Season 1: Episode 10 Transcript
Expanding Global Access
Lee Coffin:
Dateline, a campus near you. Read all about it, press releases, articles, blogs, news feeds, rankings, books, tweets, posts, podcasts, the head spins and swims in admissions updates, news, spin, lists, commentary, gossip. So much buzz, too much info, so many opinions. I'm here to help. When the beat is loud, I'll turn down the volume. I'm Lee Coffin, Dartmouth Dean of Admissions. Welcome to the Admission Beat, the pod for news, conversation and advice on all things college admissions.
Hello everyone. This week on the Admission Beat we take an international twist on headlines from around the world as it relates to college admission. And it's one of those topics that's really been part of my journey as an admission officer for the last 30 years, where more and more students from around the world have found their way, not only in our applicant pool, but onto our campuses. And to my mind, make these American campuses richer, more interesting, multidimensional places, because they bring their lived experiences from all points around the world. That has been one of the most important and exciting parts of my work as the admission officer and as a dean. As our listenership grows around the world, hello to all of you. We thought it was time to have a episode themed around all things global, so we'll start today with our newsroom, with Charlotte Albright.
This week's newsroom has a Dateline around the world, and let's first welcome a guest. Greg Manne is the manager of selection and global outreach for Schmidt Futures foundation in New York City, where he is in charge of recruitment and selection for their program Rise. Greg hello, welcome to the Admission Beat.
Greg Manne:
Hey Lee, so excited to be here.
Lee Coffin:
It's nice to see you again.
Greg Manne:
Ready to talk all things international.
Lee Coffin:
All things international, and Greg and I were long-time colleagues. Greg joined Schmidt after a long and successful career as the coordinator of global outreach at Dartmouth College. Before that, he was at Fulbright in Spain after finishing his work at DC and before heading to the Harvard Graduate School of Education where our paths first crossed. Greg and I are going to hear the headlines from Charlotte, so Charlotte Albright, hello, what's on the news beat this week?
Charlotte Albright:
You're the news beat this week. This is called Admission Beat, and very often in our newsroom, we're talking about other schools, but in this case, we need to talk about Dartmouth because my understanding is, I hear it on the best authority that Dartmouth is making a very important and big change in its admission policy, as it relates to non-US citizens, so I'm teeing you up.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Effective January 12th, Dartmouth College became the sixth institution in the United States to offer need-blind admission to all applicants, regardless of citizenship. And to guarantee 100% of demonstrated need for all students, regardless of citizenship, so a pretty huge policy change for us. And in my career, when they write my obituary someday, I hope they say as dean of admissions and financial aid at Dartmouth, Coffin, pardon the pun because I'll be dead. Coffin helped implement universal need-blind and in Hanover, and it's really exciting and a really important statement by Dartmouth about the global moment that is the 2020s and the students who are joining us from around the world.
Charlotte Albright:
So let me-
Greg Manne:
I'm giddy hearing this news. I'm giddy.
Lee Coffin:
You're giddy, yeah.
Greg Manne:
I oversaw international recruitment and selection at Dartmouth and it was such an integral part of my journey that, to hear about this policy change and what it means for the international student community at Dartmouth, makes me even more proud of the work that I was able to participate in during my time there. It's just awesome.
Charlotte Albright:
Define again for us what need-blind means. Then Lee, if you would also explain what's behind this decision? What motivates it?
Lee Coffin:
Need-blind and its opposite, need-aware, or need-sensitive, describes the evaluation process the college uses. When a institution is need-blind, as Dartmouth and many other places are for US citizens and permanent residents, it means that the application is reviewed without considering a student's ability to pay or the level of scholarship a student might require to enroll, it's something of a gold standard around admission practices. Need-aware means that, to a degree, it varies by institution, the ability to pay or the level of scholarship required may factor into a decision. For most non-US citizens applying to an American college or university, that's the case. It's a significant resource investment and up until Dartmouth announced our policy, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Amherst and MIT were the only institutions who guaranteed need-blind admission for all students and a hundred percent of demonstrated need, and that twinning is really important.
