Season 1: Episode 15 Transcript
Marching Forward
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's Dean of Admissions. Welcome to the Admissions Beat. The pod for news, conversation and advice on all things college admissions.
Hello, everyone. Nice to be back at the mic with Charlotte, once again, in person. We're making a habit of this Charlotte.
Charlotte Albright:
That's right, and in your office.
Lee Coffin:
In my office.
Charlotte Albright:
With real plants.
Lee Coffin:
With real plants and a big pile of letters I just signed. But we are recording this episode a couple days before decisions are released and that always feels like the ball dropping in Times Square on New Year's Eve, where the cycle completes itself, and decisions are coming out. There'll be a lot of news on the Admissions Beat in the days ahead as colleges release decisions and some of us put out press releases about it, some don't, but lots of chatter in the schools of the world. We thought it would be a good week to have a conversation about the decisions and the admission cycle for the high school class of '22, and what's now pivoting from reading and selecting to enrolling.
Charlotte Albright:
Well, you just mentioned signing a lot of letters and I should add that I see the stack of letters.
Lee Coffin:
You see the stack, yes.
Charlotte Albright:
I see these green pens on your desk that you sign them with. I mean, that's a huge stack of letters, so what does that tell me?
Lee Coffin:
Well, the stack of letters, I was looking at them yesterday when they got plopped on my desk and I started to sign, and each one of them is a student. Each letter represents a story that a student told through the application and over the last three months, we read and reread and debated the pool that we had at Dartmouth to select a class. So that stack of letters waiting to be mailed represents an invitation from Dartmouth to a set of students that we read as holistically compelling, and also good matches for what we do here in Hanover, New Hampshire. Every dean signing a comparable pile of letters is going to have a very local response to that same question, because we're shaping a community on our campus, not nationally. But it's always exciting to see the letters printed, signed and ready to go and I know that in the mailboxes where they arrive, this document is something special.
Charlotte Albright:
Right. That's a small pile though, compared to the applications that you received.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, so 6% of our applicants, were offered admission.
Charlotte Albright:
Is that unprecedented?
Lee Coffin:
It ties last year's record low, so for the last two years, we've admitted 6.2% of our applicant pool, and that's not a stat I like to dwell on. It's the byproduct of a large pool, and in our case, a small class. And it's the way this week gets covered in the media. It's the way families often zoom into who got in, who didn't, and trying to make some sense of this work based on the acceptance rate. So the fact of it is, it was a very selective year, but I saw a quote from my colleague, John Burdick at Cornell from last year, and he said, "It's not news that Cornell is a very selective place," and so I smiled and I said, "That's really well said, it's not news that the places that are known to be selective continue to be selective."
What's news is, from last year to this year, I think a lot of us saw sustained volume that jumped dramatically last year, during the first cycle of the pandemic, and it repeated itself for a second year, so that volume is a thing that we had to negotiate.
Charlotte Albright:
There are a couple of reasons for that. I'd love to see how the data crunches that out eventually, but one is, possibly, that a lot of people are applying to college that might not have been encouraged to do that, might be more aspirational. The other possibility is that the same number of people are applying to more colleges, and that brings me to this story that was on CNN, so I imagine a lot of people know this story. A Georgia high school senior has received acceptance letters from 49 colleges.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. I saw that.
Charlotte Albright:
And over a million dollars in scholarship offers. Mackenzie Thompson, 18, didn't originally plan to apply to over 50 universities, but she went to college fairs, she got fee waivers. She ended up applying to 51 schools. She was accepted to 49. I mean, that's the other reason for these low acceptance rates, because if everybody applies to that many schools, everybody is going to see her application.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. That sets a record in my understanding of volume. I've never heard of a student applying to that many. The Common App caps it at 20, which is also a lot. But yeah, I think this story from CNN... I do wish the media would not cover this every year. There's a story about someone who got into 20, 25, 30, her case 49 places, or there's a story that I'm sure will come out in the days ahead. "Charlotte sweeps the Ivy League, she gets into all eight of us," as if that is the Holy Grail, and I would say that's a really interesting outcome because the eight campuses that represent the Ivy league are eight really different places looking for really different things.
