Season 1: Episode 15 Transcript
Marching Forward
Lee Coffin:
Hello everyone. For a historic first for the podcasting career of yours truly, after 25 episodes of my original podcast, "The Search," and now for the 16th episode of "Admissions Beat," Charlotte and I are together in the same room to record this episode. Hi Charlotte.
Charlotte Albright:
Hello there.
Lee Coffin:
She has jumped out of the Zoomscape and we are sitting in the committee room at Dartmouth College's admission office as we start to reemerge from pandemic hiding. It's nice to see you in person.
Charlotte Albright:
It is amazing to see you in person.
Lee Coffin:
I know. So March in college admissions in April are sort of the 13th and 14th month of the calendar. So you've got the seniors starting to receive decisions this month, leading up to a yield conversation in April, where we are encouraging the admitted class to enroll. And then you've got the juniors in high school up and running, starting to do their visits, going through the beginning part of discovery phase. So you've got these two cycles, both being primary.
So it's a really interesting moment for me every year, because on the one hand, the seniors and their parents are veterans of this work and they ask really sophisticated questions and they dig deep. And then the juniors are little puppies and kittens, just learning how to crawl. But there's a lot of news in this overlap moment.
And we thought what we would do for episode 16 is Newsroom, as always. And then Inbox, which pulls some questions from a recent program I did that I thought were worth sharing more broadly today. So Charlotte, what do you want to talk about today as we think about the news?
Charlotte Albright:
Well, you were talking about coming back from COVID.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Charlotte Albright:
And the question, is how do we bring students back who might have dropped out during COVID? And it turns out a lot of them did. So there's a story quite recently, Inside Higher Ed, about a plan that sort of worked to do that, to bring back those students that we had lost. So-
Lee Coffin:
And by "lost," you mean students in high school, or you mean students were enrolled in college already?
Charlotte Albright:
I mean, who had dropped out of college.
Lee Coffin:
So they were in college and then COVID hit and they dropped out.
Charlotte Albright:
Right. So to the extent that this fits into an admission conversation, it's readmission.
Lee Coffin:
Readmission. Yeah.
Charlotte Albright:
But that's important. Sometimes that gets lost in the shuffle. I mean, attrition can really be a big deal for colleges and for students. So what happened was, in partnership with InsideTrack, which is a nonprofit that helps institutions enroll students and improve their academic outcomes, 25 colleges partnered to recruit student success coaches to literally reach out to those 27,000 students.
And it was pretty successful when you think about it, because of course a lot of them dropped out for financial reasons and that couldn't be helped, but the coaches did re-enroll 3000 students this academic year ,and that's really just a pilot project. So it does kind of point a way ahead perhaps, right?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. And I think this topic affects all colleges. I think places that have a bit more of an open access admission process are perhaps more vulnerable to some of these attrition topics and places like Dartmouth and our peers saw less of it, but we weren't immune. I mean, we saw significant numbers of students from all backgrounds take some time off and either because they didn't want to be on campus during the height of COVID or there were circumstances that just prevented them from being with us.
And I think this readmission, which isn't as formal as the admission process itself, usually when you're post admissions and you have the letter, my name on it, or one of my peer's names on it, you don't need to reapply. So when we talk about readmission, it's not "go back to the beginning, fill out another application and present yourself."
It's usually a more internal conversation between the registrar or academic deans and the student about what does the student need to get back in the classroom on this campus. And I think the most important part of it is financing and being able to, if that was the reason there was a pause or the finances, such that a student can re-enroll. But then the other question, which is academic, is: Where is a student in the credit conversation?
So you might have been a member of the class of 2024, so you'd be a sophomore right now, but because of the pause, you might still be a first-year, or you might have been projected to be a senior and you're still a sophomore. So part of coming back in is student by student, taking a look at your transcript and the requirements of your campus and saying, where am I around declaring a major, was the sequencing of some of the courses I was taking disrupted so I have to back up the steps.
So math, languages, courses that build off for one another, do you need to go backwards, maybe a step and redo a class so that you can begin or not, maybe you're fine and there's going to be study skill workshops. And the faculty are attentive to, you can pick up where you left off, but we need to be attentive to how fuzzy is your memory of where we were when things ended.
