Admissions Beat S2E2 Transcript

Season 2: Episode 2 Transcript
A High School Senior Interviews The Dean

Lee Coffin:
From Dartmouth College, this is Lee Coffin. Welcome to the Admission Beat. This week, we have a special episode. I was invited to be a guest on the podcast Hold Me Back hosted by the father and son team Ash and Aidan ElDifrawi from Hinsdale, Illinois. Their conversation with me airs on their pod platform, but they've given me permission to share it on the Admissions Beat feed so that we can cross-pollinate each other's podding, but my conversation with Ash and Aidan was a really wide-ranging, interesting one covering lots of different topics within the universe of college admission. So it absolutely is worth sharing with my listeners on Admission Beat. I hope you enjoy this special episode of Admission Beat.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Welcome to Hold Me Back and today we have another wonderful installment in our college admission series.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Yeah, Dartmouth, and I have to be honest, everybody's heard of Dartmouth, but I didn't know very much about it.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Well I did, but I still found this interview to be incredibly interesting. We had a wonderful experience with Dartmouth.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Yes.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Both leading up to and within the interview.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Yeah, they were so engaging.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Even though we interviewed Lee Coffin and they absolutely loved it, I would be remiss not to mention the director of enrollment planning and special assistant to Lee Coffin.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Yeah.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Mr. Kevin Ramos-Glew

Ash ElDifrawi:
Yeah, he was amazing.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
He was amazing. He spent a lot of time with us. He helped us work through everything.

Ash ElDifrawi:
He had so much knowledge.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
We got so much knowledge at the table, so it was wonderful working with him.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Yeah. Kudos to him.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Made this process incredibly smooth and informative, so a shout-out to him.

Ash ElDifrawi:
I'm glad you mentioned that. So let's get to Lee Coffin though, because he has such an amazing background and such a unique perspective.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
So to start, Lee Coffin is Dartmouth's vice provost for enrollment and dean of admissions and financial aid and he has been since 2016. Prior to being at Dartmouth, he was the dean of undergraduate admissions at Tufts from 2003 to 2016. Before that, he was a dean of admission at Connecticut College from 1995 to 2001.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Wow. So he also held a chair in admissions at Milton Academy from 2001 to 2003 and served in administrative appointments in advancement at Trinity College and freshman advising at Harvard College. In addition to these administrative roles, he was an adjunct lecturer on education for 10 years at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he taught a seminar that was called Principles and Policy Issues of College Admissions. So the man knows his college admission stuff.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
His stuff.

Ash ElDifrawi:
He currently, doesn't he have a couple podcasts?

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Yeah. So he currently hosts a weekly admissions news and discussion podcast called the Admissions Beat, which is wonderful. I love listening to it and he also has a podcast called The Search, which is wonderful as well. He earned his BA in history from Trinity College and a master's of education in administration planning and social policy from Harvard.

Ash ElDifrawi:
But in addition to that, Aidan, and most importantly, we continue our luck, I guess, in having incredibly thoughtful leaders that are willing to be very transparent and share all things about the administrations process. Mr. Coffin definitely fits that bill.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Oh, absolutely and I don't want to spend any more time introducing him when we could be listening to him. So let's come back after this break and hear from Lee Coffin. Today I'd like to welcome on Mr. Lee Coffin from Dartmouth College. It's an honor to have you on.

Lee Coffin:
It's great to be on. Thanks for inviting me, Aidan.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Our pleasure and I'd like to just get right into the questions. That's how I like to do these interviews and we've had a few other admissions leaders on before, but I haven't been in the actual application process until now. So I think this is going to be really interesting interview.

Lee Coffin:
Wow. Yeah.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
The first question I want to start off with is as I'm going through this process, it feels like a lot of colleges want students to have a very clear idea of what they want to do, very clear interest that they've been pursuing throughout high school, but I know for a lot of my friends, they haven't figured out what they wanted to do. A lot of colleges also say, "We want students that are undecided, want to explore things," but it feels like those things are a little bit at odd. So I'm wondering how do you think that students should find balance there?

Lee Coffin:
Yeah, it's a really good question and I smile as you say, "Oh, it changes my perspective now that I'm actually in the application space myself," because it does. One of those very lived journeys where you start to look in the mirror a bit more than you might have before and start to take stock of who are you, where am I in this journey, and what am I thinking about? Where it relates to the question you're asking, Aidan, is I think the sense that we want you to have this preordained sense of who are you at the age of 17 is overstated. I think as a high school senior, you have license to still be imagining where you're going, exploring, certainly exploring new topics and new ideas and new identities for yourself. So that's really essential to me. I would be saddened if applicants to college think they need to pop out of some magic box as high school seniors and be ready to say, "This is who I am. This is where I'm going. Let's go."

There are some of your peers who absolutely know at the age of 17 that they're aiming in a certain direction and that's wonderful, but I think most of you are still very open-ended and that's exactly where you should be. I think as you think about both finding colleges that are good fits for you, but also asking yourself the question how do I introduce myself to that place, I think for those students who are still thinking it through, I would ask, what is it that makes you happy? Whether you go into a classroom in high school, are some subjects more exciting than others? Are certain activities more organically part of your identity than others? Those are the things you need to bring forward into your application and illuminate for the person reading your application down the road.

Ash ElDifrawi:
So let me build on that because that sparks a different question for me. So there's a lot of thought around this question of why X or why Y school. So from your perspective, do you think that along the competitive school area, that where you are in the spectrum of knowing what you want to do versus wanting to go someplace that maybe you just still want to explore? Do you think schools are differentiated in that? Do you think their schools are different fits for that? Where do you think Dartmouth falls?

Lee Coffin:
Yeah, every college is not the same. Even within the Ivy league. People lump the eight of us together as Ivies, but if you line the eight institutions up, we're all quite different, with Dartmouth probably being the most dramatically different than the other seven in terms of our location and our size and the atmosphere of the place. It's quite different from the other seven and that's essential to who we are. So I think one of the trap doors in all this is to lump a lot of institutions together by association. So that's part one part. Two, around fit, is as I recruit, as I read a file, as we shape a class every year, and as we're talking, our class '26 will arrive this week. As I look forward to seeing the students in person, really for the first time, what we're doing is meaning every applicant and wondering does the education we offer at this institution, does the place that we are at this institution correspond to the person we are meeting through the application?

So you might say, for example, you're interested in sustainability. Then that theme comes out of your application in lots of different ways. That's a great fit for a place like Dartmouth, which has an organic farm, is right on the Connecticut River, has a wonderful program in environmental studies and then Arctic studies. You don't find that everywhere in energy and you put all that together. When we find applicants who share that interest, whether it's academic or just activism, that's a fit. Doesn't mean every applicant to Dartmouth needs to have that set of qualities in focal areas, but when it's there, we start to recognize it. So when we ask why Dartmouth on our supplement we're not looking for a declaration of love from every applicant.