What does it mean? To me, it's a statement of global equity. It's an exclamation point on this college's commitment to honoring its mission, which is to prepare students for a lifetime of responsible leadership in their lives and careers. To me, as we recruit the classes of '26 and '27 and '28, we're talking to high school students who will have lives that stretch across what is a really global century.
The other thing just to point out, is it's a significant investment. I mean, it's a $90 million investment by Dartmouth in it's endowment to be able to do this kind of work. I work from a position of privilege in this regard, that the place where I am vice provost and dean, has both the alumni and parent body that can raise this kind of resource, to invest in this particular admission policy. But to me, it's an exciting forward looking one that speaks to the essential global identity of Dartmouth and the students we're hoping to attract.
Charlotte Albright:
I wonder if it's worth mentioning too, and correct me if I'm wrong, that Dartmouth isn't making this change in order to get more international students to apply, as a matter of fact, international applications are surging. I say that because there are a number of national news stories over the past couple of months, that have implied the opposite because they're using 2020 numbers, which were, of course COVID impacted. But you've been telling me recently that you're getting lots and lots of applications from outside the border or from non-US citizens living inside the United States, right?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Yeah, no, 2020 goes down in the data archive with a big asterisk. So many things related to that admissions cycle were scrambled by a pandemic that appeared in March and just upended everything we did, not only in the way we enrolled the class, but throughout the summer and the number of students who were able to enroll in the fall. As Greg was right there with me watching it, as COVID erupted, many students from around the world were not able to get visas, they weren't able to leave their countries, airports were closed. So international enrollments sagged on many campuses because it was just physically impossible for people to move around the world.
When you get to 2021 and things started to, at least last summer, become more open again, the international pool bounced back. And a year ago, so Greg's last year at Dartmouth, we had a 48% increase in applications from non-US citizens, which was a staggering one year jump that took us to a record high. As we're still opening the mail for the class of 2026, which we're working on now, that is not going to be that giant jump, but it went up again. So we are seeing interest from around the world, and to your point, implementing this policy was not a volume initiative. More was not the goal or the intent, it was really, like I said earlier, about equity. About how do we make a statement to the world about the role of non-US citizens on our campus, in our curriculum and in the policy we've just enacted?
Charlotte Albright:
The other thing to remember, perhaps too is that, and I'm going to refer to another national news story that ran around Christmas time, noting that as you say, it is a global society and traffic goes both ways. So in some cases, students who are US citizens, are looking to schools in Europe and other parts of the world, frankly trying to find something that's affordable to them if they can't afford the sort of school they were looking at in the United States. It might be worth remembering that as you expand this policy to include non-US citizens, there's still a lot of financial assistance available to American students. In other words, you're not robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Lee Coffin:
Oh, no. Right, this is not an either/or.
Charlotte Albright:
You have mentioned a couple of times about Greg having been at Dartmouth. So I think Greg, I'd like to ask you your news. You aren't at Dartmouth anymore, where are you now? And also there's news about where you are, tell us.
Greg Manne:
Absolutely. I'm excited to talk a little bit about where I'm at now. A member of Schmidt Futures, which is the foundation that I'm working at. Schmidt Futures is the initiative of Eric and Wendy Schmidt. Eric Schmidt is the former CEO of Google and they launched a program in 2019 called Rise. Currently, I'm, as Lee mentioned, the manager of selection and global outreach at Rise. And Rise, it comes from a $1 billion philanthropic commitment to identify and support global talent, especially youth talent between the ages of 15 and 17. This past October, we announced our first cohort of 100 global winners and they come from 42 different countries, they speak 22 languages and are very global in nature.
Lee Coffin:
And Greg, tell us what did these winners get? What's the prize?
Greg Manne:
Sure, absolutely. The purpose of the program is to find and identify this youth talent in a very innovative way, right? We've moved away from using standardized test scores and some of the other metrics that are traditional to US higher education. The philosophy is we're trying to bring opportunity to brilliance and talents around the world because brilliance is equally distributed all over the place, why you would want to have a need-blind admissions policy, for example, but opportunity is not. So how do we bring that opportunity to talent?
