A live audience of high school seniors and parents at Dartmouth's accepted student open house ponder the lessons of the search they are about to complete. "What are the things you wish you'd known a year ago?" AB host Lee Coffin and former New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg ask them. In response, they offer tips for a meaningful campus visit; they celebrate the importance of vibe over spreadsheets of data; and they advise rising seniors to filter an admissions-clogged newsfeed with care. The audience of admissions veterans reminds the next crop of applicants to sustain a sense of authenticity and self-advocacy as the admissions cycle plays out. "Are these my people?" was the key assessment of one senior's discovery period; "I was the guide on the side," a mother shares. And Dartmouth's Dean Coffin reminds future applicants, “ 'Feel' is the unsung hero of your college search.”
A live audience of high school seniors and parents at Dartmouth's accepted student open house ponder the lessons of the search they are about to complete. "What are the things you wish you'd known a year ago?" AB host Lee Coffin and former New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg ask them. In response, they offer tips for a meaningful campus visit; they celebrate the importance of vibe over spreadsheets of data; and they advise rising seniors to filter an admissions-clogged newsfeed with care. The audience of admissions veterans reminds the next crop of applicants to sustain a sense of authenticity and self-advocacy as the admissions cycle plays out. "Are these my people?" was the key assessment of one senior's discovery period; "I was the guide on the side," a mother shares. And Dartmouth's Dean Coffin reminds future applicants, “ 'Feel' is the unsung hero of your college search.”
Lee Coffin:
From Hanover, New Hampshire, I'm Lee Coffin, Dartmouth's vice president and dean of admissions and financial aid, and this is a live studio audience edition of Admissions Beat.
(applause)
So this is the third, I guess, annual at this point, live studio audience version of Admissions Beat. We are coming to you from Cook Auditorium at Dartmouth College as we wrap up the accepted student program for our class of 2030. And we've invited parents and students who are attending to join us for an episode we're calling “The Things I Wish I Knew”. And we know that juniors, as they start, are looking ahead thinking this feels daunting. And so we've got a group of people today who are days away from May 1st, which is the candidate's reply date, which pulls down the curtain on the admission process for the high school class at '26, wait list activity notwithstanding.
And so we thought this is a good moment to have voices from the schools around the world and the homes around the world that house the applicants who just went through this gauntlet to chime in and bring their wisdom to us. So I'm joined this week by my recurring co-host, Jacques Steinberg. Hi, Jacques.
Jacques Steinberg:
Hello, Lee. It's so great to be here.
Lee Coffin:
It's always great to have you with us on Admission Beat. For listeners, meting Jacques for the first time, he is a former reporter, still sort of active on the higher ed beat for The New York Times. I've often teased him that he was the father of the admission beat in the late 1990s when he started reporting on all things college admission for The New York Times and their blog, The Choice. So the good news, bad news is he's an expert, but it's also all his fault that the mainstream media covers us with such attentiveness. But Jacques, take it away.
Jacques Steinberg:
We've done this a few years in a row with all of you, and we mostly record, of course, in a studio or on Zoom, and we don't see each of you. And it always gives us a thrill to see your faces, see your smiles, to imagine what you've been with and see you on the other side of this process, or at least close to the other side of the process. So I'm going to start with a few questions for Lee, just to prime the pump. And then we're going to open this up to each of you. But Lee, just to get things started, among the themes of our conversation today is reflection. So what are some of your reflections on the admissions process recently completed by you and your colleagues?
Lee Coffin:
You ask me that question every year when we get to the end of the cycle and I keep answering it in a very similar reassuring way, which is this year felt like the 30 previous cycles I experienced as a dean. There’s a certain rhythm to the work we do where we start in the junior year, saying hello to 11th graders and their parents. I call them the Bambis coming up to the starting line with a clearly nervous vibe as they start to move forward. They move through discovery into the act of applying in the fall. The pools around my peer group this year basically held. So there was some question mark a year ago with the volume proposition hold it has. So I think for juniors looking ahead, I think you can anticipate a cycle where the volume that we've seen in recent years is true again.
You can't control that. Don't worry about it, but you need to know if you have ambitions for the most selective colleges in the country, they're probably going to see another banner crop of applicants. And last year, the other question was what would happen with the international pool? The geopolitics were suggesting some students from around the world might choose not to apply. Didn't happen. We actually had an increase of about 5% in our international pool and things proceeded in a very normal way. So normalcy is a good thing. I kind of get up in the morning and I say, "Phew, this did not feel like a turbulent admission cycle." Even though there might be some bumps in the atmosphere around us, we got where we were going. I guess I'm making a flight metaphor as I say this. I think that the plane landed just fine.