If it's early decision, and maybe we come back to this later, then, yeah, you need to have a more specific reason about why this is your first choice, but when we get to regular decision and we know you're applying to multiple places, part of the strategy and purpose of a question like that is to help the college understand why did this place land on your list of applications? You have so many options. On the common app, you have 20 possible applications you can file. Why this one? What was it about Dartmouth in this example that attracted you to make an application in our class of '27? What is it about the place that spoke to you? When the answers to that question are really useful, a student is able to imagine herself in this community and share that with us in some way that helps us say, "I see it too."

When it doesn't work, or the students who are doing really high level, oh, I'm applying to this place because it's an Ivy, then the answers tend to be a bit less personal and a bit more proforma. That's not a really effective response to the why X question. It's there a program on our campus that makes you think this is something I'd like to explore? Is there a theme? Like I mentioned, sustainability. For Dartmouth being located in New Hampshire, a lot of students who have a political orientation are attracted to the idea that we sit in a place where the New Hampshire primary begins the road to the White House every four years. So for politically oriented students, this is a remarkably unique opportunity to have a ringside seat to the beginning of a presidential election.

That's very Dartmouth-specific. You're not going to write that for a lot of the other places on your list my guess is. So that's what we're trying to understand is have you done some homework, not to go to the website and copy sections of it and regurgitate it back, but in your own work, because that happens too, where you're like, "Oh, they just lifted that answer from the anthropology department," but it's what are you seeing and feeling, emphasize feeling, that helps us understand where is this college fitting into your emerging plan for your own choice?

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Wow. Wow. That's a great answer.

Lee Coffin:
Is that helpful? Yeah.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Yeah. That was a great answer and it actually leads pretty well into my next question. I hope we didn't really answer this too much in the last. We hear a lot about this idea of mission drives admission. I'm wondering, you kind of answered it a little bit, but what is Dartmouth's mission? The more novel question is, how transparent are you with applicants about that?

Lee Coffin:
Yeah. So our mission statement is in our information session. So whether we're on campus or on Zoom, as we continue to offer that option for people, one of our slides is the mission of the college. So Dartmouth educates the most promising students for a lifetime of responsible leadership in an environment framed by a faculty committed to teaching and research. So one of the interesting places where Dartmouth fits on the spectrum of higher ed is we are still a liberal arts college and a research one university, and we hug that dual identity really closely.

So we talk about what does it mean to be an undergraduate in a place like this where most of our classrooms have 14 students or fewer and where discussion is more the norm than lecture, where each person in a classroom is expected to participate, contribute, have ideas, poke the other person's ideas in a respectful place in that political dynamic. I hope it's more purple than red or blue. How do you bring people together and model active citizenship, model the exchange of ideas without acrimony? How do you bring people from all around the planet together, because Ash and Aidan, you probably haven't thought about this, but students who graduate from high school this year, members of the class of '27, your careers go all the way to 2070, which is a really sobering.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Yeah.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Oh, wow.

Lee Coffin:
Ash, I think, oh my god, I'll be 107.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Yeah, I...

Lee Coffin:
So I'll be dead.

Ash ElDifrawi:
I'll be, yes. I will be. I won't be.

Lee Coffin:
No, but what does that journey, what kind of tool do you need to go from 2027 to the 2070s? Is your peer group more or less global? Is a commitment to multiculturalism and globalism going to be more or less important? How about the acquisition of a language other than the one in your home? How does your discipline that you study now shift over time and what kind of education gives you that ability to be responsive to the world as it evolves? To your question about Dartmouth and our mission, I think what we do in this small university space is exactly that. My job as the dean of admission is to bring together in every entering class the most heterogeneous group of people from as many different places as we can fit into 1,150 seats and then let you loose and let you have a peer group where you're going to be challenged in the best way by that.

So we talk about that on the recruitment part of the job, because I want applicants or I want prospective applicants to be able to hear that and imagine that and say, "I love that. That's exactly the kind of learning environment, the kind of social community that feels like the space I want." Someone might hear me saying all this and say, "14 people in the average classroom? Much too small." Great. There are a lot of big places that are wonderful. Godspeed. Off you go. So I think part of clinging to your mission and being transparent about it is to help applicants also understand every college is not the best place for every applicant. That includes members of the Ivy league. Just because Dartmouth is an Ivy doesn't mean every high achieving student should want to be here. This is not going to be everybody's best space and helping you see that during the recruitment and pre-application phase, and then again in April when people are making decisions, really, really important.

Ash ElDifrawi:
High-achieving. So I'm going to be a little cynical.

Lee Coffin:
Okay.

Ash ElDifrawi:
No. Okay. Shocking, shocking.

Lee Coffin:
That's okay.

Lee Coffin:
I'm an optimist so we'll adjust.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Okay. No, the reason is because, look, as people start putting real pen to paper, the stuff gets really real, right?

Lee Coffin:
Yeah.

Ash ElDifrawi:
So here's my cynicism. I'm just going to push you a little bit. So a lot of the missions start seeming like the sea of sameness, to be honest.

Lee Coffin:
Yeah, yeah.

Ash ElDifrawi:
A lot of what you said, some of what you said is very foundational to a lot of schools in terms of open-minded, transparent dialogue, ideas. I think about some of the other schools. I was a University of Chicago person. It's core to them. Some of the other Ivies as well. I think you didn't indicate some things that Dartmouth stands for more so than how it happens, but more so than how, but in the what. So I'm wondering, is that the balance you're looking for? I mean, look, some schools have very tangible, different cultures. University of Chicago versus a Duke versus a Dartmouth. I actually could sit there and say, "Those are very different places to be."

Lee Coffin:
Yeah, I agree.

Ash ElDifrawi:
But as you start expanding that, it starts getting harder and harder. I picked the ones that I thought were very different for specific reasons. Is that the right thing for the student, because I don't want them to focus too much, or Aidan to focus too much on just saying, "This is the environment I want to be in versus there's some very specific things here that I'm interested in pursuing along with being in this environment." Is that the sort of combination you're looking for?

Lee Coffin:
Yeah. I think on the students side is, I mean, we're now for seniors, as you said, this is getting real. The Common App is live. It's time to start typing, but there's still this moment for the next couple of months of discovery and checking yourself and saying, "What's attracting me to the places on this list?" Each student is going to have a very personal response to the questions we're asking. So someone might say, "What's really important to me is a college that has a set of majors or academic programs that are really defined in this space I'm thinking about." That's, as the dean who was my mentor often said, this is a college. This is an academic experience. That always stands out first, but where does that academic experience play out?

Yesterday, over the weekend, I was kayaking on the Connecticut River and traveling down the river. So the Connecticut runs between New Hampshire and Vermont, right on the edge of our campus. It was this stunningly beautiful late summer afternoon and there were a lot of undergraduates paddle boarding and kayaking and canoeing. It was a very outdoorsy vibe that I was witnessing from my own kayak. I thought this is not a common college campus. So for someone who is attracted to what I just said, we stand out. If your happiness as a person is framed around being outdoors, there's an athleticism here that, not just varsity athletics, but I just think students in general have that vibe to them. There's an adventurousness. We have a unique schedule called the Dartmouth plan, the D plan, which is a quarter system, three courses a term, 10-week terms, and students mix and match the terms to be on campus, off campus as they move through their undergraduate experience.