What we're doing is we're supporting these hundred winners that we've uncovered from around the world, by offering them a lifetime of benefit. We're actually in partnership with the Rhodes Trust, the Rhodes Trust out of Oxford University, which oversees the Rhode Scholarship, one of the most prestigious scholarships in the world. And we are offering internship support, networking support, mentorship support, a fully paid residential experience for our hundred global winners, as well as the possibility to receive need-based funding for both higher education and post higher education, so graduate school and the like.
Lee Coffin:
Wow, so the funding is for them to pursue these opportunities while they're in high school?
Greg Manne:
Right, so they apply, most of them as high school-aged students. We did have a few students who are not necessarily traditional and that some of them are in refugee camps, they're not in a traditional high school setting, that kind of thing. But once they've become a member of the winning cohort, then they're given this funding for potentially going to a higher education institution, one that may not meet a hundred percent of demonstrated need, for example, whether that be in their home country or in the United States or otherwise.
And then also funding for further ideas that they have in the future, so part of our process for finding these young people is actually, it's project-based learning. It's a service or social impact project concepts that they've launched in their community or in their school, in their neighborhood, maybe it's even global in nature. So we're going to provide them not only with funding for their education, but also funding when necessary, for them to build out their impact. For them to make an exponential impact with some of the ideas that they've come up with, and spread what they're doing to other parts of the world, especially if it solves one of the world's most pressing problems.
Lee Coffin:
Thanks. When we come back, Greg and I will have a globally themed round table, see you in a minute. Round table this week will look at global recruitment and international admissions. I hope in having this conversation with Greg, it will serve as a primer for 11th graders around the world who are thinking about applying to an American college or university, about the steps they might take. So Greg, we're going to put you back in a college admissions seat. You did this at Tufts and you did this at Dartmouth and you visited schools, literally all around the world. You were one of those people where I said, "What if," and you'd say, "Where's my passport? Off I go." What was it about that work that spoke to you? You were really good at it, but what was it about it? Because you also recruited in Florida and did sort of a US territory, but you had a particular affinity for the international part of the job, why?
Greg Manne:
Absolutely. I think for me the roots go back to the full ride experience, so participating in a program like that where you get to see the world through a completely different prism of another country and its society and its ways of doing things, was just so eye opening and it was something I wish I could give to everyone who wanted it. I think there are so many millions of people around the world who want that kind of experience, but just don't have access to that kind of experience.
So my thought was like, okay, how can I be an ambassador for the idea of educational exchange and the opportunity to try a system that may fit you better, or try a system that opens your eyes to so many things you never even realized about the own kind of bubble or water that you swim in? There's an old philosophical phrase, that says a fish that lives in water does not know it lives in water until it's been removed from the water. I kind of am into that. I don't know if that's a philosophical phrase, a professor once said that to me. I just was like, "How do I go and let people know, here's how you can jump out of your water?" That's why that part of the job always attracted me first and foremost.
Lee Coffin:
One of the things that's always been really interesting to me about the international part of college admissions, is you have to recalibrate the way you talk about your institution as you move from country to country. I remember on my own travels around the world, I was visiting Norway and the alum who was hosting us said, "Before you do the info session, you need to understand the way Norwegian high school students think about university and the path from, what we would call senior year to college." You declare a major pretty quickly, there's no such thing as a residential experience. It's very professionally oriented and it costs a lot less money.
So as you go in and talk about the liberal arts and talk about residential, you're speaking a completely different lexicon to this community, versus other parts of the world there's just more awareness of what we do you in the US and why it's a good fit for them. I mean, you spent a lot of time in South America and then you started doing Europe, so what was your comparison between those two very different world regions as it relates to college admissions?
Greg Manne:
There's an interesting calibration that happens. When I was in Latin America, especially when I was inside of high schools that were not the American school or the British school of X city, you really have to calibrate yourself to the space that you're in and the audience that you're speaking with. Then I started, I remember in my second and third years, overseeing international recruiting in the UK and Turkey, which tend to be a little bit more savvy. Like even the United Kingdom, for example, they have a personal statement when you apply to university there, they say university because college is a completely different thing, right?