So that shouldn't be the goal, and I think that coverage around someone getting into so many places is not the right way to look at it, but it does—to the question that sparked that reference to that CNN story—I think some students have applied to a lot of places as the pandemic has made them more nervous about, "How is this going to play out?" And, "I haven't been able to visit, and so maybe I need to cover my bases and make sure I have financial aid," and all the reasons that generate the jitters, that more applications will help. But it also means the pools are that much more jammed with traffic that we had to read and then evaluate in a high volume, scarce resource way.
Charlotte Albright:
It has been a few weeks since I've seen you because you have been too busy to do the podcast.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. I've been in the bunker.
Charlotte Albright:
How are you feeling? I mean, is this March Madness, your team has made it to the finals or what?
Lee Coffin:
It definitely is March Madness. I often think about the admission cycle and the NCAA Basketball Tournament playing out through that same frenzied space over the same weeks. Yeah, I'm pooped, to be really honest, the journey from the deadline in January to the release of decisions this week is a long one, and it is my favorite time of year. I've talked before about reading season and it's the work of the work. It's where you read the files, you assess them, and then where I work in this really competitive framework, you have to make some decisions about who to admit, who not to admit. But there were, I would say, three weeks or so where I worked every day, 12 or so hours a day, just to work through the docket and it's exhilarating.
But it's also like being in final exams for three weeks and you get to the end of it and there's this relief to be done. My friends are all seeing me reemerge and they say, "Oh, hello," I'm like, "Yeah, I'm still here." And signing the letters, which I'm working on today and tomorrow, is, for me, the last task. Taking out the pen, scribbling a signature on every letter, it's almost like a little kiss on each file saying, "Okay, this one's done," and it's an invitation to that student to join us, to think about this as their college of choice.
Charlotte Albright:
You did have a team of readers working with you, so raise the curtain on this a little bit, for those of us who aren't insiders. Once that team comes up and creates some consensus, each of them has a geographical area and they go to bat for their candidates. Do you ever have to say, "I don't agree?"
Lee Coffin:
Oh yeah, all the time, or the flip. I read a file and my colleagues say, "I don't agree," so we're reading them, we're cross reading them. The way we set up the system here is I act as a first among equals to use that British parliament as an example where I'm reading, but I'm also managing the macro, seeing the class come together across 20 different perspectives and unifying those reading styles with some common purpose.
We meet in committee and we review them and ultimately, and this happened this year, it's happened every year, we get to the end of committee and we've admitted more students than we can accommodate. I have a model that I run everything through and it tells me based on this many offers, do I have the right size class? Because the pool is talented, we always hope to admit more people than we can, and that's an awful moment of truth, where I see the bin filled with more quality then we can manage and we have to go back in and shape.
Charlotte Albright:
I have to say, we're talking about Dartmouth, but because you've been in this business for 30 years and Dartmouth is just your most recent job, I'm assuming that the process that you're describing is a process that goes on in a lot of schools.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. I mean, some version of this happens across the selective universe. I mean, some type of committee, some dean in a macro role, tracking the different files as they move through and how the sausage gets made. I mean, it's ultimately my calculator and pen that has to keep cross tabulating everything and saying, "Does this group compute to the class I need to enroll by May 1st?" And I love that part, that analytical work at the end, I find very interesting and mysterious, even after all these years are doing it, there's some magic to the way the data point towards an outcome. I can't tell you, Charlotte will say "Yes," and Lee will say, "No," but I can say, "Out of these two, five, ten people who fit this set of characteristics, five of them will say yes, or two of them will say yes."
Charlotte Albright:
Fascinating. Wow.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. So there's this data analytics that it goes on at the dean level, at the director level, that every year, I get to this moment and as I'm relieved and excited to be doing something else, I then move into April where every day is a tightrope walk. Where I'm waiting for people to respond, and the decision-making swings from the admission office to the student and parent.
Charlotte Albright:
Well, Lee, that's only fair, these students and parents have been on a tightrope this whole time.
Lee Coffin:
That's right. That's right.
Charlotte Albright:
And now, it's only fair that you're on the tightrope to find out what they're going to do, so what should they do with this month? How would you counsel a family who gets one of these letters or gets a letter that says, "Declined," and they'll get that in the mail, not an email, right?
Lee Coffin:
Usually both.
Charlotte Albright:
Okay.
Lee Coffin:
Most of us release electronically and then follow up with some type of paper as well.
Charlotte Albright:
Oh, darn. So that means they're watching their computer every minute.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Charlotte Albright:
All right, so let's say they've seen it. They've seen one of three responses. What are those responses?