Jacques Steinberg:
And I think for listeners, if you follow the news, you might get the impression that this process is completely upended relative to what it's been in years past. And hopefully it's reassuring that... I'm hearing you say that at its base level, it's largely the same as it's been for many years.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. I mean, over the last several years, we had a Supreme Court decision that banned the use of race in college admissions. We had a federal “upgrade,” quote, unquote, to the free application for federal student aid, and that was delayed and it was messy, but we worked through it and colleges are offering financial aid to students. We had international student visa issues, but all of those momentous things did not disrupt the fundamentals. Colleges that are selective remain selective. We remained holistic in the way we review files. Students were accepted. They made their enrollment decisions. And as I've gone through April and seen the high school seniors go through the last 30 days or so of their search, and maybe the audience will chime in, it's felt like they've had good news and they're making interesting choices and that makes me happy.
Jacques Steinberg:
Lee, we're recording a podcast today and together with our guests and for those listening, there's several dozen parents and students with us in the audience, and you're going to hear from them in a moment. Wearing your hat as managing editor of Admissions Beat, can you help our guests understand where today's episode fits into the story arc and themes of the spring 2026 season of Admissions Beat, which was its ninth season?
Lee Coffin:
Broadly from late January till May follows the path of a junior in high school as she begins to gather a list of options to explore, proceeds through the discovery process. When we come back in the fall, we'll pick the story up again and take the applicants from discovery to applying. That's season 10. But for season nine, as we have just a couple episodes to go, the story really pivots back to the 11th graders with, I hope, some advice from the audience around what they wish they knew a year ago. And if I had one word I would use to describe the reason I do this podcast, it's to reassure students that this process does not need to be intimidating or quote, random, which I think a lot of people think selective admission has no logic to it. It does. So in your words today on this episode, I hope we can share some thoughts about what you experienced, especially in the process to date.
As you move through discovery, are there some things you wish you did sooner, differently? What worked? What would you do again if you could? If you're a parent and you have another child at home and you're going to do this again, what lessons do you draw from this cycle that will help you keep your wits about you? Especially if you live in one of those communities where people are antsy about college admission, can you be a voice of reassurance in your home communities as others come into this college admission cycle and you say, "It's not so bad," or, "Dear God, it was awful"? And let's talk about that too. I mean, if I'm being too rosy, of course correct me and say, "No, Lee, please. This was terrible." And let's hear why this felt not as smooth as you hoped.
Jacques Steinberg:
Yeah. So thinking what you would want those who will follow you as soon as next year and the years that follow to learn from you in terms of what you've learned and what you think it would be helpful for them to know, if you're comfortable, we ask that when you answer if you could let us know your first name and where you're from. To guide that conversation, Lee and I have got a few prompts for you and Lee is going to kick us off with asking you for advice and tips you have in the following areas.
Lee Coffin:
So rewind your admission clock to somewhere in the winter of 11th grade, whenever your high school started the process with your class. You got a list, maybe it was long, maybe it was just a few options. What do you wish you could do again in that initial discovery period when the list was coming together? And this could be parent or student. The joke among college counselors is how many times a parent will say, "What? I've never heard of that place," or, "A college is described as a reach," and the answer is, "Yeah, but let's just see what happens." And the guidance counselors, "I can tell you what's going to happen and you persist." So what did that feel like? What were the lessons from the initial list making from the winter into the spring of 11th grade or were you a procrastinator who didn't start doing this until the fall and what did that feel like?
Jen:
My name is Jen. I'm from Newton. So for us, I think it's going to go a little bit against what you said. So our child Rain got a list of schools from their college advisor and Rain's a top achieving student and had very few top schools on the list and we were kind of like, and there was not a single Ivy on the list. You know these schools and so they felt like they didn't need to put them on the list, but it felt bad. And it felt like, okay, our kids worked really hard and we think they're good enough. And are we out of our minds? Are we wrong? It made us feel a little bit like, are we not where we thought our kid was destined for? So we said thank you. And we did look at those schools and we did some research on the schools and went to see some of them, not all of them.
Some of them we looked at the list. We're like, "Yeah, no, thanks. We're going to pass on that one." But I think it was helpful to give us a good balanced list. And I think that's one thing I would advise that parents do is make sure their kids' list is very balanced and you have lots of different options. And we did look at lots of different types of schools. But I think also when you know your kid, I think you have to advocate for your kid and I think that reaching is sometimes a good thing.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Jacques, what's your reaction to that story?
Jacques Steinberg:
I think the word “advocate” and not abdicating to the guidance counselor while listening and taking in that input but actually keeping your own council, and you know your kid better than anybody, and knowing if fit doesn't sound like fit to you while also being very open to that counselor's perspective and experience to the extent it's there.
Lee Coffin:
So I'm going to turn the tables on my colleague, the journalist, and interview you. So Jen is from Newton, Massachusetts, so suburban Boston. Jacques, you live in Westchester County, suburban New York, they're sibling counties. Think about what Jen's saying from the context of your kids going to public high school in Westchester and the landscape of high quality kids competing for similar places.