So even speaking the language of the United Kingdom, or speaking to people in the United Kingdom was a whole different experience because they would say, "Well, we have a personal statement for our application process, but it's a completely different statement." The statement in the UK process is way more academic-focused. It's not a story that gives a snapshot about who you are and how you think about things, it's very you want to study physics, then here's my work in physics and what I hope to research in physics at the university. So those conversations are going to change as you cross borders and meet with different students. Then of course calibrate even further as you go into different schools and think about the audience that you're speaking to within [inaudible 00:18:39] high school.
Lee Coffin:
What advice would you give them? High school students thinking, oh, the United States seems far away and really foreign to everything I know. Why should someone consider an American college option?
Greg Manne:
I think the thing that I identify the most with, in my experience talking about the US system abroad, is the liberal arts opportunity. I think the opportunity to learn how to think as opposed to what to think, is always what stood out to me about the US system and what makes places like Dartmouth so special and unique and different from any other experience. So that's my starting point there. I think as they prepare to consider that, it's also important that there's fit for them, right?
So if they are intent on a very professional track within their home country, sometimes it does make sense for them to stay put. But on the other hand, if they're looking to think a little bit bigger and they're looking to take that risk and it's something that they want to go for, I'd still encourage it. I think that was the point I made at the first question, it's like, there are millions of kids who want this. Those are the ones I want to speak to, are the ones who were thinking about it, but never really considered, oh, it could be me. But that's not to force it on everybody.
Lee Coffin:
If you're an 11th grader thinking about applying to college in the US for the fall of 2023, which would be the next cycle, step one might be thinking about the liberal arts, but is there something even more basic than that? Is it different for a kid in California or New Jersey thinking about going to college versus somebody in India or South Korea, or-
Greg Manne:
I think if you're coming from outside the United States and you don't hold a US passport and you have no experience to guide you, especially like within your family and your community and your network, on that process I think you really got to start your homework early. Now is a good time if that's the... In the months ahead, to be thinking about, okay, I always go and start with the classic Lee Coffin, which are the four PS. I still swear by the four PS. I advise the Rise winners with the four PS and that's to think about place where do you want to study? even more globally, maybe you can start thinking about the US, but are you interested in the UK? Are you interested in Canada? What do all those processes mean?
What kind of experience are you looking for? And then obviously within the US, if you're coming from a place like south America, going to a place like Dartmouth, it's a little bit colder than probably what you've ever experienced versus studying in a Texas or a California. Right? So thinking about the geographic location and the ramifications of that. Thinking about the program, what do you want to study? I'd mentioned earlier, Dartmouth is a way more liberal arts curriculum than other even peer schools within its peer group. You think about some of the other Ivys, they may have a separate school of engineering or a separate college for arts and sciences versus another area of study. Dartmouth is just one undergraduate college, college versus university, all of those questions.
You need to be asking yourself about size, majors, minors, study abroad options. You really got to do your research around those topics and what you're looking for, because you want the intellectual fit. You're going to be spending a lot of your time studying and learning, so you want to be happy in that space. Then the third P, people or personality, right? One thing about US university is you only spend 15 hours a week in class, 10, 15 hours a week in class. You got a lot of free time so you want to be in a place where culturally you're happy, you're going to make friends, it's a fit for you. Are you artsy? Are you politically oriented? Are you sports-oriented? Are you a mixture of the three? How do the universities line up in that sense?
Learning about culture for university's easier than ever, even if you're not on campus because of the internet, right? You can read the admissions blogs, you can follow admissions accounts on Instagram. There's so many ways for you to learn about schools without ever having to even visit or set foot on the campuses, which would've been much harder back in the day where you just got one simple brochure, if anything, right?
Then the fourth P is process. We talked a lot about how do you apply and that's always really important, testing, is it optional? Is it not optional? Do you have to take an English language verification, yes or no? All of those pieces, and how do you get the letters of recommendation and write your essays? Then last but not least, there's the bonus P, which is price. I think this is one where-
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, I was going to say there's a fifth P.