Lee Coffin:
So the three decisions that have been coming out all month and that will hit the last wave this week, would be an offer of admission, and ideally an offer of admission paired with an offer of financial aid, if that's part of the application, so those two pieces should come concurrently. Some students will be offered a place on a waiting list, which we can talk about, and then students will be declined. And that is a disappointing outcome to an application process, but it's the organic byproduct of volume and space.
So I think what's hard about getting a "no" is, it's disappointment and the letter doesn't say, "Dear Charlotte, we were not able to offer you admission, but you were really close." Or, "Dear Charlotte, we can't offer you admission and you were way outside." So you don't have any way of knowing how close you were or not, and when the admit rates are really low, like in my case, there were wonderful people at the 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 12th, 20th percentiles and we just didn't have the space.
I think you, if you're a junior and you're mapping your list and very selective places are on your radar, go in wide eyed, knowing that the odds are low. Doesn't mean you shouldn't try, and if you're the recipient of a letter of denial, it's not saying we didn't see merit in your file. It's, we saw more merit or different kinds of merit, as it relates to the campus where we work and we needed to respond to that, and then we just ran out of space. So that's another way to think about it. Does that make sense?
Charlotte Albright:
It does make sense. Actually I have an interesting story to run by you on that, because, as you know, sometimes I actually write stories about students for Dartmouth News, and I interviewed a student today. He got a letter that declined him admission to Dartmouth. He went to a school in his home state of Tennessee, worked really hard, didn't give up, applied to Dartmouth again and he's a transfer student, and he's in my story because he just won a very coveted Goldwater Fellowship, so not only did he work hard to get in as a transfer, but once he got here, he's working really hard to prove that he should have been accepted to begin with. Does that ever happen or is that just completely out of the blue?
Lee Coffin:
I think transfer varies from campus to campus, so we don't, for most cycles, have many transfers
Charlotte Albright:
That seemed unusual.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. It's not unusual that students make a second go, and again, like to this example, it's not that he was undeserving the first time. What's so hard to really wrap your brain around when you're not in the admission office or the admission committee directly, is just how deep these pools can be, and the fine distinctions we have to make between a big queue of candidates who are compelling. That's where you see... This is where the rubber hits the road, the decisions come out and there's just a limited number that can be yeses.
Charlotte Albright:
So for those of our listeners who might have gotten into more than one school, they now have to figure out what to do. How do they do that? How do they spend this month? Do they start flying around to schools again? Do they talk to people? Do they go into social media? What do they do?
Lee Coffin:
All of those things. So I think the spring of '22 finds us mostly reopening our campus visit programs and maybe not as big and multidimensional as they were a couple years ago, but I can speak for Dartmouth. I mean, we are planning open houses and people visiting starting next week, so that's exciting. So that part of it, I think. I think the first step, if you have multiple offers of admission is to look at this group of invitations and say, "Do one or two or three of them excite me more than the others?" And if you got into multiple places and there are a couple that you're like, "Yeah, this one is no longer of interest," decline it as soon as you know that.
Don't sit on that offer until May 1st, because what we're doing on the college side is we're watching those response rates to be able to prepare any wait list activity that we might need, and the wait list activates when the accepted students start to reply, and if we still have room in the class, we can say, "Oh, great. The wait list now has an opportunity to come into this class as well." We can talk a bit more about wait list, but for the admits, coming up with a short list. Again, if financial aid is part of this decision, look at the financial aid awards, make sure you understand what's in them. What's the scholarship component? Is there a loan in it? What's the cost and did the college meet that cost, or is there a gap between what you can afford and the college costs?
Once you've done that, if there's something not adding up, you need to get on the phone or send an email to the financial aid office and start that conversation, so you can consider your award with clarity. Maybe there was an oversight. Maybe there was something that you forgot to submit that will change the award. It's not a negotiation moment. It's not like buying a used car where you show up and say, "I want to pay X. You cost Z." It's like, "Well, we met your need."
Charlotte Albright:
What if something has changed since you applied?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, then bring it forward. Yeah.
Charlotte Albright:
Because your father might have lost his job in the last month.
Lee Coffin:
Then that's new information.
Charlotte Albright:
Okay.