Charlotte Albright:
Makes sense.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Charlotte Albright:
And by the way, among those 25 partner institutions, there was a cohort of eight historically Black colleges and universities that participated sort of as a separate pilot program and that was pretty successful. And so speaking of historically Black colleges and universities, I read about a psychology professor at Morgan State University named Carol Perrino. This professor was worried that standard test scores weren't telling admissions officers enough, it's not-
Lee Coffin:
Or we're missing.
Charlotte Albright:
We're missing something.
Lee Coffin:
We keep talking about the test-optional. So not only are they perhaps not informative, they may not exist.
Charlotte Albright:
Right.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Charlotte Albright:
So at Morgan, she's now overseeing the development of a non-cognitive assessment designed to predict not only which students will succeed and graduate in an historically Black college, but also what support they might need to do that. So it's taking several years to develop it. It isn't out there yet, but do you see that in the future, these non-cognitive assessments that are going to supplement the typical SAT?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. And this has been a topic of conversation for a while. When I worked at Tufts, the dean of arts and sciences was Robert Sternberg, who is a psychologist in the same space who is talking to me about what he called the 21st century skills that students needed to be successful in the curriculum and beyond. What he taught me to think about were things like creativity and analytical reasoning and wisdom, practicality were four of his pillars of success.
And the takeaway was, do you value creativity in an undergraduate experience? And I think the answer everywhere would be of course, and that doesn't just mean artistic creativity. It means you're in a classroom and you're able to think of a new idea in relation to what you're studying. How do we see that skill, that quality when we're reading an application, how do we measure it?
And what's tricky about things like creativity and curiosity, or collaboration or citizenship, or I can keep going, but there's not a way of quantifying that right now. So I can't get to the end of the admission cycle and say, we value curiosity. And the curiosity quotient of the class that was just admitted was X. And people like numbers, that's where the SAT or the GPA are spotlight elements in a college admission process, because there's a number there that people associate with quality or the lack of quality.
Curiosity—if we could measure it in some discreet way and say, through this new battery that's been developed in Morgan State—it's helpful not to replace, but to compliment the other data points we have. And I think one of the challenges that the pandemic has kind of revealed is, testing has paused if not been eliminated as many schools went to pass-fail, and some of them have called the passes "A," so transcripts this year look a little different than they did before the pandemic, because I think assessment was framed in a different way for the last year and a half.
So an A might not be what an A was, and an A that's not paired with testing is harder to ascertain, is this student prepared for the curriculum we're offering? So if you can complement that with other batteries that the public can look to and say, okay, I have some confidence in this, that would be helpful.
Charlotte Albright:
Well, this work that's going on at Morgan State and probably other places as well, is fascinating to me because if they figure out how to measure soft skills as you say, determination, leadership, a sense of belonging is another one they're looking for, imagine how useful that test is across the board not just for college.
Lee Coffin:
Great. That's right.
Charlotte Albright:
This is if I'm an employer, I want that test.
Lee Coffin:
That's right. And I don't even think they're soft skills. I think they're essential skills.
Charlotte Albright:
Yeah.
Lee Coffin:
That when I hear faculty who are doing work in the first-gen college space, they will often say things like the students who succeed from under-resourced backgrounds in schools are the ones who have grit, that's what Angela Duckworth at Penn has done a lot of research about. They have persistence, they follow direction, when we offer a study skills workshop, they come, they recognize what they know and don't know, and they're open to being coached.
So I want to be quick to say, it's not admission officers around the country are not looking for these essential qualities or soft skills, we are. I think what this research is pointing to is can we make it more systematic?
Charlotte Albright:
So finally let me pivot to an editorial. We don't always cite editorials, but this one caught my eye in the Boston Globe, by Christine Koh. The title of the editorial is "College Rejection Doesn't Need to Hurt This Much." And of course, it's timed to the fact that people are beginning to get letters. Christine Koh says, "I hold two beliefs about college admissions. First, there is no such thing as a safety school, every institution deserves respect."