Greg Manne:
There's a fifth P, the bonus P, I used to talk about, depending on how much time I had to present, sometimes you only get two or three minutes, which obviously Dartmouth has changed the game with this announcement as far as like, how much is it going to cost you? And I think when you think about the macro, a lot of international folks are nervous to apply to the US because they think it's the sticker price cost of US$80,000 a year to go to school. Many of them don't realize that also incorporates housing, food, all these other pieces because in their home country, when you pay to go to school, you just pay to go to school. You don't pay for your residentials and your cafeteria, and et cetera, et cetera. But I could go all day, this is the one that I learned from you, but I appreciate the opportunity to bring it back up, as I do now.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, let me ask you another P, some practical questions related to international admissions. In a lot of countries, going to the national university is a test in scenario where you take an exam, you have a score that either welcomes you into the student body or not. This idea of holistic admission, which is the way a lot of American colleges practice our evaluation, is a completely alien concept. Talk a little bit about that.
Greg Manne:
Absolutely. I think this is the case in the vast majority of countries around the world, with a few exceptions, is you take an exam and that exam dictates not only where you can study, but often what you can study. Then in the US context, this is a very different process, especially for selective schools like Dartmouth or highly selective schools. We're looking at a variety of factors, where we're asking students not only to submit their data, their kind of quantitative metrics around their grades, and whatever grade system that is.
People often ask me as I traveled abroad, like, "Is it okay that I took the national curriculum of Brazil and not AP classes or IB classes?" That's totally fine, we're not in the business of saying one curriculum is better than another, and we don't compare across curriculums. It's like an apples to oranges, in this case apples and oranges to fish comparison, it's not the same thing, right? So we're looking at all those data metrics that everybody knows the more traditional ones, but then there's all these elements of voice that play into the decision-making process, that is how you spend your time outside the classroom and areas you participate in.
Again, I mentioned this earlier, there's a lot of countries around the world that don't have sports teams as part of their school or after-school activities, so here's another opportunity and I'll plug it really quickly here. Something like Rise, like, do you participate in social impact projects online or do you write poetry on your own? Or do you watch a lot of Netflix? What is it that you do with your time? We want to know that. Then of course there's the personal statement, normally schools like Dartmouth, the supplemental essays, which are more institutional fit kind of questions to see how you would be a match for that specific university or college. Then obviously the letters of recommendation that we're looking for, and those pieces that we get a view of you kind of in the classroom and then as well as from like a school official or a counselor sort. Sorry, my dog is barking [crosstalk 00:26:21].
Lee Coffin:
No, that's okay. But yeah, this is part of podding from home, is our pets sometimes want to chime in and say, "Hey, hi."
Greg Manne:
Participating.
Lee Coffin:
No, when you went to curriculum, I was about to ask you about that because when I first read the United Kingdom, I was like A levels, O levels, what? What is this? Or the International Baccalaureate program and the IB scores, or I used to... Greece where the students will take, seems like 20 courses a year, and their grades are on a scale of 20. And you think, how could you possibly study 20 things at once? Or Turkey would have their national curriculum, and what I think a lot of students around the world don't appreciate about American admission officers, is we shift. When we're in your country, we learn what's the system, what's the norm.
Some nations, for whatever reason, have curricula that sync up really nicely with things like the SAT or the ACT and then other places, those kind of standardized tests are from Mars and the scores reflect it. Like I remember when I was a entry-level admission officer and my dean at that point saying like, "Yeah, the Europeans don't usually have really high SAT scores," which seemed surprising to me back in the day, but it was just those high schools weren't teaching students the kind of test-taking skills that the SAT required, and they often were doing more expository writing, and so you move as a reader among these various types of transcript.
Greg Manne:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that that's a really important point. I think the word that I always loved was context. Context is one of the most important words in the admissions and selection space, because you really have to understand where is this individual person coming from? Within a country, within a city within that country, within a school within that city, within their family within that community. All of those as pieces are so important to the decision-making process and the review process that we undertook in admissions, and also in the process that I'm in now.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Let's talk about like a COVID impact on the requirements, which is, I mentioned SAT and ACT, and around the world, access to those tests has been really constrained. I think when I just look at our inbox in the office, we had a lot of students with an international background saying like, "Am I going to be disadvantaged because I couldn't take the SAT, because no one in my country took the SAT?" Or increasingly there are options for English proficiency, like Duolingo, where there's a video component, as well as a test. Talk a little bit about those, first of all, test optional and international.