That requires a high degree of independence and confidence and creativity. It's not a curriculum that we say, "Here's the fall term. Here's the spring term. Here's the fall term. Here's the spring term. Now you go abroad. Now you come back. Here's the fall term." If that's your jam, that's not this. This is not a place that says during first year orientation, "Here are the rules. Everybody follows them in the same way." We say, "Welcome. This is very open-ended in ways that will invite you to blend academic programs, to explore things through the mission that you might not be thinking about now and you may discover because of where we are that my interest in environmentalism really is more about Arctic research because the polar melt is something really significant and we have an Arctic Institute and you find yourself shifting as you explore."

Ash ElDifrawi:
first-yearThat's interesting.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Yeah, that's amazing. Just for some of our listeners out there, I know there's some cool facts about Dartmouth, but they have a quarter system where I know students are required to spend, I think, their sophomore summer on campus.

Lee Coffin:
Yes.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Then they get to go off pretty much any other quarter they'd like that year. Also I think Dartmouth owns the most land of any, I think, private institution in the United States for college, right?

Lee Coffin:
Yeah. So this tiny place, if you're in Hanover, New Hampshire, the formal campus is not the biggest you're ever going to see, but we have the land grant in Northern New Hampshire, is huge and it's this conservation area that we own and manage. So in that space it's very bucolic, but so back to one of your earlier questions about fit, when I'm describing this campus where I now work, is not Tufts where I worked for 13 years. I mean, they have similarly wonderful liberal arts and engineering curricula, but the undergraduate experience plays out on campus in profoundly different ways. Not one right, one wrong, just different.

There are different flavors of the same undergraduate function. To Ash's point, similar missions. I work here. I worked there because I saw something that spoke to me as an admission officer, but they're distinctive. I think that's the part of the applicants process that if you let yourself figure out what is this campus really saying to you? I've had students over the years say, "Oh, I don't really see myself coming to a rural campus, but it's the best place I could [inaudible 00:23:00] I say, "Oh dear god, don't come here for that."

Ash ElDifrawi:
Yeah.

Lee Coffin:
That's not the way to think about this because "best" is such a subjective concept. It's really about can you imagine four years in a community that stimulates you in whatever ways that's true for you as an individual and as you understand yourself today. The other thing I would just say to seniors as the fall plays out, by June of your senior year, you're a different person. You're in this enormous growth moment that don't lock yourself in before you're, I guess a different metaphor, don't eat the cake before it's baked. Give yourself time to enjoy 12th grade. I'm still very old-fashioned. So you said you're a cynic, Ash. Somehow I've hung onto my optimism and I think my job is to keep pulling people back from the dark spot that college admissions sometimes feels stressful and to say, "Yeah, there's competitiveness here that you can't ignore, but there's also some joy here that you need to let yourself embrace."

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Yeah, no, I feel that a hundred percent as I'm writing these. It's hard work, but it feels meaningful and you actually know you're working towards something at this point. You've been working towards your entire high school career…

Ash ElDifrawi:
Actually, we did an interview where somebody said something that was really fascinating. He said, "When else in your life you get to spend all the..."

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Yeah, two months or three months just sitting down, reflecting on all the cool things you've done.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Yeah.

Lee Coffin:
No.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Doesn't happen very much unless you're on [inaudible 00:24:46]

Lee Coffin:
Very rarely.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Yeah, unless you're unemployed for a long time.

Lee Coffin:
It's permission to be narcissistic.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Permission granted. Permission granted.

Lee Coffin:
Yeah. I mean just because a lot of students have said to me over my many years doing this, "What makes me uncomfortable about applying is I don't want to brag." My answer is always, "You have to be able to tell your story in your own words." It's okay to brag. Don't be arrogant. Have humility as you introduce yourself, but if you don't introduce yourself in the narrative form of your application, you're depending on your teachers and your counselors, and perhaps an interview if you have one. You're outsourcing that task to other people who may know you quite well, but in the reflective moment of your senior year, you know yourself the best and you don't have to have a perfect answer. You can share your openness to new things, but start jotting down.

If you're on Instagram, you know people curate this online persona. What photo I'm going to pick and what am I doing in this photo? What do I say and am I an influencer? I don't really understand how that role happens, but I'm old now, but no, the idea of being a curator, your application isn't, if I can use social media as a parallel, you're curating through the application your story. As I'm saying that, it's the first time I've ever imagined it in quite this way, but you're using all the different elements of the common app and the supplement and the adjacent pieces to say, "Here's Aidan. Here's my transcript. It shows you the courses I've taken. Here are the grades I got in those courses. Maybe there's some testing attached to it or not. Here are my extracurriculars. I'm a podcaster." I haven't asked you this question yet, Aidan, but I hope in your application, you would say, "And this is why I started to do it and why it was fun and what I learned and is this pointing me."

Are you a baby journalist that we're going to see 20 years from now on some new outlet that hasn't been invented before? If that's what you're thinking, cool to share it with us. What are your teachers telling us about Aidan in a classroom? Not just, I got a B plus or an A plus, but what kind of questions do you ask? When you were absent, was the discussion different because you weren't there? What are your papers like? How do you write? Maybe you're more a STEM kid and what's the way in which your logic comes through the experiments you do, the labs you perform, the way you use numbers and arithmetic to find solutions? I mean, when I was your age, I would've said about myself, "I am a word person." I still am. I'm a reader. I'm a writer. I'm a talker. Put me in front of a mic as you're seeing and I go.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Yeah.

Lee Coffin:
I'm a numbers person in the sense that they're part of the work I do, but they're not what gets me up by the bed in the morning, but for other people, absolutely 100%, stats are your thing. So those are the narrative themes every applicant should be imagining. Are you a performer? Are you an analyst? Are you a behind-the-scenes person? Are you out front? Are you an activist? Are you a follower? Are you a leader with a capital L? You're the class president. You're popular and you try and make things happen? Are you a leader through your action and people respect you and you're that glue kid in the dormitory when they come together, the person that you're a great friend, you're the person people go to when they need help? All of the things I'm laying out on the table are pieces of the class we're putting together. There is not one super person that has every single thing I just said. If you are that person, I don't believe it.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
I love hearing that and that actually hints at the holistic admissions process, which is something I want to get to right now, because we've heard a lot about the student side of the application process, but I want to hear about the college side. So when an application arrives at Dartmouth, whose hands does it go through? What are the conversations that are being had? What overall happens when Dartmouth is evaluating a potential student?