Lee Coffin:
So the offer and financial aid, when it's part of your decision making, is the first step. And then I think as you navigate April, go to an open house, if there's one offered and you can get yourself to that campus. Especially if you went through the search before we all reopened, this might be your first chance to actually visit a campus and feel it and see it and interact with it. If you can't do that, social media, Zoom continues to be a platform that is not going to go away, and the task is really, to answer this question, where do I see myself? By May 1st does one of these options click?
Charlotte Albright:
Yeah.
Lee Coffin:
And then that's your choice.
Charlotte Albright:
Those are for people in a fortunate position.
Lee Coffin:
Who got in.
Charlotte Albright:
Who got in.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Charlotte Albright:
What if you didn't get in anywhere?
Lee Coffin:
We'll talk about wait list for a second.
Charlotte Albright:
Okay, let's talk about waitlists.
Lee Coffin:
So a wait list offer means you were qualified and compelling and the college ran out of room. So you're asked to stand by for two, three, four weeks, maybe longer, while the enrollment situation clarifies. So if you find yourself on a wait list or two, step one is to respond. The wait list is an invitation to remain active. If you don't say, "Yes, I'm staying on the wait list," then you're not on the wait list. Your file gets closed out, so the first step is to accept that position on the waiting list.
Perhaps you send in third-quarter grades, you might send a letter that says, "I now have all of my decisions, and I see very clearly that this is where I see myself, and if offered a place, I would happily enroll in your class." If you know that, that's helpful to know. Not required, but helpful, if you can genuinely say that. What I think is tricky about wait lists, is some students hang onto the hope of a wait list, and that's distracting from the reality of the offers of admission. So I'd say first pay attention to the places that made you an offer. Keep the wait list as a possibility. It may or may not ever come into play. If you got in nowhere to your gloomy... But it's true, some people, that's going to... If there-
Charlotte Albright:
Well maybe nowhere you can afford or maybe where you really want, let's put it that way.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, then the wait lists are important things to actively manage, or there are places that have rolling admission that the deadline remains open and you could continue to apply. Those would normally be your state universities. Continue to file an application at the most selective places, that's not possible. I mean, the deadline happened and this is not the moment to continue to apply.
Charlotte Albright:
Okay. So that gives a family a sense of what to do with their April. What are you going to do with your April?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, so April is the month where we go from reading and selecting, behind closed doors, it's a very social month. So I'm looking forward to having conversations with the admitted students when they visit campus, and to help them imagine themselves on this campus. Someone said, "Oh, you're selling," and I it's like, "No, I'm representing." I will, with my colleagues, we'll represent the opportunity that this place represents, and we will do some travel. We'll start to go back on the road and meet students where they live, and then concurrently, April is also primetime for the juniors in high school, so we'll start seeing the next class show up at the very beginning of their college search, and so we'll be talking to them.
Then you'll have some transfers to your question. That deadline has passed and we will be reading transfer applications, and so, all three of these cycles, the seniors, making a decision by the end of the month, the juniors getting going in earnest, and then some transfers being read and reviewed to see, do we have space in the college in September? All three of those rounds are happening concurrently.
Charlotte Albright:
Let me take you back to the admissions beat, which is after all the title of this podcast, and very often, we start by talking about stories in the news and sometimes you debunk them and sometimes you decry that they even exist. But I think this is a period of time when you get particularly worried about the impact of news stories on students and their families at this very vulnerable moment when they're trying to sort through all of their options, and then they get flooded with data and schools bragging about how few people they took and isn't that the best school to go to then. I think you need to give people advice about how to consume media, at a really tricky time.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. There will be, over the next couple of weeks, a lot of stories about the admission cycle that just concluded, who had what acceptance rate, who had what volume, and the stories are often written in a horse race theme, where someone was faster, lower, smaller and it suggests to a family, you do have to go to the one with the smallest acceptance rate and that doesn't necessarily mean it's the best place for you. It's just one way of capturing a result.
I would say read these stories for what they are. They're characterizing volume and the opportunity to make offers of admission based on that volume, and it's helpful, if you were disappointed in your outcomes, to have context. I think that's where they're useful to be able to say-
Charlotte Albright:
"A whole bunch of other people didn't get into the school either."
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Yeah. I was one of... Dartmouth, we had 28,336 applicants for a class of 1130.
Charlotte Albright:
Right.
Lee Coffin:
So, that ratio, there's 25 applicants for every seat in my class. That's helpful knowledge to have, might not be comforting, but it's context for the competitive contract. There'll be other places that maybe had 10 applicants for every place in the class, and your chances of admission were much stronger. I think that's where these stories are helpful.