Greg Manne:
Everyone's trying to do the best we can with what we have available to us, so I think universities are right in not trying to expect every individual around the world to get access to a test that was hard to get access to before there was a global pandemic. So now you have a global pandemic added on top of the fact that these were pretty expensive tests that only took place in certain parts of each country, and in some countries, not at all, and you had to fly somewhere to go and take it. That's a huge expectation, and I think it's reasonable for the universities to not require every single individual applicant to submit one of these examinations that, frankly, can be very inaccessible.
That being said, if you can access it and you can take it and you want to take it, my understanding is that the universities are happy to look at it still to this point. I only did one cycle under this current situation, but obviously if you can, and you're able to, great, and if you're not, that's never going to be held against you and they have all these other... The reason we use a holistic process with all these other metrics, is so that we can make informed decisions without certain pieces. That could be the case in other aspects too. An example, as I said before, were a student who was at the American school of X country, had lots of extracurricular opportunities as part of their high school experience because they were in an American curriculum high school, and then the student down the street at the national public school didn't have the same opportunity. So it's all about context in that regard as well.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. What about the language proficiency test? There's been a requirement that students for whom English is not the first language or the language of instruction at their school, has to take traditionally the Test of English as a Foreign Language, TOEFL, and there are now other options as well. Talk a little bit about that, Greg.
Greg Manne:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think one of the things that's been exciting is what Duolingo has done as far as access is concerned, by creating a test that can be taken on home or at least online anywhere in the world. You can be at a library, you can be wherever you have a stable internet connection, a camera and an audio system, you can take the test. I think for a lot of us, it was a standardized metric for which we could say, "Okay, everybody's had the same, at least testing experience," because if you go to high school in one school and you go to high school in another school, those grades are never going to be comparable. Obviously that context piece makes it so that two test scores are also never really truly comparable, but at least we know that everyone was offered the same curriculum within that experience.
I think on the English front, I think it's important for success, right? You don't want to bring individuals, young people to your institution who then fail. So the correlation was, if you use the standardized tests, language proficiency and grades in combination, you had a higher correlation in first year success than you did if you just used one of those metrics. I think that's where the history of that lies. I learned that back when I was in your grad school class.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. You were a good student. The thing that I always found about these exams too, is they give you a way of understanding, listening, and speaking, and reading, it's not just grammar. I mean, I try to imagine being a student in another language somewhere and I'm like, that, to me, would've been very intimidating coming out of high school Spanish in 12th grade. I think that's the other, the utilitarian part of the test. There'll be someone where you look at the score and say, "Your listening and reading and verbal skills are preparing you," to your point, "preparing for success on our campus." A couple more questions, Greg. What about visas? That's always kind of a sticky topic for non-US citizens coming into the United States. When does that happen? You get admitted, then what?
Greg Manne:
Yeah. I mean, obviously the pandemic has made this more complicated recently than it had been in the past. But I think one of the things that places like Dartmouth do really well, is they have an entire office dedicated to support in that realm. I think a lot of times students would get admitted, especially in early decision, and we'd start getting the emails in February. Like, "I haven't started the visa process yet." It's like, this is something that didn't really lie with the admissions office, it was something we liaised with. The office at Dartmouth was called OVIS, the Office of Visa and Immigration Services. So every institution in the United States is going to have dedicated people, often with legal backgrounds, who are committed to just navigating this process.
I think the visa system is one that's constantly evolving and changing because of the political dynamic in the country, but at the end of the day, one of the things that's unique about higher education and university specifically, is we have an unlimited amount of visas we can offer up to students coming to study on our campuses. Because there are caps on other types of visas for working and other spaces you may occupy outside of being a student within US society. So my advice is this could be strenuous, but try not to fret because every university like Dartmouth is going to be there to try to support you to the best of their ability, to get to the United States. I still think back to some of the experiences we had with kids from places like Syria who are now... They've made it, right? It took a long time, it was an arduous process, but we're getting them to our campuses when we have to.
Lee Coffin:
And the key practical part of this is a student must be admitted and then enrolled and then the visa process begins. It doesn't begin when you apply.
Greg Manne:
Exactly, exactly.
Lee Coffin:
Begins upon enrollment, so from that date to matriculation, the first day of school. But just as a quick reference point for someone listening to this overseas, who might be like, "Give me one more little detail," what does the visa allow them to do?