Lee Coffin:
So it varies a little bit from place to place. To start in the most philosophical space, holistic means we are reading every application with an eye towards the sum of its many parts. I think the popular misconception is two things are more important than the others and those two things being your transcript and standardized testing. Those are foundational elements. I mean, the first question any admission officer at any selective place, or really any place, has to ask is, "Does this applicant have the academic background to succeed in the curriculum offered by the faculty at the institution where I work?" That's step one everywhere.

Now, some places are open admission enough where they're not as focused on that because they have the capacity to welcome more people in and things fall where they may, but for a place that has a retention rate like Dartmouth's in the high nineties, the reason you see these big retention rates, and that's one of those hidden stats that you should try and sniff out, what's the first year retention rate, how many freshmen come back as sophomores, and what's the four and six year retention rate, and that's all public information, but anyway, what we're doing is looking at your academic background first and mapping it out.

When you apply to a place like Dartmouth, there's something called the ceiling effect, which means we have so many applicants and they're of such quality that a lot of the students we're meeting are at the top of the curve. They're doing well in high school, wherever they might be enrolled. The question we also ask is what are you taking? How are you doing relative to what's available to you? So I'll use Aidan as the example. You're at Hinsdale Central. What does that faculty offer by way of courses as you move from ninth grade to 12, with a particular focus on 11 and 12 and the grades you're having, as you have permission, really for the first time to start to explore more of your intellectual curiosity and not just take the same five core subjects every year.

So we spend the first part of our review that way documenting it. Everywhere I've worked, we read by recruitment territory. So in my pre-Dean days, I used to read the Washington, DC area and suburban Boston and parts of Europe. Three really different places, but my job was to visit those places, meet the schools, have a sense of place so when applicants emerge from those places, I have context and that's a really important word to kind of highlight. What's the context of the school, the family, the student, or the region from which this person is applying? Then for the students who pass that first critical bar, and at Dartmouth most people do. I mean, I would say of the 28,000 applicants we had last year, well over 22,000 of them passed through that first screen of can they do the work? The answer was, yeah. Are they all going to be phi beta kappa? No, that's not the question. It's who has the background to be successful here?

Then we move on to the holistic read where you go through all the other elements and you think about background. Are you first generation college? Are you the son of a lawyer? Are you from suburbia? Are you from rural America? Are you at an urban charter school? Are you at the International School of Bangkok? What are the different pieces of who you are, where you are that help me know what extracurriculars are available to you and where have you used your out-of-school time to make a mark or to be engaged or to lead if that's something that's part of your personality or to be creative in whatever way that might happen? We read your essays. What story are you telling about your aspirations, your background, your interests, your achievements, your political views, your religion, your family? Why do you like Oreos instead of Twinkies?

Whatever it is you want to talk about that helps me get a sense of this is a kid named Aidan from Chicago, and I'm starting to put some flesh on the skeleton of all these numbers that come along with your application. Then the teacher recommendations help us do that. At Dartmouth, we have an optional peer recommendation, which is one of my favorite pieces where we say that every applicant, if you'd like to have one of your peers, however you want to define that word, speak on your behalf, please do. It's one of my favorite parts of every file because you have this very earnest, usually classmate, perspective on the applicant, telling us things that round you out as a member of a classroom, a member of a community. As we read all of that, we document it. We're doing it in a shorthand, because we have to be able few weeks later to be in a committee room where we bring you back to life. So one of the ways I've thought about this is we read the file and we dehydrate it.

We're breaking it down into its core points and then when we're in the committee room, we have to rehydrate you and say, "Okay, you all didn't read this person named Aidan. It's my job to introduce you to him through his own words." Then we have a conversation about your merit and does this set of characteristics seem like an enhancement to the student body we're building? At that step, everybody's qualified. So we don't in committee spend a lot of time hashing through your transcript at that point, because you've already cleared that bar. The conversations tend to be more about impact and personality and potential and kindness and curiosity, all of these things that are hard to measure, but you see them in the file as you're reading it. It's my job as the reader, if you watch a lot of lawyer television shows, to represent you and to use the application you'd filed to make the case for you to a group of admission officers or at some places, admission officers and faculty members, depending on the committees are structured, with some cold, hard calculus here.

We can't take everybody who we love and that's just volume. We have to make some really informed choices about who gets an invitation to join the class. I'm saying it that way deliberately. We're not rejecting the others. We have to invite a certain number of people in and one of the, back to the question about mission, our mission is to be small. To be small means we have to be intentional and being intentional, we have to make sure we have representation of all of the different pieces of this community that we're trying to bring together in Hanover. Then at that step, I can't say anything, but it's a subjective exercise. We're using professional judgment to shape. It's more art than statistics. We are building a community out of that big pool of people who we have the privilege of considering.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Let me actually build on that piece. So we had presented this concept we call the pile theory, which apparently people like that term, but the idea that the school has to satisfy a diverse set of piles. What's been interesting about this is that most universities haven't denied that there's some sort of pile theory.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
By the way, when we say piles, we mean when you're sorting through, at some point in the process, you're trying to hit certain demographics or certain interest areas.

Lee Coffin:
Yeah, yeah.

Ash ElDifrawi:
What was interesting was to hear where in the process different university that happened.

Lee Coffin:
Yeah.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Then as you can imagine what they pivoted off of or actually what they anchored, it was different. So for example, some schools are like, "Well, we have to have this many people by geography." Others were by major. Others were by instate, out of state. Then there was others that were talking about diversity and so on. So curious about for you or for Dartmouth, does that come into play? When does it come into play? Are we thinking about the wrong way?

Lee Coffin:
Yeah. So I've never thought of them as piles. So I'm not denying that concept, but I think of it as almost, I use the word shaping. So for Dartmouth, we're the smallest of our peer group by a lot. So I have 1,150 seats that I can fill in each entering class. So I said earlier that we want representation. So this experience doesn't sing if there isn't organic diversity in the classroom to the degree we can create that. So some of it is I do not work at a place that has cohorts by academic area. So I've heard my colleague at Northwestern say things like, "I've got a cohort for the journalism school and for arts and sciences and for music and nursing." So I don't have a class like that. I just have one class. The academic interests fall where they may, but I do have an eye towards we want to make sure all the different parts of the curriculum have students thinking about it for the first couple of years, as opposed to everybody piled up in computer science. That would not work.

Also part of my job as vice provost for enrollment and Dean of admission and financial aid, it's a long title, but in the more strategy part of what I do is to look forward and say, "20 years from now, where are the demographics moving?" So 20 years ago I was saying, "Well, the west is a rising part of the high school population." When I was at Tufts, we made decisions to invest in recruitment on the west coast. So when that became the dominant high school population, we were established there. So we do things like that. So I pay attention as the Dean to what does the geographic makeup of the class look like as it comes together? So 12% of the class that's enrolling this week comes from California, which is a remarkable percentage, but it's a huge state.