Jacques Steinberg:
Yes. And I am you. I have a soon to be 28-year-old, a soon to be 26-year-old. They both went through this process. We were at a high school, as Lee suggests not dissimilar to yours, and those counselors do have to... They're balancing a lot of relationships, for lack of a better word, with a range of parents, many more interested in places like this and others like it than there probably is bandwidth.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. And I would offer as a “news you could use” to juniors and for retroactive news you could use for all of you. In some big suburban public high schools and independent schools, you see a lot of students who are high achievers getting transcripts that are pretty sexy looking, like lots of A's in a fast-paced curriculum, whether it's honors or AP or international baccalaureate or whatever it's called in that school. And what's hard family by family is you see one report card coming home. You don't see how that transcript of A's and A minuses in an honors curriculum with some AP work just to, as an example, fits into the fabric of that junior class as a whole. And so I think sometimes what the counselor is doing is not intentionally trying to douse ambition, but I think to level set something you can't see yet, which is as wonderful as that transcript is, it is not atypical of a lot of people who will apply to colleges that are aspirational from that same high school.
And that's the tricky part. And you might have in your schools a scattergram that shows here's GPA, here's testing when it's part, here's the outcomes across that metric. That's useful as a very preliminary assessment, but it's flat. Doesn't show you what the essays were, doesn't show you what the recommendations were, doesn't show you. This was the tube of player who was also the class vice president. It just says that GPA with that SAT got in or not.
Jen:
Well, I think also at the school, Rain’s at a smaller independent school, and they had not had a good track record with Dartmouth or even I think in the Ivys in general. They had some kids, but it wasn't like an Ivy feeder school. And so I think because of that, the college counselors were steering kids towards other schools based on track record. But, yeah.
Lee Coffin:
No, I appreciate this question as the first one because it does open up the topic that a lot of families have to navigate in the discovery part of the search where you've got a lot of conventional wisdom paired with your own romantic hopes of how this process plays out, twinned with an in-school person saying, "Let's be pragmatic," and helping to protect your future outcomes in a way that makes you pleased now. As you're listening to this conversation, does that ring true to you too? Did you have a similar conversation with either your guidance counselor or at home?
Fawn:
Hi, my name is Fawn. I'm from Hawaii and I just want to thank both of you, Jacques especially, because your book, The Gatekeepers, I'm a first generation college student and when I was helping my daughter who's a junior in college and now my son who's a pre-frosh, who are only the second and third people in my whole family to go to college, go through this process, I was out of my depth. So I appreciate your book and the podcast.
We had actually the opposite situation with our current junior in high school. She was high-achieving and her guidance counselors wanted her to apply everywhere, to every Ivy, to everything. And we foolishly did that. We helped her apply everywhere, which was extremely time-consuming. There were so many essays that she wasn't even vibing with, that she had to really dig deep because these schools weren't necessarily matches.
She ended up choosing a school that we weren't a hundred percent sold on, but she absolutely was, and she's thriving and did awesome there. So with our current pre-frosh who is considering Dartmouth, we had him do a much smaller list and it was so targeted that when he wrote all of his supplemental essays, he was like, "That was a great essay," or he had no problems writing them at all. And then every single interview he came away with, he was like, "Oh my gosh, that was awesome. I love that guy," or, "I love that lady." Or he was just like he enjoyed it. And the problem now is because it was so targeted and he got into such great schools, he has a difficult choice because he loves all the schools that loved him. So we're hoping that this is where he'll be.
Lee Coffin:
Well, I love that story. So I have follow-up questions though. Okay. So your family story is a version of this podcast episode. You have the lessons learned, but your first daughter, when you say she applied everywhere, how many?
Fawn:
25 schools and she went to nine fly-ins. So we had zero idea she would be so compelling and she was. So when it came time to our son, we had a feeling he would be pretty compelling after what she'd went through and he was, but we really saw... We should have listened to her and never made her apply to the school she was not interested in that ended up admitting her, but she didn't want to go to any of these schools.
Lee Coffin:
Was she worried? Why was she over applying?
Fawn:
Because everyone kept on saying, "You're so smart. You're so great. You should go to Harvard. You should go to Cornell. You should apply to MIT." And so she applied to all those places, but she'd never wanted to go there. So even after getting in, she wanted to go where she wanted to go and she's thriving there.
Lee Coffin:
So juniors listening, don't apply to 25 because that traffic jam… you said two things that were really interesting. She couldn't honor each of those applications as she applied because she didn't know where she was applying. And to those of us who read the file, we see that. We can tell that you don't have a really great connection to us and we'll have that conversation in committee about like, "Does she really know where she's applied or I don't see the connection between you and us. Maybe there, but you didn't know it, so you didn't bring it forward," versus your son who had a smaller, tighter list and those applications and interviews resonated with him and then with us because they were sincere. He didn't apply to a whole bunch just to see what happened. He was making really targeted applications and had something to say back.
Jacques Steinberg:
Yeah. Another thing I love about the story, Lee, is that this process is not just about the college admissions process. As you all know as well as I, it's about parenting and teaching moments, and what a lesson in decision making that will be a gift that keeps on giving throughout your son's adult life that sometimes you have to make decisions on the front end before you even give a school an opportunity to make a decision on you, to take that school off the list before a decision is rendered. And I think that as somebody whose daughter just went through the graduate school application process, which you all should take a deep breath before you know and your children too, that kind of decision making is really, really helpful by the time that rolls around.