Lee Coffin:
Amen.
Charlotte Albright:
Second, "There are many, many places where a kid can thrive. The idea of there being one perfect school for each kid is false, and yet this narrative persists at a culture wide level." So to counter that narrative, she cites a Harvard Business Review article, which actually includes advice to employers, saying to employers, this is the Harvard Business School, which is always teaching employers how to do their work.
culture-wideTheir results suggest that hiring graduates from the higher-ranked universities is not necessarily a good predictor of individual job performance. Employers can get a better deal by hiring the right students from lower-ranked institutions than just blindly going after everybody from the most selective schools.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. I mean, and I sit at that one of these very selective places. So I recognize the spirit of this question in a couple of ways. And as we move through March, and if you're listening to this at the very end of March, is decisions are released. Volume demands selectivity. We have a fixed number of seats in our class. We have a surplus of qualified people. I said the other day on Zoom that part of my job is managing scarcity where we have, in my case, over 28,000 applicants for a class of 1,130.
Charlotte Albright:
Wow.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. And if we were to rank everybody, those are strong profiles. As we're coming into the committee phase at Dartmouth, we're carrying a significant number of files that are outstanding, that we're not going to be able to admit because we just don't have space.
So it focuses on the word "rejection," which in the admission landscape my peers will often say, we have declined you, not rejected you, or you've been denied, not rejected. Maybe we're playing with words. But I think the spirit of the word is different. Rejected means no in some way that feels hostile or dismissive. A decline or in deny is recognizing the space constraints. And I can't write a letter to everyone and say, dear Charlotte, we can't invite you to join us in the class of '26 for the following reasons.
That's not practical. So you don't know. You just get a letter that says, "I regret to inform you" and it's a no. And I think keeping your wits about you, and this is true for juniors too, as you're beginning a search, if your ambition for college points you towards places like the one where I work, where the acceptance rate is a single-digit number right now, start the conversation with confidence, that you are going to present your best self to us, but start the conversation with a sobering reality of more than 90% of the applicants don't get accepted.
And it doesn't mean you shouldn't give it your best shot, but it doesn't mean if you don't get the offer you have failed, or the college is saying to you, you're not worthy. I mean, I've seen students get very emotional when the answer is, we regret to inform you. And I understand that, but I think part of it is beyond my control. It's the cultural imperative of a certain number of places are wins in this work. And I was watching a TV show the other day, the kid came out with a Harvard sweatshirt and it's you get this message over and over again that places like that are the norm, they're not the norm.
Charlotte Albright:
Yeah. But maybe it's also worth remembering that it was the Harvard Business Review itself that is saying to employers-
Lee Coffin:
Look beyond us.
Charlotte Albright:
Yeah. And so that means that if you don't get into one of these highly selective schools and you choose one that's right for you, the chances are pretty darn good that you will find a fulfilling line to employment.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. I went to Harvard for grad school, and I remember being struck by how many of us who were in the Harvard graduate schools went to a really wide range of undergraduate places. So that's true as well, is that this is not the only moment of academic access if that's your goal. But I think easier said than done to say the students who have applied don't take it personally when the decision is a no. When we come back, we will be in extended inbox based on a set of questions. I answered as a panelist at an independent school in Connecticut. We'll be right back.
(music)
So Charlotte, one of our episodes was called Junior Kickoff, and there is a tradition in a lot of independent schools, a bit more than public high schools, where January, February, March, each year the school sponsor panels of college admission officers helping the junior class and parents kick off the college search. And over the last couple of months, I've done eight or nine of these all through Zoom.
And one of the ones I did in mid-February, at Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut, shared a list of questions with us and said, we're going to ask each of you to comment on these topics. And so thanks to Marcia Landesman, the dean of college counseling at Choate, I'm borrowing your list, Marcia. And I thought, let me give this set of questions to Charlotte and see what questions spark your interest as a journalist that might be helpful to our listeners.
So this part is really aimed at juniors and parents who are thinking about getting a college search rolling over the next couple of months and so there'll be a panel of one. So Charlotte, what caught your eye as you saw the topics we talked about that Saturday morning?