So we want to make sure that this institution has representation from the high schools in that part of the country. Same is true as we move around the world. Dartmouth became the sixth college in the US to be need-blind for foreign citizens this past year. So that for us is a pile, to use your, is a global pile. That policy was a statement to the students of the world that we wanted global equity in the way we read and invited students into our class because we think perspectives from around the planet are really important, again, to the life and career that students are going to have as they move through Dartmouth today and then the years ahead. So the students who will enroll this week from Ukraine, there's five of them in the entering class, they come to this campus with a really rich and poignant story about the last year in their country.

Ash ElDifrawi:
I bet. Wow.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Yeah, wow.

Lee Coffin:
So that's intentional. Was that a pile? No. Was the commitment from this institution to say, "What act of global citizenship might this little place have as we move through this admission process and how might our classmates at Dartmouth and international relations?" We have a program in War and Peace. How do you bring voices here that haven't just read the book, but have lived and experienced that informs the conversation or part of the educating leaders for lifetimes of responsible citizenship. Students are going to leave Hanover four years from now and return to their home communities around the world and make impact. That's part of our mission and I hope someday day in retirement to pick up a newspaper and smile and say, "I admitted that kid and now she's president of fill in the blank country." That's cool to think about this, not to put too much pressure on someone. Oh, you have to be president of...

Ash ElDifrawi:
Big aspirations.

Lee Coffin:
Of Lithuania, but maybe because we read essays that talk about that and that the opportunity of college, the opportunity of college in the United States, is a gateway to something different for family, community, nation in some context. So every college is going to have a different set of piles as we build the community. At some point you also have to just step back and say, "We can't do everything." Every college can't do everything for everyone. So where do you lean in because it's organic to who we are?

Ash ElDifrawi:
Yeah. That's interesting. Remember, Einstein talked about this too. We talked about how this changes demographic, actually plays a role in how they shape the college. So it's interesting that you'd bring that up, too.

Lee Coffin:
Yeah, no. Think about Texas. It's one of the five largest states in our applicant pool and when you look at the applicants to Dartmouth from Texas, a super majority of them are applying for financial aid, which we're need-blindneed-basedfirst-generation. So we don't know that when we're meeting them one by one, but just as I help raise the resources for scholarship, I point to Texas as an example of, for Dartmouth to be accessible to families from Texas, we have to keep investing in need based financial aid or it's out of reach for them, but the majority of families from Texas are not white at this point in our applicant pool. The majority of families from Texas are now often first generation Americans. So you have this really rich demographic in that one giant state within the US. So I think it's important for a place like Dartmouth to be recruiting across California, Texas, Florida. Then you jump. India has become the largest country in our applicant pool, outside the US, and that's a recent phenomenon.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Holy cow.

Lee Coffin:
That's exciting to see our need-blind policy opening up potential pipeline to India, to Brazil. We've been very present and both of those places, but it's expanding. That's one college. That's this college saying, "We want to be present in these places." Another college may look at it and say, "That's not what we do." It's what we do here.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
I mean, we hear a lot about international students and just international admissions. I mean, it is really interesting. I never really thought about the fact that there wasn't really any schools, that there were not many schools that were need-blind to international students. That's a really cool thing to hear.

Lee Coffin:
Yeah, we were six and now [inaudible 00:46:23] just did it. So there's seven to date, not a lot.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
So I actually have another burning question about demographics before we move on here, which is really prevalent as a person applying to colleges now, which is we've seen the past few years that there has been a rising number of applications, especially at top colleges. I'm wondering, do you think there's going to be some sort of critical mass you guys will reach where at a certain point there's just not going to be too many more applicants year over year, or do you think you're going to start to see application numbers fall and admissions rates rise? What do you see in the future there?

Lee Coffin:
Yeah. So I'm going to say a very unexpected thing as a Dean. I would love to see applications fall. That's not what you read in the newspaper, but I think the volume, certainly the volume triggered by the pandemic, the last couple years has been staggeringly high. I had one of our trustees ask me at the end of year board meeting, "When do we have too many applications?" I said, "We already have too many for a class of our size. We have 25 applicants for every seat in the class." Part of that is we've hit the top of a demographic curve.

I think fewer people are applying to more colleges. So we see in our applicant pool, the average is about 12 applicants per student when we do the admitted student survey. I would say as advice, that's too many. I met a student at our admitted student program in the spring and she was wrestling with where to enroll. I said, "How many is it down to?" She said, "It's down to three." I said, "Okay, how many did you get into?" She said, "21." I said, "21?" I said, "How many did you apply to?" She said, "24."

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Wow.

Lee Coffin:
So I said, "My God," and the happy end of the story, she chose Dartmouth, which is nice, but I said, "Why did you apply to 24?" She said, "I panicked and I thought I needed to apply to that many to have options." What I said to her is, at the end of this story said, "The fact that you got into 21 or 24 was a proof point that you were really dynamic, compelling applicant that lots of places saw." She goes, "Yeah, I see that now." So there's this doubtfulness that jumps into the way when people are applying and it juices the volume. It then creates headlines in the spring where you see acceptance rates in the single digits and you also see, because the two of you are well informed, there's a movement a-foot to stop releasing data. So a bunch of our peers in the spring stopped sharing their applicant pools and their acceptance rates.

There's a lot of debate about whether that makes sense or not, but the spirit of what they're doing at Penn and Princeton and Stanford and others is to say... My colleague at Cornell had a couple last year. He said, "It's no secret that Cornell is selective. You don't need to know it's eight or 7% to prove that point." I thought, you're right. When I welcome the class on Wednesday, I'm not going to talk about the acceptance rate. I mean, they got in. They're here. The number to me does not need to be... There's no confetti that we need to toss around that percentage at this moment, because when it's out there, it generates jitters. Aidan, as you're thinking about your ultimate list of colleges, you might be like, "Oh yeah, there's still 10, 12, 14, 15." If you start drifting into the high teens, ask yourself why. Why do I need to file this many applications?

If you're being thoughtful and have a couple that are aspirational where the odds might be low, several where you're like, "You know what? I think I'm in the wheelhouse for these places and I'd love to go to any one of them," and one or two where you're like, "I'm pretty sure I'm going to get in. This is a likely outcome." You notice I'm not using a word that starts with S because that word that I don't say suggests a lack of interest and the place that you're likely to gain admission to should be in the scenario where nothing else comes through, you're still happy to go there, but the volume is a problem.

I've seen places, a lot of us suspended testing during the pandemic. Some places have dropped their application fee. Some places have stopped asking for a supplemental component to the common app. It makes it almost too easy to just click the common app on January 1st and apply to as many as your credit card will let you apply to. I don't know that that's a thoughtful way to do it because it's generating volume that to my eyes, and I say this to my peers, it's false volume. It's a big number that doesn't really speak to an intentional way of inviting people to consider our campuses.

Ash ElDifrawi:
So let's get into because now we're...

Lee Coffin:
Yeah, go ahead.

Ash ElDifrawi:
We're going to get into this. We're going to get into it now because...