Lee Coffin:
Are there any other second timers? Yeah. How did you feel as you did the search for your second or third child? Did it flow with experience or was it a whole new adventure?
Speaker 3:
It was very different and unlike the last person speaking, it was much worse this time around. Our first child knew exactly what she wanted. She wanted an engineering school in a city, so we had very few schools that we were looking at with her. We looked at a handful and she made her list. It was very balanced and a lot of the schools we felt like if it came to that, we could go visit after the fact. With our son, he wanted more of a liberal arts education. So we were advised by the high school counselor that everywhere really cares about having the student come to show demonstrated interest. So when you were talking about what was it like last year, winter and spring, it was awful because we went everywhere. I mean, we went to so many schools and they all blend together and all the info sessions started to sound-
Speaker 4:
They don't all blend together.
Speaker 3:
Okay. Some stood out.
Lee Coffin:
So we have an intrafamily disagreement.
Speaker 3:
Some definitely stood out and he came to Dartmouth the first time and was like, "This is where I want to go." But you need a balanced list because it is a very selective school. So I think a lot of the ones that were maybe lower on his list felt like they blended together. Would you agree with me on that? Okay.
Speaker 4:
One thing as you've been talking came to my mind, and I don't know if this resonates with others, the increased competition, and this is maybe a little bit off-topic, but it came to mind. I feel like it has created a change in culture so that young people need to start forming their personalities a little earlier, because to find that fit by the time you go to college requires you to understand a little bit more about who you are and how you would fit somewhere else. So you need to define yourself to then fit with a definition of the fit for your higher education. Just an observation, I'm curious whether that's something that the admissions people have discussed or observed.
Lee Coffin:
We've definitely discussed and observed it. I think you're right. The volume has been acute. So I'll just use Dartmouth as an example from the pandemic to the present. So if you rewind to the fall of 2020 when we were all on lockdown and didn't see what was an application tsunami coming at us. So we went up 32% in one year, and it has not stopped. Every year since then has had that level or a little higher. So people say, "Oh, it's test optional. It'll recede when you restore testing." Well, we did and it didn't. So the volume has become kind of a living organism unto itself where it just keeps recreating itself. And I think part of what happens is our friends from Hawaii, when one student applies to 25 places, sadly, she was not the only student doing that. So you have maybe the same N of applicants applying to N times some big number and our pools all go up.
And as a byproduct, what we're trying to do college by college is map that volume down to our scale and say, how do we invite into the class the right combination of individuals who seem to know us and help build the community we hope to have on this place? And it's not that we're trying to force this premature articulation of identity by the student but to say to students to the degree you can introduce yourself with clarity is going to help us meet you and have a more accurate answer to the question, "Do we see you here?"
Jacques Steinberg:
Lee, we've heard almost exclusively from parents, so I'd like to put a little bit of a spotlight on you that are students in the room. There's many dozens of you in the room with us here. Can you bring your perspective into this conversation and advice, try to remember your junior high school self and how you navigated this sort of search and discovery process? And if you can, tell us your first name, if you're comfortable in your community.
Harry:
My name's Harry. I'm from Georgia. And one of the biggest regrets I had was that I came in with this attitude of just, why visit anywhere when I might not even know if I'll get in or not? Why visit 15 colleges when 12 of those are going to just reject me anyway? And that was a big mistake. I realized that I didn't really know where I wanted to apply, what I liked in a college, why I didn't. So what I would say to a junior in my position, what I'd say to junior year Harry would be visit all the places, even if you don't think that you're actually going to apply there, even if you know you're not going to apply there, just so you know what it is you do and don't like. So you can narrow that list down because there's also no point in applying if you know you're not going to go there.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. That's good advice, Harry, because I think that the trap door of the way you did it, where you apply to places, get in, you may not like the places where you got in. You may get there and realize, "Oh, I really don't see myself here." And you could have course corrected a year ago and realized this type of place feels right. Friends of mine have a junior in high school and they said, "Would you sit down with him and give him some advice?" And I said, "You have to start to go on campus." So he went to his first visit and he loved it. And I said, "What'd you love about it?" And as he was describing, I said, "The task now is to find other campuses that have those qualities." But until he had visited, he didn't know. And then he went to a second one.
He goes, "I didn't like that." And I said, "Okay, let's do the same thing. Let's map off of that experience what wasn't clicking for you and to the degree the list can shift accordingly, let's do that." I have a campus visit question that comes back to the earlier conversation about visiting places and they all start to sound the same. I think that's a fair critique of a lot of us in the college admission space who like to use the word unique. And another unique thing about us, it's like, well, it's not so unique. It's maybe part of our story, but because a lot of the admission officers live on this campus, they have a one place view of what's unique or not. So you're nodding as I say this. Let's talk about unique. How hard was it as you visited to dissect either the info session or the tour and what helped you do that?