I think the other thing that's tricky is not even the admission beat so much as the admission chatter. So decisions land, and in the senior class and the parent body around that class, there's a lot of comparisons. Who got in? Who didn't get in? "Can you believe she got in?" "Oh my God, he didn't get in." And my advice to anyone going down rabbit hole is this, you don't know what was in the application. You might think you know the person, but you don't know-how were the essays written? What were the recommendations like? What about the interview? How did that play out? What was the midyear grade report? There are a lot of data points that we had as admission officers that are not transparent.
Charlotte Albright:
The other thing I've said, I've occasionally taught at a state university and some of the students who are in my classes, my journalism classes, didn't get into Columbia or something higher in their estimation. So I have them look up the alumni from the school that they did get into, see what they did. There's some remarkable alumni, for example, from, I'll drop a name, Northern Vermont University, where I've been teaching. If you get a meteorology degree there, you're in company with Jim Cantore, if you watch him on the Weather Channel. I told them, "Go look at your really stellar alumni and then aspire to be like that. Be a really excellent person wherever you land, grow where you're planted," as my mother used to say, because I think a lot of people define themselves by the school they got into, where they should be defining themselves by the performance at the school they did get into.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. I've talked about the three PS in other moments of the admission cycle and those PS, program, place, people and price, the fourth P, are still the operating agenda. You're referencing meteorology, that's a program. If that's what you hope to do, and the college that admitted you, does it really well. Ding, that's a fit. If you also like where it is and you see yourself challenged by, comforted by, the community that it represents, that's a triple, and if you could afford it, good.
So, those are the opportunities this month. There's always an emotional moment, both excitement when you got in, and people post videos on social media of them opening the email. I always wince when I see one, because I think, for every happy video, there's one where someone clicked the link and the news was not confetti-inducing, and you don't see those.
Charlotte Albright:
Right.
Lee Coffin:
But they're real, and the disappointment is valid. I get it. I got denied somewhere my senior year and it's stung, because I was a high achieving high school student who didn't think anyone was going to say no, and it happened.
Charlotte Albright:
Well, there are a lot of high school achievers that apply to college.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Right, and that's what the lesson of this is. You will apply for jobs and you won't always get one, and there are many moments where you have to represent yourself and a decision will be made based on that process, and that's what college admission just was It's a good life lesson about how do you tell your story? How do you present yourself in a space where you're not known? Then also, how do you take the outcomes, make wise decisions for where you are, where you're going, and move forward?
Charlotte Albright:
We've talked to students over the past two years who have, slightly and politely, asked, "How to manage their parents?" And this is a month when parent management has to be nuanced. Sometimes you'll get into a school that your parent went to, and it may not really end up being your first choice, but you've got that pressure. Or sometimes you will not get into the school that your parent went to. Or sometimes your parent didn't go to college and isn't in a position to help guide you to through this month, so the whole parent thing is tricky.
Lee Coffin:
It's tricky and it's loaded with parental love, pride, support, ambition-
Charlotte Albright:
Expense.
Lee Coffin:
... expense. There are a lot of things a parent is also juggling as the senior has offers or not. I've seen parents swing into action where they are the defender. The decision is a no, and they start yelling.
Charlotte Albright:
And they call you?
Lee Coffin:
Oh, they call, they email. Sometimes they're just upset. Sometimes they're rude and that's always... I was telling my mom this, and she said, "I would never have called." I said, "But they do." And so it's channeling that emotion, containing that emotion, and to the best of your ability, understanding that this was not an attack on your parenting, or on the quality of your children, and that's hard. It's just there's a lot of energy invested in college admission and it bubbles up.
But then there are the parents who get really excited by the accomplishments of their kids and I think no matter where this story goes, whether it's your child got into or did not get into your own alma mater, or you think he should go to college X, and he sees himself more at college Z, offer wisdom as you can, but understand that the choice is not yours. This is an experience that this person who has been offered admission is going to have, and each student has to come to that moment of personal truth and say, "This is where I'm going."
So our next episode, our guests will return. We're out of the little lull in podding, where it's just been and Charlotte and me. But when we come back, we'll have a set of episodes covering, as always, the wide range of topics on the Admissions Beat, so we'll see you soon. For now, this is Lee Coffin and Charlotte Albright from Dartmouth College. Thanks for listening.