Lee Coffin:
There's chum in the water there.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Yeah, there's chum in the water. There's chum in the water here because this is where the whole, I think, drama around the admission rates falling and we've heard from several colleges that the very few cases are getting the most headlines and it's causing all this false narratives. The reason kids are applying to so many schools is because they're panicking, because they're hearing schools that used to be target on that reach and now safety is now targeted and these schools are now accepting...

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Used the word. Used the S word.

Ash ElDifrawi:
What was the word?

Lee Coffin:
You did use the S word. Thanks for calling him on that.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Oh, okay. Sorry. All right, I'm an idiot, but whatever, but the reality is it is creating this sense of panic which then takes us into this whole area, which we're going to get into, of the early decision.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Yeah.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Stuff, because it's creating a game theory that's causing so much stress for everybody that it's maddening.

Lee Coffin:
Yeah, I agree.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Yeah. Well also I'm wondering in this wake of all this drama and also the rising admissions rates and I'd imagine that ED admissions have to become more meaningful and I'm also wondering what your thoughts are on why do you think certain colleges use REA instead of ED? Do you think it's more helpful because for me, I think it causes a little more stress, but I'm wondering from the college side why might it be more useful?

Lee Coffin:
Yeah. So tell me one more thing, Aidan. What causes more stress, EA or ED or both?

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Well, REA. EA, just regular early action I don't think is very problematic, but REA, I think it puts you in a little bit of a bind.

Ash ElDifrawi:
ED, too. That causes…

Lee Coffin:
Yeah.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
I think ED, you also have the ability to EA to other places and apply early to other places that might be private where I feel like REA puts you in a little bit of a bind, but I'd imagine maybe for financially disadvantaged students, it might be better.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Yeah, and just one more quick thing. We understand that these colleges are solving for yield. The last three jobs, I've had to introduce yield management as a concept to my company. So I understand why they're doing it and what they're optimizing for and some deans were very transparent with us that this is a college issue, not a student issue, solving for the college. Your friend is probably Jonathan Burdick, who you talked about from Cornell.

Lee Coffin:
Yeah, right.

Ash ElDifrawi:
I'm guessing as well. So I understand that, but the question is how should students navigate this in a way that feels healthy and to their benefit, despite the fact that it's not constructed for them?

Lee Coffin:
So two things. There's a business function hiding behind the work I do and the business function is I am in charge of generating a full enrollment for the institution where I work. If that doesn't happen, either there's too many, too few, things start to get complicated really quickly. For places that are more tuition dependent, that's where this yield question really comes in because the dean has to really guarantee a certain cohort at matriculation. So that's nothing for students to worry about, but that's where you hear people talking about it, but to the early question, I don't know, there are days where I feel like, oh my god, I am a dinosaur wandering around the landscape of college admissions right now because I'm going to give you a very old fashioned answer that I've been saying since the 1990s.

To me, an early application signals it's your first choice. You have done your homework and as you come into the fall of senior year, one place has emerged as the place where you see yourself thriving. There it is. Then apply in November. What runs parallel to that is this strategy component where some will say your best chances are applying early and there are some colleges that will load up in the early round for reasons that are distinct to those campuses, but for me, the advice I give to seniors is if somewhere has emerged, there's no risk in saying to the college, "I see myself here. It is my first choice and I'm applying, binding or not." As we read that file, this is where the story behind the news that you'll see in mid- December every year about it's "easier to get in early than regular." Yeah, the acceptance rate is not identical in both of those rounds.

Part of that is a volume proposition. The end of applicants is lower. Part of it is as you read during November, I pick up every single file and say to myself, "Can I make this work," because I know that on the other end of that file is a high school senior who put her heart on the line and said, "This is my first choice." I can't always say yes, but that question dances in that round in a way that it cannot in March, because we've got thousands and thousands and thousands of people who have applied to a dozen plus institutions, and I'm not asking you then to tell me it's your first choice and that's where you're managing yield because you're trying to figure out how many do I admit to fill the remaining seats in the class? In early, class is empty and you, as a high quality student who has submitted a high quality application and has also said, "This is my first choice," I mean, you'd be cold hearted not to look at that scenario and say, "Why would I say no?"

This is where my colleagues will say to me, "You're such a softie." I'm like, "I'm a human." I am not doing this job because I want to make people cry. I know that there's an emotional current that comes through the work I do and I cannot say yes to as many students as I wish I could because of where I work and our scale, but in the early rounds, it's especially true. I think this question about EA or ED, early action, non-binding, whether it's single choice or not, then I think some students use it as their early S word. I've heard students say to me, "Well, this is my safety." There, I just said it. I'm applying, going to put it in my pocket. It's an insurance for what comes next. I think, I don't know that that's really the spirit of what these colleges are trying to do by inviting you to apply with it in a non-binding round, but I get it.

Then the binding places, Dartmouth among them, are saying, "Be intentional. If you see yourself on this campus, here's an option. We only do round one. We don't have round two or three for early." For us, it's twined with being need-blind all the way through. We meet full need. I think our financial aid is very generous, but in the event that a binding offer is extended and a family says, "Oh, this financial aid award isn't realistic for us," we will release students. We only had one release last year and it was a question of the family was like, "Yeah, we have the resources. We don't want to spend them." I'm like, "That's your choice, but we cannot give you need-based aid in this scenario." We released the student, but that's rare, but anyway, so I think the stress of it comes with trying to force an early decision into a space where a student's not ready to do that. That's called regular. That's called January, send in your best work. I think the results in March are going to be more surprising than not.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
So you already mentioned that your board of trustees was wondering is this too many applications and you, yourself, want application numbers to fall. So I'm wondering, where is all this heading? Are we going to start seeing a trend where all applications are going to be early and so many people are going to be EDing that it loses all meaning? I'm wondering, is this working and what does it look like going forward?

Lee Coffin:
Yeah. So you're asking me this question as somebody, if this was a baseball game, if my career were a baseball game, I'm in the late innings of the baseball game at this point. As I start to think about my legacy as a Dean and as an admission officer, I have started to say to my peers, "What are we doing?" Maybe that's privilege. Maybe because of where I work and the success I've had over these years, I'm starting to speak up as we reconvene after the pandemic and say, "Something is breaking if it hasn't broke and where is there an opportunity for a reset?" I have to be careful I mean, it can't be collusion. So there are some legal frameworks that are just the reality, but as a profession, I plan to be a voice among my peers that is saying, "Let's rethink this."

Maybe I'm being naive, but I think, well, maybe as an Ivy Dean, if I start saying this a bit, maybe others should just say, "Oh, well, if they're saying it, maybe we can think about it too." Create a permission structure for all of us to start to say, "Why are these tiny admit rates good and how much lower can they go and is that healthy, not just for applicants, but for the people in the admission office who have to read them and make the decisions?" There's no joy in saying no to so many people. I mean, my first year as an admissions officer, 1990, the admit rate was, at Connecticut College, that year was 49 point something percent and that was not unusual.