Finley:
Hi, I'm Finley. I'm from Houston. The first few visits that I went on, and I went to the info sessions and I did the tours and I was like, "Oh my God, these are all amazing. How am I going to choose?" And as I did more and more, I realized I just really liked the idea of going to college. And I think it is a fair thing to say, a lot of colleges have a lot in common. And so my biggest piece of advice when you're going on the tours and seeing the different schools, don't discount the importance of just vibes, right? That's the one thing that I'll say is truly unique about every single school I've visited. No school has given off the same vibe. Every school is a little bit different and it is intangible and later on when you're applying, it makes it a bit harder to write your why blank essays.
But if you go to that school, you're going to be experiencing those vibes just as much as you are going to be experiencing the student clubs and organizations or this type of curriculum or whatever.
Glenn Finney:
Hi, my name is Glenn Finney. I'm from Mountain Lakes, New Jersey. Kind of going off what other people have said, I think being on campus is huge and especially talking to students. On all of the campuses I've visited and the colleges that I visited, when I spoke to students, I could really get a sense of these are my people or these people seem great, but they're not for me. And I think interacting with people on campus, because at the end of the day, the people that are at a university are what makes that university special. So I think interacting with students, and the other thing I would say is representing yourself authentically and honestly in your essays, because a lot of people think, "What do the college admissions officers want me to be?" And I think admissions officers are good. Every school has a unique identity and I think admissions officers are good at recognizing this person fits their identity or they don't.
And as long as you represent yourself authentically in your essays, I think you will end up somewhere that's great for you no matter what, because you're only going to be accepted at places that fit you as a person.
Lee Coffin:
That's great advice. And the last two of you are talking about the same thing. This vibe is discernible to you. And to juniors, you may not be able to explain to your parents why you're reacting to the vibe that they are perhaps not feeling with you. That's okay. Own the vibe that you feel. And one of the things I hear kids telling me is they'll visit the campus and the vibe is, "This is an intense place." That's not bad, but it may not be your jam. You may be like, "I don't want a campus culture that's this angsty," versus another campus may be more laid back. It doesn't mean they're not smart and high-achieving, but they approach day-to-day life with a different composure. You may love that. And I think those are the kind of things the visits help you understand. And jump forward to April of your senior year where all of you are now navigating this.
This is what you're doing at this program today is touching it and seeing, "Do I feel it and are these my..." I love this sentence. Are these my people? Because that's a question that's really essential and you're the only one that can answer it.
Jacques Steinberg:
So for parents, imagining the parents who will follow you going on a campus visit, how did you sort of distill what your role was on a campus visit versus what your child's role was? So for example, in my family, when my kids would say to me, "What did you think?" I would bite my tongue and say, "What did you think?" And I found that helpful, but would love to know some advice you have for those who will follow about a successful but also stress-reduced college visit.
Katie:
I'm Katie, I'm from Mount Vernon, Ohio, and I was a guide on the side. I accompanied my son on probably a dozen visits starting back at his sophomore year, really hyped them up this past summer. And I can tell you that he would ask me many questions and you have those feelings inside you, but it was really pushback, "How do you feel?" And I could tell you when we left here on a very hot day in July, this is where he was going to land.
Lee Coffin:
So “guide on the side” is an awesome job description. Was it easy to do that?
Katie:
It was easy. I am a first gen. I only applied to one school and it's because I loved going to football games there. So getting to experience this part of the college process was actually a lot of fun. I would say those deadlines coming in November were stressful. He only applied to four schools, ED, here, we allowed him to not touch another supplemental waiting for that decision.
Lee Coffin:
Did anybody play a role different from “guide on the side?” Were any of you driving the bulldozer? Oh, yeah.
Laura:
Sure. My name is Laura from Needham, Massachusetts. I worked in higher education, have a master's in higher education and saw probably over 30 schools with two daughters that were graduating one year after the other. And in the beginning, I think I was very much wanting to ask questions and be involved. And toward the end, I laid off, which I think was pretty appreciated. But on a different note, I would say it was very helpful to have two children touring at the same time, completely different majors, completely different interests to see through each other's eyes or to get exposure to campuses that they maybe wouldn't have thought of initially.
Jacques Steinberg:
Our dean, Kathryn Bezella, I think has something to add.
Kathryn Bezella:
I'm Kathryn and I'm originally from Wisconsin. I just was listening to the conversation before and I was hearing this wonderful sort of mirroring on both sides of some of you saying, "Oh, the campus visit, they were all using the same word, unique, and they all start to blend together and they have these great features in liberal arts and this and research and athletics, but so does every other school." And then on the other side, I heard Lee saying, "We have all these amazing transcripts, right? We have all of these pieces of data that on some level are uniform." And on both sides, what I heard each party saying is on the students, it was the vibe, right? It was the kind of non-textbook, non-boilerplate features of a school that rose to prominence and made a memory and made a connection. And Lee and I would say exactly the same thing as we read applications, and it's not as complicated as either party believes. So I just want to make that parallel for everyone listening, because I think the conversation, the observation goes both ways.