Charlotte Albright:
Well, to come to this kind conference room where we are, I had to take an elevator in the building that houses admissions here at Dartmouth and the elevator said, visitors are still not allowed in, but the same elevator in front of it said, if you're here for your in-person tour, just wait outside the door. So we've got kind of a hybrid situation and the first question is sort of about that.
After a year of fully virtual programming colleges are once against offering visit experiences. So what tips do you have about planning those visits in the coming weeks and months, and are there significant advantages or would we just be fine figuring out how this college fits us by staying at home and doing our research online?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. So we are in a hybrid moment as we reopen. And I think a lot of the COVID restrictions are starting to loosen. And for the first time in two years, we are planning on campus programming in April for our accepted students and their families, and planning to invite students, to visit us in person for the first time since the fall of 2019. So it's been a really long period of being mothballed. But as I say that there are still guidelines we need to follow.
And this is true for seniors and it's true who have been admitted and want to visit and for juniors who are just starting out, it's not the spring of 2019, you're not going to show up on a campus with your sleeping bag and be able to do an overnight in the dormitories. We're not there yet.
You can come on campus. Our tours have been running since July, they've been outside exclusively. We just got the green light to let people come into the library again, and then to the art center again. So campus by campus, there will be that invitation to kind of come inside, but the groups might be smaller. So I think the caution as part of this reopening is, I don't think we're going to be able to have tours of 100.
I mean, during April vacation every year, we would see gigantic crowds of juniors mixed with admitted students show up for a campus tour. We're probably going to need to limit those to much smaller cohort as they walk around campus. And as public health allows we'll grow again, the good news is we're reopening the guidance offices. Every place will have slightly different policies and you need to be thoughtful about that.
But as we move into the summer, and this is more for juniors, I think you're going to see programming that happens on campus, that looks a lot like it did in the summer of 2019. And while the hybrid component will continue, I can imagine any of us pivoting away from the opportunity presented by the digital recruitment that we had to develop that will continue. But I think for families that want to visit come, I think it's something important.
I mean, sitting here in the room with you again, there's a human piece of this that is an important part of what we do. And it's good to do it in person seeing a campus firsthand, being able to touch it, smell it, experience it, valuable. And it helps answer the question, if I'm a student here, can I do this. And if I'm from a different part of the country where mountains and pine forest are not the norm, how does it feel?
I met a student on the first day of school who had just arrived at Dartmouth from Bengal or India, and I said, "What was that like?" And he said, "Well, I'd never left India before, I landed at Logan, I got on the shuttle, I was coming up the interstate and I wrote a letter to my parents." And I said, I've never seen a more green place in my life. I said, "Right. It's like Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz" it's just dramatically green. And then I said, "How does that feel?" He said, "It feels great." And feel is the verb. It's the emotion. How do I feel it?
Charlotte Albright:
Well, it is chilly here, I must say.
Lee Coffin:
It is chilly here and that's also important. Yeah.
Charlotte Albright:
You need to know that you'll need a coat, but there are some people who want to know how to spend their summers. I don't know if that's different for juniors or seniors, but they see the summer as a time that's important in terms of documenting how they spent it and how that looks in their application. Do you have advice about this?
Lee Coffin:
Summer does not necessarily have to be another extracurricular moment. There may be a program that someone wants to do in the summer, that feels like a really exciting way to spend that period, go for it. I had a high school friend emailed me a couple weeks ago and she said, my daughter's looking at two dance programs for the summer and she said, which one's going to look better on her application.
And I said, Marge (if you're listening) I said, Marge, don't think of it that way. Which one seems more interesting to her? Where was she going to have more fun and do that one. I said, because we're not looking at that part of your application and putting a value judgment on it. Sometimes there is an opportunity that's kind outside of your formal school where you're like, yeah, I want to go do that. And if that experience makes you holistically shine in a new way, fantastic.
Charlotte Albright:
And there's a labor shortage right now so it might be a good summer to make some money.
Lee Coffin:
You can get a job. Great.
Charlotte Albright:
And that might be something that's also impressive.