So you're taking one of every two and there was something lovely about being able to consider students with more of an eye towards potential and not just based on have you hit potential by 12th grade? So you're asking a big question, Ash, and I don't know that what I'm saying is going to happen. I do know a lot of us in my peer group are starting to talk about this. Certainly the schools are saying it. The high school part of college admission is starting to poke us and say stop it and I think the colleges are starting to come to the realization that more and more and more, it is not good, good, good.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Yeah. I mean, I agree with you on that and that I think for high school students, I think a lot of them would agree as well.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Yeah.

Lee Coffin:
It's too much pressure.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah, especially around here. I live in a very competitive place when it comes to colleges and I can see, sometimes it will flay people a little bit, but I want to move on from there. That's a little bit dark place. I have some more, I guess, quicker questions. The first one being about this topic of summer programs, which we haven't talked about before on here and coming out of the summer now was on the top of my mind for a while. So I know Dartmouth has their own summer programs. I'm wondering how does that figure into a student's demonstrated interest, if you guys measure that, or how does that figure into a student's value proposition as they're entering the admission cycle?

Lee Coffin:
So you mean summer programs for high school students to take courses?

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Yes.

Lee Coffin:
Yeah, so honestly, I've never seen that as a very high-value proposition in the college. I think there's a belief that, oh, if you do the summer program, you have a leg up. I don't think that's true. I think they're enrichment programs where the experience, the coursework, whatever the topic of the program is, that's valuable in and of itself. I've never worked at a place where there's a bonus point for participation in one of those programs, nor have I heard my peers, when we do panels, pointing to them as this is the back door into this college. I think the bigger question, Aidan, is how do you spend your summer?

Again, old fashioned guy in Hanover, I think giving yourself permission to be a kid for a little bit longer is important. You don't need to spend every minute, every week of summer doing something that looks good on the college application. I think sometimes things that look good are things that make you a whole, well adjusted, happy person. So learning how to take time out, I think is valuable. I don't think I'm naive in saying that. I don't hear my fellow admission officers dwelling on the summer as another window of opportunity to prove yourself. A lot of students do wonderful things during the summer and that informs lots of elements of their narrative as they apply. It's not a required element.

Ash ElDifrawi:
All right. So I know we've covered a lot of ground, but I also know that you have a couple of podcasts. You're very passionate about this and you love to share information. So we're curious whether or not there's something that maybe we didn't cover that you think is on student's minds that they want to know about.

Lee Coffin:
Yeah, no, I mean, I always love talking to high school seniors. So Aidan, I would love to have a quick conversation with you about how you're feeling as you've come out of your junior year. The summer's, maybe you're back in school already, but how is this feeling for you as you enter prime time?

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Yeah, oh, it's...

Lee Coffin:
Yeah, oh is one of my favorite words.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Words. Yeah, it is definitely a mix of feelings. So there is definitely an element of stress to it, especially where I live. I know I mentioned it's competitive, but there is an undue emphasis around here around the place you go to college and academic success beyond all of the things. So I do feel a good amount of pressure in that area, but also there is a lot of places I'd like to go. I've looked at a lot of colleges. I've been considering a lot of things and there is a little bit of stress on where will I fit in? What is my best possible fit? It's is a hard thing to figure out, even if you go and visit a campus for a day or so. It's still hard to really get a good grasp on that.

So trying to figure out where I want to go combined with will I actually be able to get into this place? Are my grades good enough? How do I look compared to my peers? There is a lot of things at play and a lot of uncertainties in my mind that have made me stressed, but at the same time, it's like I've been working towards going to college for all of high school. This is a really cool thing to be able to do is to finally sit down, write my essays, like my dad said, think about all the things I've done throughout high school that are cool, that I can be proud of and get that all done on paper. So it is this combination of there's stress, but there's also reward in the process itself.

Lee Coffin:
Well, I think one of the way... You're not saying things I've never heard and especially coming out of a high-powered suburban community. I think my one tip to you, Aidan, would be, it's hard to do it, but keep your own council. I think what's so tricky as you navigate senior year in a high school community like yours is avoiding the idea that this is the Hunger Games and that everybody in your senior class are rivals and only one of you can win. It may help keep you focused. You control your own application and what's going in it and where you apply and what story you're telling and who you're telling it to, period. To the degree that you can inoculate yourself against the chatter, and this is true for Dad as well, I think what causes stress is you get too much input from other people who have points of view.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Hey, now, careful.

Lee Coffin:
No, no, no. I've been a dean for 28 years. So when you rewind me, I was in my early thirties and the parents were my parents' age. Over my journey, I've become one of this parent group. They're my peers. Now, sometimes they're even a little younger and so I'm starting to look at my peer group in the parent world and saying, "Our parents didn't do this to us in the seventies and eighties and early nineties." Turn down the volume, turn down the angst that we're feeding our high school children. I think we're doing it out of love and trying to generate the best outcome we can, but we also can give them a role model in saying, "Let's keep this in perspective. You're a high achieving, likable kiddo, and you're going to go to college."

Which one's still TBD, but college in and of itself is not the question mark for a lot of people. The media, and here we are in a podcast and I contribute to this myself. I try and be reassuring as I speak publicly and to empower you, Aidan, as a applicant to do your best work and to convince you, when I look at the students we admit to Dartmouth every year who then say, "No, thank you. I'm going somewhere else," they're going to wonderful places. So Dartmouth saw this and other places did too and it does work. The selectivity that gnaws at you is not as toxic as you worry it will be.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Yeah. Well, a lot of what you just said resonated with me, especially when I've listened to your own podcast. It was very reassuring. That's one of the reasons I wanted to have you on here is it made me feel better to listen to it.

Lee Coffin:
Thank you.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
The reason it really does resonate with me, and the reason I think I have a harder time in this community with college admissions is because, like I said several times, it's competitive, but the way I'm wired is I also like to help people. I'm energized by helping out my peers and by seeing people succeed. I feel sometimes energy when it comes to college admissions is there's envy between people and can get toxic. So hearing what you're saying now is very reassuring and I think for a lot of students that are wired in a similar way, it can really help them with the process.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Ironically, despite the fact that you ratted me out… Just stop and I try to own it. That's why we did this podcast. What I'm most proud of from Aidan is the fact that he actually wanted to do these interviews so he could help his peers because, to literally give them an advantage in getting better, he's been helping his friends think about how to make these choices and even how to potentially get into schools I know Aidan wants to get into. He actually even knows that they might not accept too many people from the school, yet he's trying to help his friends get in there. So I think it is hard. I've seen him struggle with it because this community's not always wired that way.

Lee Coffin:
No. Aidan, you said a sentence I hope you write in your application somewhere. You said, "I am energized when I am helping people." That's a headline. That may not seem like the kind of thing a college is going to dial into and appreciate. A hundred percent, we will. If we were on Instagram, I'd put a little red 100 at the bottom of your picture there. That's exactly the kind of thing a college admission officer is trying to know about you. What makes you tick? You're energized by helping people and this podcast is one of many ways in which you do that. That helps frame our sense of you as a person. We can see you as a student on your transcript. You as a person is going to come through these more subjective, qualitative characteristics. So what you just said is really, really important. So I just wanted to toss a little cookie back and say, "You just said something really, really important."