Michelle:
Hi, I'm Michelle from New York. And another thing I noticed sort of building on that is then when our son was trying to dig a little bit deeper into what each university was about, if you dig into the websites, not every university knows what it's about, and so they blend together, but the ones that do stand out by a mile. And that not everyone can go college visiting, right? So that, I mean, I think I would love to hear from you, because I'm sure there are kids who will listen who just can't college visit. And what we found useful, or not us, our kids, because this is our third time around, was talking to students who had attended or were in attendance at that university.
Jacques Steinberg:
Yeah. As Lee mentioned, I was a journalist for many years and still do some journalism. And I think one way to approach this process is imagining yourself as a journalist. And I appreciate the reminder that not everybody can go. And there's so much you can learn by digging into a website, by digging into department sites, by digging into activities, but also asking colleagues like Lee and Kathryn and their counterparts at other schools to connect you with students and professors and leaders of advisors or whatever you're interested in and getting on a Zoom or getting on a phone call with them and asking them questions and listening to their answers. I would argue it's never been easier to visit a campus without having to get on a plane if that's not always possible.
Lee Coffin:
No, I think that's true too. And I think to parents of 11th graders who are either first gen or went to college 25, 30 years ago, and what I lovingly call the paper-based world, I did my college search out of my mailbox. I was first gen, I took the PSAT, the paper started coming to me and that's how I discovered. I didn't know how to look. I just reacted to what was coming to me and I made little piles on the floor in my bedroom and remember saying to my mother, there was one place that I kept looking at and I said, "I don't know that I see my people here." And she said, "How do you know?" And I said, "I'm reading these profiles and they're just not syncing with me." It was a wonderful place, but now that I know more about it was not the place I should... And I didn't go, but you can discern these things from other sources besides the in-person visit.
I think when you can visit campus, do it. And to those of you listening who can't afford to get to college A, B, and C, a lot of us have fly-in programs designed for low-income students to come to campus. So Google it, find the link, apply, and get yourself on a fly-in program. They go junior, spring, summer, even into the fall, and that's a way of getting yourself to campus when you can't afford it.
Jacques Steinberg:
So I want to make sure we don't leave this conversation without having you all take us virtually to your kitchen tables, both students and parents into your living rooms. I know firsthand that if you're not careful, this process can quite literally swallow your family and it can become dinner table conversation every night, conversation on the car ride to and from wherever. And my gut is that both students and parents, you have some advice for those who will follow about how to put guardrails on when to talk about this and when not and how to talk about it, and also how to lower the temperature of stress in those conversations, including for siblings who may be nowhere near this process and they certainly don't want to hear it. So who has advice on how to keep this from sort of swallowing your kitchen table and your mealtime?
Vip Soni:
Hi, I'm Vip Soni from Southern California. Thank you, Lee. By the way, my wife is a big fan of this podcast. So I'm here forcefully. No. But thank you though. This has been great. So you started actually this morning with something that I loved when you introduced us in the auditorium and it was breathe and feel. And I think that's kind of what we did through the whole thing. Just kind of let things sink in and try not to talk about things too much, try not to get too analytic about all of it. And the whole vibe thing is, I think, 100% correct. I think if you just give yourself that space, you can really take it in and I think you process things better maybe on that level. So yeah, I mean, that's how we did it.
Jacques Steinberg:
So breathe and feel. And also it sounds like you're saying notice. Were you able to notice, "Hey, we're talking about this too much." If you did notice that, how did you steer the conversation elsewhere?
Vip Soni:
I think it was more like just being aware of what's going on with... I guess what we're talking about is just human interaction. But just being aware of the other person, trying to read other people. And I feel like sometimes people are ready to hear things, sometimes people aren't. And so I think it's a lot of just feeling things out, like you said, feel. And so that resonated with me quite a bit this morning. So I was like, "Oh yeah, it's 100%."
Lee Coffin:
“Feel” is the unsung hero of the college admission process.
Vip Sony:
What's interesting, to piggyback on the concept of the vibe and as it relates to the mission process itself, I found this was quite fascinating in the same way that a lot of the audience was saying going to the school physically made a big difference, right? It's not the same as necessarily reading it. I found that the application process that included videos was very fascinating because in the same way, is it true that you guys get more of a vibe of the applicant from videos in addition to the writing because it's like the same corollary?
Lee Coffin:
That's a still minor part of a lot of our processes, but when I click on one of those video elevator pitch, I like kids. And so I see these charming little faces saying something to me and it helps meet them. I used to work at places where we did interviews. I used to love that. I'm a chatty guy. I like sitting down with people and having a conversation. Those little videos do that. Audition tapes do something similar. So the artists who send in a performance, we watch those. My colleague Kathryn was an opera singer in the day, and so sometimes she'll sing along, but there's this human dynamic that it enables where we connect and you help tell your story through a medium other than an essay.
Jacques Steinberg:
So other kitchen table, car ride, boundaries advice?