Lee Coffin:
That's right. And it doesn't have to be a fancy internship or research. A lot of students who live near universities will try and get internships in research labs, great if that's your jam, but that's not required. Working a grocery store, working at a farm stand. I read an essay the other day from a student who has an annual summer job at the farmer's market, awesome.
But I also want to say to the high school juniors who will be rising seniors, this has been a really tiring couple of years, have fun. No one's going to look side eyed at you in your application if you took the summer off, read some books, went to the beach, played with your dog, seriously that's okay too.
Charlotte Albright:
The other thing that juniors are doing beside looking ahead to the summer of course, is they're really looking ahead to fall and some of them are choosing courses. And the question is, can you share some tips about course selection? For example, is it better to really look like a specialist and double up in an academic subject, or should you be a generalist and take courses in five areas?
Lee Coffin:
I think it depends. That's the favorite kind of answer for all admission officers, it depends. If you are in the specialist category, if you are someone whose high school allows you to have more choice in your senior year and you know you're focusing on the humanities, which we talked about in a previous episode, and you want to take two English course and art history course, great because it's showcasing that part of your intellectual curiosity.
If you want to double up computer science and physics, great. Five courses is what a selective place will be expecting. Often one from English, social studies, mathematics, foreign language and science, but you can mix and match. Usually English is not the one you can drop. And most students, English and math are the two that persist. And then the other three might shift as student interests dictate fine.
Charlotte Albright:
Yeah. Okay.
Lee Coffin:
But if your ambition for college admission is a very selective outcome, it's not the time to take your foot off the gas pedal. We are looking carefully at the quality of curriculum in 12th grade, the grades that come in that curriculum. And I think an insight just from my reading this winter, because so many high schools during the COVID remote experience gave passes, or As that were really passes, grades in an in-person classroom, which you might not have had since your first year of high school are important.
So think carefully about what you're going to take next year and select a schedule that allows you to do your best work. Don't load up on the most rigorous courses you could take if you can't handle that load.
Charlotte Albright:
Here is an interesting question I would not have thought of, but it has to do with a role of the college counselor at a high school and the expectations about whether that counselor will advocate on behalf of applicants. I mean, should families expect a college counselor to call you up Lee and say, guess who I've got for you? I mean, do you take calls like that?
Lee Coffin:
No.
Charlotte Albright:
Or is that just off boundaries?
Lee Coffin:
I think that's a practice that occurred more regularly a generation ago. I think in the contemporary admission landscape, I mean, do I know college counselors? Yes. I meet them when I visit schools, I meet them at conferences, all secondary school counselors, public, private religious are welcome to reach out and engage us. That does not mean they have opportunities to convince us, to admit Charlotte.
They write a letter on your behalf, they help you frame your list and pick your courses, that's important advocacy, the letters that come are a really important part of our understanding of the application, but an expectation that a guidance or college counselor would somehow have the hotline to the dean of admission is an unrealistic expectation.
Charlotte Albright:
So let's talk about the number of applications that each student fills out, because you've been telling me for months now that because of testing optional policies and fear on the part of families that it seems like students are expanding their list to 10, 20 schools. And this question is, do you increase your likelihood of admission by having those long lists, or is there a disadvantage to having too many colleges on your list?
Lee Coffin:
There's definitely a disadvantage to having too many. The common app allows a student to apply to up to 20. It's not the recommendation, it's just the ceiling. And there are some students who go that high. I think the mean is closer to 10. My advice would be eight to 10 is a reasonable number of applications to file couple of places that have selectivity that might make the odds unlikely, a few that your profile is right in their wheelhouse and you can be confident to a degree then an offer will come.
And then a couple where your background will pretty surely line up with an offer of admission. And that I'm studiously not using a word that starts with S that was in that op-ed, I don't think the word safety school, there's a pejorative there that I've never liked. And I also didn't use the word reach because that also rubs me the wrong way.
I think just coming up with a list that frames your options around a realistic set that are good fits to what you want to study, where you want to be, the kind of people you want to be with those Ps again, program, place and people, and then can you afford it? That's a good list. But the disadvantage of over applying is I think it dilutes your voice.