Aidan ElDifrawi:
I appreciate that.

Lee Coffin:
Yeah. I have another question for you, Aidan. So you are uniquely positioned as a high school senior in that you've interviewed a bunch of college admission Deans, which most 17, 18-year-olds don't meet one of us, never mind a bunch. What has surprised you as you've had these conversations with us?

Aidan ElDifrawi:
I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. I very pleasantly surprised.

Lee Coffin:
Why?

Aidan ElDifrawi:
The thing I have found is that I think in the process, especially for high schoolers, it's very easy to think, you see colleges in this very bureaucratic lens where you're not really sure who's behind all of it. When I've talked to every single Dean, including yourself, what I found is you are all extremely passionate about the process being, A, holistic, but also just you guys clearly want to say yes to as many students as you can. You respect that students really want to come to these schools and just a general respect you show for the process and for students desires.

Ash ElDifrawi:
How much work they put in.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
How much work students put in. The work you guys put in yourselves is inspiring and it also makes me feel better about the hands my application will go through. Even if I don't receive a yes, I feel like I have been sufficiently accounted for and respected.

Lee Coffin:
Yeah. I'm glad that that's coming through and I always smile when I meet students and they say, "You're nicer than I thought you'd be." I smile and I say, "Why wouldn't I be nice?" They're like, "Well, you're the Dean of admission." It's like, "Yeah, but I am not Darth Vader." I'm not, but there's this mysterious persona that we turn into these little cartoon characters. I think part of it is there's just not a lot of us out there. So you don't bump into a Dean of admission every day and have a conversation. So you think of us as the name on the letter that says no.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Yeah.

Lee Coffin:
But I'm also the name on the letter that says yes and that's our purpose. I haven't done this for my career because it seemed like a masochistic way of just making high school seniors unhappy.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Yeah. You didn't ask, but I'm going to answer what I found most surprising about it.

Lee Coffin:
That was my next question.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Well, so a couple things. So first of all, I've been unbelievably pleasantly surprised at the level of transparency and honesty that they've shared within the discussions, and empathy and compassion. I simulate to Aidan, even fall in the trap of being a little bit more this conceptual idea, this caricatures that has been shattered for me very pleasantly. The other piece of it, I have a strong appreciation for how hard this is. So having been in all kinds of different business worlds solving really complex, I have a real appreciation for solving very complex problems and how hard it is to serve the needs of many, I don't want to say masters, but many things you have to balance. So the needs of the school, the needs of the students, present, future, the needs of every faculty, department. You can't starve anybody. You can't keep everybody happy.

Just I can imagine this is three-dimensional chess and so I just had a huge appreciation for just a level in depth of complexity that they're solving for. I always had it in the back of my mind, but it came through very clearly that you're all trying to do their best to solve this complex problem. The other thing that they were honest about, which I thought was interesting is that this process is built around the school's needs, where some of them say very honestly, "It helps us to have more applicants because it gives us some more our opportunity to shape the school the way we want." So the fact that they're at least open and honest about that, realizing that might not necessarily be in the best interest of the students all the time, but they're solving a college problem. I appreciated some of them being honest about that.

Lee Coffin:
Yeah, no, I'm nodding as you say that. I work for Dartmouth College right now, and it's my responsibility on its behalf to lead this process every year in a way that brings the best class we can get to Hanover, New Hampshire. In doing that, to be compassionate and to be humane and to, I think, help families understand that if you've wandered into this competitive end of the college admission process, and it is a small subset of the larger national topic, but it's where all the electricity sits. The space where I've always worked is where all the tough stuff happens because it's supply and demand in an economics kind of way where lots of volume, limited ability to respond to it, and how do you do it as thoughtfully and ethically as we can?

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Well, that's all we had.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Wow, wow, wow.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Yeah. So any final thoughts?

Lee Coffin:
I really appreciated the invitation to have this conversation with you this morning, and I'm impressed that you're able to do what you're doing. As a fellow podder, I discovered this medium the beginning of COVID and I at the beginning really didn't know what I was doing. I was just like, "Well, we're talking to people," but what I appreciate is it's another opportunity for transparency, that you're bringing voices forward that help listeners say, "Seems like a nice guy."

Ash ElDifrawi:
Yeah.

Lee Coffin:
I appreciate that, that the platform invites that kind of conversation, and it's not antagonistic. Even when Dad said, "I'm going to be a little cynical." It's like, "It's not cyn-" because you have peers out there who are more cynical than what you just were.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Yeah. Yeah.

Lee Coffin:
It's an opportunity to say, "Well, yeah, but here's another way to think about what's happening."

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Well, that's the perfect note to end on.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Yes, it is.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
I want to thank you once again, Mr. Coffin, for joining us today. It's been very informative and I had a great time.

Lee Coffin:
Thank you. It's been fun.

Ash ElDifrawi:
All right. Let's take a quick break and come back with some final thoughts.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Well, that was interesting.

Ash ElDifrawi:
You just got impromptu interviewed by the Dean of admissions at Dartmouth.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Yeah, well, how the turntables.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Nice. Nice Office reference.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Anyway, how'd I do?

Ash ElDifrawi:
You had a couple of extra ums.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
All right. 

Ash ElDifrawi:
Okay. All right, all right. Thanks. I appreciate that. All right, before we go, do you want to...

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Yeah. I'll give one last plug.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Okay.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
For Mr. Coffin's podcasts. The one that he updates most frequently and currently is the Admissions Beat.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Yeah.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
His one that I think he has finished but previously had, was called The Search Podcast with Lee Coffin.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Okay.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Both are wonderful and you can find them wherever you find your podcasts.

Ash ElDifrawi:
With that, I'll finish off once again by thanking our audience. As you know, we are the finalists in the People Choice Awards in two categories, which will be revealed at end of September. We also continue to build a lot of momentum. In fact, just recently named the top 1% of all podcasts globally in terms of audience size. So we're super excited about that. So thanks for all you do. Thanks for all those five-star reviews. They really help.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Hold Me Back. As always, please check out our site, holdmeback.com, for show notes and any other information from this episode.

Ash ElDifrawi:
Who was more convincing? Please vote and leave any feedback. We read all of it.

Aidan ElDifrawi:
See you next time.

Lee Coffin:
I think you heard what I heard. This was a really lovely conversation. I'm always really taken with conversations with high school seniors, and it reminds me I probably need to do more of it on the Admission Beat. So Aidan, as a senior at Hinsdale Central in Illinois is a kid with great wisdom and insight and it was really a treat to be able to have a conversation with Aidan and his dad and to witness their banter back and forth as they navigate the college admission process this year. Next week, we'll be back with an episode that looks at standardized testing and the way it fits into the college admission process this year or not. So until then, this is Lee Coffin from Dartmouth College. Thanks for joining us.