Claire:
Hi, my name is Claire. I'm from New Jersey. I'm not sure this really actually answers the question, but for me, I'm lucky that my parents let me be mostly independent with my college search. But one thing that was sort of swallowed up quote, unquote was my social media, because somehow my For You page sort of figured out that I'm like a high school student applying to college applications. And that was a thing that I was bombarded with all the college advice from quote, unquote “experts” and that's like the thing that was sort of like swallowed up for me.
Lee Coffin:
So your feed became kind of a monster that took over? Yeah.
Jacques Steinberg:
And do you have any advice for those who will come after you on how to not let that dominate your brain space? What did you do to sort of turn it off?
Claire:
I guess I would say there is actually a lot of good advice, I would say. But again, it's also just like trying to know who you are because I think... Well, one example for me is that a lot of advice I would hear for essays is like topics to avoid because admissions officers read those topics all the time. So for me it was, "Oh, you shouldn't write about sports because a lot of students play sports and they'll write about sports." But for me, swimming was really important to me and I wanted to write about swimming and so I was like, "No, I don't want to listen to that." So I wrote my Common App about swimming and I kind of just ignored the advice because I knew like I wanted to be authentic to myself.
Jacques Steinberg:
So Lee, you've read tens of thousands of essays. And when you hear a student told, whether by a credible source, like a counselor or somebody fill in the blank on the internet, whatever you do, don't write about X. As a reader, what's your perspective on that?
Lee Coffin:
You did the right thing where you turned... I try and never give advice about what not to do and to turn it around and say, "Do this." And so this in your story, Claire, was swimming. So the trick there is it could be a common topic, but how do you make it a personal topic? And when you could do that, it doesn't matter what you're writing about, you've owned it in a way that helps me meet you, which is what the point of the essay is. You want to give the reader a way of meeting you through those 650 words or fewer and saying, "I know who has applied." And if the headline you want me to take away is Claire is a swimmer who, you have to write an application that lets me fill in that blank. The other thing I would just tack onto this, as we think about news feeds and the way our phone listens to everything we say, and I was talking about my dog the other day and I started getting all these dog things on my Google feed and it's spooky.
Know your source. Every opinion on the internet is not always credible. I'll just leave it at that. Some people make anonymous comments and you're like, "Well, who are you? How do you know that the advice you're giving me is germane to me?" And you were able to do that where you say, "Nope, nope, this is not Claire's story." But I think that's the trap is you listen to people who you don't know.
Christine:
My name's Christine and I'm from Virginia. And Lee, I've been listening to your voice in my car, so it's really fun to be here in the flesh. A couple of thoughts. One is when our daughter was doing a ton of college visits, we had her carry around a little field notebook and she jotted down the feeling that she had or things that she noticed about campuses because the visits can start to blur together. And we created an opportunity. She loves New York City. We sat in a cafe and she just sat there and thought about all of the visits that she went on and just wrote down some of her initial impressions because we were wondering how was she going to process all of this later along the line of the application process. The other thing I would say is in the fall as she was starting to write her essays, we walked with her through thinking about like a timeline of when she might want to finish some things and I had to get out of her way of asking too many questions.
I would want to follow up on had she made any progress or was she thinking about this. And at one point I had to ask her, "Would you like me to be like your other friend's parents who set up meetings with their children to talk about it, or is it okay for me to ask you questions kind of along the way?" And she was like, "Mom, our relationship is one where you ask me lots of questions so you can keep asking me. I might not answer them all." But what I will say is, as I was getting out of the way, I felt like I had to trust her in the process. And when she showed us one of her drafts of her essays, we were quite surprised at how thoughtful she was in it and I wouldn't have seen that. If I'd gotten in the way, I might have tried to drive it in a different direction, but it really was her heart, her passions and her voice in it.
And so one thought is just get out of the way. And I felt like very much my role was not to drive the process for her, but to serve as kind of a research assistant when she was interested in a particular school, maybe learn something about it and say, "Hey, have you thought about this?" or, "Have you thought about looking at the Instagram page of this group that might interest you and reach out to a student there?" And so we think that those things were helpful in her process.
Lee Coffin:
Well, and you did something really simple and elegant. You invited your daughter to give you a role of her choosing as opposed to saying, "I'm going to do this," and that's when the arguments start. But you let her say to you, "Mom, you are who you are. I get it. I accept it. Let's go." But I think for juniors, give your parents an assignment, whatever it... It could be stay out or it could be you're the researcher, you're the navigator, you're the visit coordinator, you're my therapist who's going to hear me talk through all these things and tell me back what I said. That's really helpful.
Jacques Steinberg:
I also want to make sure we don't lose the recommendation on the journaling, whether it's an old school, hard copy write in the journal or whether it's notes in your phone. I mean, sometimes your child is going to be making decisions on a place that they visited maybe over a year ago and those notes can be incredibly helpful. Make sure the journal's in a safe place where they know where it is because it may sit for a while.
Laura:
My name's Laura. I'm from Massachusetts and there's been so much said that I agree with, and I don't want to reiterate, but a couple soundbites that I felt were really important. One was understanding the nos and the things you don't like and trusting your kids on that and that the time and effort of a no was equally important to the yes to sort of get closer to the center of what they're looking for, that it wasn't a waste of time or energy. And sort of a lot of students talked about their gut feeling, but I really felt like my kids sometimes needed help validating the nos that it wasn't a disappointment despite a number of ranking or a name.