As you're filling out those applications and the supplements that go along with the Common App, it's harder to bring that level of authenticity to 12, 14, 15, 16 places to do interviews at all of them, to do the extra essays. And then the schools start to wonder, are you really interested? And then that doesn't get you where you hope to be.
Charlotte Albright:
Right. The other thing I think that is really dizzying for parents, no matter how few schools there are on the list is the difference between early decision, early action, regular decision rolling, this is all sort of in the admissions lexicon. And Lee, we could do a whole episode on the differences in the pros and cons of each. So I keep you-
Lee Coffin:
And I think we will do that episode.
Charlotte Albright:
I'm going to keep you brief here, but just in brief, and of course college counselors will walk students through this, but early decision, early action, regular decision rolling.
Lee Coffin:
If you're a high school junior or a parent, it's too early to be thinking about early. So we'll come back to this in a later episode, but sincerely don't game it at this point. And you're discovering, you're not mapping out the strategy. So that my quick answer to Charlotte's question is by September, one place has emerged as the one that seems to be the best fit, then an early whether it's binding or non-binding application is possible. If you get to September and things are still being sorted out, that's called regular decision or rolling. But those are decisions, those are conversations for the fall, not for now.
Charlotte Albright:
Okay. So this Choate event was one of so many that you've attended I can't imagine. And how many years you've been in this business?
Lee Coffin:
Oh God, 32.
Charlotte Albright:
32 years. You've heard it all, right?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Charlotte Albright:
You've heard everybody's questions. And this question is interesting. "What is the question that you most like to answer? And what is the question that makes you cringe?"
Lee Coffin:
The questions that I most like to answer are questions that invite me to talk about the nuances of this process in a more slowed-down way.
Charlotte Albright:
Which is what we're doing right now.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Which the podcast has been that. But it's the questions that get at the storytelling opportunity of a student and not the horse race of it. Those are the ones I like to talk about. Or when I can just help a student particularly from a background my own, and then make sense of okay, how do I go from step one to two to three to four? That always feels like I have earned my paycheck when I've been able to give somebody a roadmap. The ones I cringe are, I don't know. Cringe is hard. I there's really no question. I get that I cringe.
Charlotte Albright:
I bet I could try one.
Lee Coffin:
Go ahead.
Charlotte Albright:
Okay. Here's one that will make you cringe. What are the five easy steps I could take to get into Dartmouth? Doesn't that make you cringe?
Lee Coffin:
Makes me laugh. There are no easy steps. So if there was an equation I can put on a whiteboard, X plus Z divided by two equals admit, I wouldn't have a job.
Charlotte Albright:
Right.
Lee Coffin:
So there are no five easy steps. When you meet students and they say, do you have biology, that I don't cringe, but I say, yes, of course we have biology, but that's-
Charlotte Albright:
You can read the catalog.
Lee Coffin:
But it's not a well-informed question. If what are you really asking me about your interest in biology or English? I had a student once come up to me in a college fair and say, do you have English? And just in a moment of boredom I said, no. And the student looked at me and I said, "Of course I have English," but what kind of English are you hoping to study? And the student said, 'I really like creative writing and poetry." I said, "Okay, then that's the question you should ask because every college will not have a specialty or even a major in that."
And then we talked about it. I said, "Is it film? Is it screenwriting? Is it literature? What kind of literature?" Those are very different versions of the, do you have English question. And you may not know the answer to that. You may not have thought about what kind of political science or you're in psychology, is it neuro? Is it cognitive? Is it psychotherapy? Is it music there? I mean, you can go in lots of different subsets of a discipline.
Charlotte Albright:
So let's imagine right now that students are deer in the headlights and they don't know what to ask you so you'll have to offer something. What is your best one piece of advice for students so that they can successfully manage this college search? You got to limit yourself to one big thing.
Lee Coffin:
This may sound counterintuitive for someone who's hosting a podcast: Turn off social media.