Greg Manne:
Right. It allows them to come here and study. It allows them to work on campus. It also comes with, after they've graduated from four years, a short period, depending on what they major in. This is the rule as it stands, mind you, these things change all the time, to also participate in a work experience after graduation for a set amount of time. I would two things to my international friends, one, when it comes to visas and this process, patience is a virtue. And two, to my US citizen friends, if you care about this, please vote. I'll leave it at that.
Lee Coffin:
I know, it's absolutely true. I'm talking about global community and it's another example of how do you help people move across borders and to be able to go home and to come back? So to that, let me ask you one snarky question that I get from time to time, that I'm just wondering how you would answer it. I've had people, over my career say something like, "Why are you giving away seats to foreigners when there are so many qualified students in the United States that would gladly grab that spot?" What do you say to the... I always think of it as like, bite my tongue, count to three and then answer.
Greg Manne:
Go back to my patience is a virtue and [crosstalk 00:36:41] advice.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, but what's your answer to that? Basically, it's arguing around scarcity. A seat in these colleges is a scarce resource and why aren't we reserving that resource for US citizens, period?
Greg Manne:
The first place I would go on this, is the learning experience that one has by being surrounded by diverse perspectives and opinions. There are people who believe that the US is the best "at everything". Then you go other places and hear from other people and realize we're not the best at a lot of things, and there's a lot to be learned from people who have experience doing things differently than the way we do them. So if you're sitting in a classroom around political science or the humanities, or even the sciences and engineering and any other subjects, there's so much rich discussion and learning to be had from hearing the way in which others have grappled with the same topics and problems, that we're hoping to address or learn about through the liberal arts experience.
I also think of Dartmouth's mission statement as well, which you talked about earlier in this episode, about educating the most promising, right? So the most promising, it doesn't say the most promising domestic US students with US passports, it just says the most promising, right? So there are a lot of extremely promising young people in the world that don't live within the US borders or do not have a US passport. I think directly to one of my favorite Netflix movies, which if you haven't watched it and you're looking for a good heartwarming experience, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, which is a really beautiful synergy of what Rise is trying to do and what Dartmouth has been doing for many, many, many, many, many years, by bringing young people who are smart problem solvers to campus and supplying them with the tools to change the world, right? That's why you want those people on your campus.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. I mean, I get very romantic as I think about this topic and I just think, why wouldn't any college want to have students drawn from all kinds of backgrounds, all around the planet? Because that breeds understanding, it breeds collaboration, it just, it creates a conversation that... Modern technology allows us to have "conversation" via social media and the internet, but that can get kind of ugly. When you have friends and peers drawn from lots of different backgrounds...
I mean, one of my first epiphanies on this was in the early nineties when I was working at Connecticut College. It was when Yugoslavia was going through the civil war that led to its breakup. We had enrolled in the class, a student from Croatia, a student from Serbia and a student from Bosnia. They were all on a panel, it was an international relations panel. And the three of them said, "In my country, our people are killing each other. In this college, we are classmates and friends. By meeting one another in this American context, I started to see beyond my ethnicity and the complicated politics of my country, as it now exists. And I can start to imagine a future where these neighbors have a rightful place besides me."
I thought, wow. I mean, I was just knocked over by that conversation. I thought, that's why we do it, because as an American who grew up in New England, I just didn't have to encounter ideas like that. I think it made for a really dynamic campus community when increasing numbers of international students started to join these American campuses. I think that's one of the most exciting parts of the work I've been doing. So Greg, thank you for joining us on the Admission Beat, and as always, sharing your wisdom and insight about all things international. And also good luck, I think the work you're doing at Rise with Schmidt Futures is really exciting. As I told you when you left the college last spring, it's the perfect fit for you, so [crosstalk 00:41:01].
Greg Manne:
Much obliged, much appreciated. Thank you so much, Lee. I wouldn't be sitting in this seat if it wasn't for the seats I sat in next to you over the last six years, so thank you so much.
Lee Coffin:
You're welcome. That's it for this episode of Admission Beat. For now, I'm Lee Coffin with Charlotte Albright from Dartmouth College. We'll see you next week.