Another piece along the trust line and a sort of metaphor that I've always liked to center on was at the beginning of high school we're driving the car and none of the kids know how to drive and we've become maybe used to partnering in a certain way, but at the end of the process, they're getting out of the car and I'm not in there anymore. They are driving off. And again, trusting that that journey and that drive and that destination, how they get there as indirect as it may be, it's not our direct journey. I've already gone to college. I fell in love with many that my children maybe didn't like as much as I did, but in the end, I'm not making the journey again. And so I think those two points, validating the nos and trusting that they're ready, that we've empowered them to drive off with this decision, that really helped me allow the partnering that I think they needed to hopefully and definitely be here.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. The nos are powerful. When something doesn't sit, there's a lesson there.
Jacques Steinberg:
Also, your note about it's your child going to college and it's not for you, you're not going back. There's a former admissions officer named Jennifer Delahunty who wrote a book with the title I'm Going to College, Not You. And I really tried to keep that framing in mind, parents who will follow as I was going through this process. Yes, places that I loved that didn't resonate with my kids. I'm not the one going.
Lee Coffin:
So Jacques, we are almost out of time, amazingly, but I want to ask the audience, is there anything you want to chime in on that we haven't covered or some of you have had your hands up and the mic hasn't made its way to you? You get an at large comment here.
Lily:
Thank you. I'm Lily. I'm from Miami and we had a wonderful full circle moment when she opened a letter from you and the admissions office, specifically the reader of her region, which echoed to us who she was. And I could tell it had been written with so much intention and so much knowledge of my child that it reminded me that it is a process because I don't think that when we started really getting serious about it in junior year, she could have articulated everything that she did in her why Dartmouth and that she knew who she was going to be or hopes to be on this campus and that may change, but it is a process. And hearing back what she had written and communicated from your officers who read this, I'm sure so many, as we've discussed, but really captured who she was really validated the process for us as a family. And I am just so ready and so excited for her. So I just wanted to also say thank you because it was that full circle moment.
Lee Coffin:
I really love that comment. Thank you. I think from the outside of the admission process, people have a hard time believing we actually read the file, that we know who we're meeting and that we are sympathetic characters and that's true everywhere I've worked. In the selective realm, we may have a very precise number of acceptances we could extend, but we know who we are extending them to. And that surprises a lot of people that the person to person piece of this still lives there.
Jacques Steinberg:
And for listeners, picking up on Lee's word “unique” earlier, that's not unique to admissions officers at Dartmouth. We know our peers. There's a certain kind of person like you, like Kathryn, who chooses to go into this profession, and I think in part to have an experience like was just described.
Lee Coffin:
I mean, to the listeners, they weren't with us this morning at the welcome, but when I asked the admitted members of the class of 2030 to stand, I had goosebumps. I've been doing this a long time. I still had goosebumps, and the goosebumps are kind of a byproduct of this work we do in college admissions. I mean, we are building community. We are inviting students to join a community to get a degree, to meet their friends and peers, to have an experience. And those are really human things, and even the huge places do that. The smaller the place, the more they do it because they must. The vibe of a campus is not accidental. It's a reinforcing feedback loop. You feed into it, the people who enhance or shift the vibe.
Jacques Steinberg:
So I have the unenviable task of bringing this discussion to a close and then throwing back to Lee. I'd like to ask if there's a student who would like to give us a last word, and as Lee said, it can be freeform.
Aiden:
Thank you. Hi, I'm Aiden. I'm from New York City. And the thing I was going to say is, as a last piece of advice, is throw away the spreadsheet. So I'm a very type A person, and so as you can imagine, I had 30 schools on a list with a spreadsheet. I was trying to rank them all. And about halfway through, I realized it was kind of useless.
And then again, going back to what you're saying, you really have to feel out those schools that speak to you. But the other side of that is that this is such a complicated process where everyone likes to pull up the stats, the SAT, the GPA. And I think at the end of the day, you just have to be yourself, write these essays, build relationships with your counselors, and you have to kind of throw away this drive, this urge to analyze all the numbers and say, "Am I going to get in?" And just say, "It's all going to work out in the end. Be my authentic self, write these essays the way that I truly believe in them." And at the end of the day, you'll see where you end up, and that's what it is.
Lee Coffin:
Aiden, amen. That was beautiful. Great way to wrap up this episode. Thanks to all of you for joining us on this almost penultimate episode of season nine. Next week, we will be back for season finale two part. I'm calling it “From Home to College, What You Need to Know Post Admission.” So we'll have two episodes to close out season nine, and that will be a topic aimed at seniors who have journeyed past May 1st, have a sweatshirt, and there's still a little bit more to do in this post-admission space, so that's next week. But for now, this is Lee Coffin with Jacques Steinberg from the Dartmouth College Accepted Student Open House. Thanks for listening.