Charlotte Albright:
Wow.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Not this podcast, but I have watched whether it's Facebook originally and then Instagram and TikTok and Twitter and places that I don't even know exist, so much of what you do as members of generation Z is out in public. And I think this is one of those processes that invites you to be very introspective and easy to get caught in the social pressure of, well, everybody else seems to be doing this, or everyone else seems to be so happy, or why am I not doing blank.
Back to your early question, I've had people say to me, I'm not ready to apply early, but all my for friends are going somewhere early so therefore I must. And my advice around this trying to ignore social media is, keep your own counsel. Map out of search with your school-based counselor and your parents, be true to that map as you frame it out.
And again, I'm saying this, it's hard to do. Try to get yourself out of the buzz that happens. What are your scores? What did you get on that test? Where did you go? I've gone into high schools and I see kids looking around at each other like, oh God, you're looking at this place too. Stop focusing on the competitive angle of it and just stay true to your own academic profile, your storytelling when you get there and the reality of the list you're putting together that makes sense for you.
Charlotte Albright:
Well, as a parent who went through this process with kids, that sounds like great advice for parents as well. But is there any additional advice that you'd like to give parents listening?
Lee Coffin:
Well for parents—and you can't see me, but we are peers. I graduated high school in the early '80s, college in the mid '80s, if you are that person, you're in your 50s now, maybe your late 40s, you did this yourself if you are a college grad in a very different landscape than the ones your kids are navigating today. College admission circuit 1995 and earlier is nothing like the job I have today. And colleges have evolved; the volume has shifted.
The pools are much more heterogeneous. Everything from global to geographic, to income, to high schools that never would've sent a student to a place like Dartmouth now have multiple applicants, and places that used to send a dozen now get one in every year. All of that has transpired over the time I've been a college admission officer, which started in 1990.
So for parents who are coming into this for the first time, just remember that current landscape is not what you might remember, or you might have done this once or twice already with an older child and you may have known this, child two had a really different path through this work than child one did and child three may go in a completely different direction. So be open to the discovery of this third person having their own experience that may not look anything like a sibling and you're going to have a new experience just because of that.
Charlotte Albright:
Well, all right. That does it. If people listening were not able to get to an in person or even Zoom Junior Kickoff, this is it.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. We just gave you one. Charlotte and I are going to take a little quasi spring break, though I don't think either one of us is going to Fort Lauderdale to stay in the beach.
Charlotte Albright:
No.
Lee Coffin:
No, I'm not. But given where we are in the admission cycle, we're going to wrap up act two of the Admission Beat with this eighth episode of that arc and we'll be back in April, we think with another set of episodes. But before we go, I wanted to share, we have some listener feedback that Charlotte and I got. There was a box of candy sitting on the doorstep of the admission office when I came into work the other day with this note:
"Dean Coffin, I thought twice before writing this note and dropping off a treat, certainly the receptionist would give me a funny look.
Someone who doesn't know Mr. Coffin dropping off treats for him, but it's who I am. I listened to your podcast when the pandemic set in and it really helped provide some helpful insights. As I watched my daughter set out on her murky path to college during the pandemic, she's wrapping up her first year of college right now, I've continued to listen on my daily commutes, the kindness in your voice, the transparency and honesty in your guest interviews, the reading aloud of your own essays, the constant reference to applicants as she, all goes noticed and appreciated.
As I look to help guide my two high school boys through the process over the next few years, I will heed the wise words of your podcast as I encourage them to trust their voice and tune out the noise as you say, and enjoy rather than endure, as one of your recent guests said, please enjoy the treats. Share some with Charlotte."
I did. A grateful and thankful listener. It was really lovely. And so anonymous listener, thanks so much, not just for the treats, but for those kind words. Charlotte and I have loved doing these pods over the last two years.
What I find intriguing about podcasting is I can't see you. So I'm talking to Charlotte. I see my guests when we have people with us in Zoom, but I can't see you listening. So it's really lovely to get feedback that says to the two of us, this is helpful. So thanks for that. I really appreciate it.
Charlotte Albright:
And we'll see you in a few weeks.
Lee Coffin:
And we'll see you in a few weeks. Until then, this is Lee Coffin, and Charlotte Albright from Dartmouth College. See you soon.