Season 2: Episode 5 Transcript
The Pull of Prestige
Lee Coffin:
From Dartmouth College, this is Lee Coffin, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid. Welcome to the Admission Beat.
Geanine Thompson:
I accept that for most families, that's the conversation we're going to start— U.S. News & World Report rankings—and that's okay. But the conversation goes beyond that and that's part of the process. And I am a firm believer and I always say trust the process.
Lee Coffin:
So when I meet juniors and seniors in high school and help them think about the path to college, I often advise them to keep in mind what I call the three P's. Program, people, and place. And those P's represent three big building blocks of any successful college search. And then there's a fourth P, price, that also comes into this conversation to inform the discovery and the idea about where is the best next place for me. But there's a naughty fifth P that dances around this conversation and invites attention. And that fifth P is prestige. And it's hard to have a conversation about college admission and particularly competitive college admission without this pull of prestige, this wink towards reputation being part of the conversation.
And so I thought seniors, parents, it's time to pause our guidance and have a thoughtful conversation with some people who are in the schools and in the conversation with you about the proper place of prestige, if any, in your search for a college. So this week on Admissions Beat, we tackle prestige, rankings, selectivity, and all of the other distracting elements that might make your internal conversation a bit more complicated.
Today I'm joined by three friends from very different parts of the country with really different backgrounds to help us think about this pursuit of prestige and how there might be some regional differences as well as we find students in different parts of the US. So going east to west. Kate Ramsdell is the Director of College Counseling at Noble and Greenough School in Dedham, Massachusetts. And for long-time listeners of my podcast, welcome back Kate. It's always fun to have you as a member of the Admissions Beat.
Kate Ramsdell:
Thanks, Lee. It's so good to see you and nice to be here.
Lee Coffin:
And then moving to the southeast, Steve Soud is the Director of College Counseling at Isidore Newman School in New Orleans. And previously worked at the Bolles School in Jacksonville, Florida. And before that was a faculty member at Maryville College in Tennessee. So Steve brings not only a southeast U.S. perspective, but he's actually been in a classroom with undergraduates in a way that I think helps inform the topic we're having. So Steve, always fun to see you. Welcome to the Beat.
Steve Soud:
Thanks so much, Lee. I'm delighted to be here and really excited to join in on this conversation.
Lee Coffin:
Thanks. And from the west coast, someone who got up really early to join us this morning is my friend Geanine Thompson, who is the CEO of the College Guru College Consulting, where she helps families navigate this process one by one over many, many years. She's also been involved with the Gates Foundation in their scholarship program. And she's also been part of the A Better Chance program. So Geanine brings multiple different perspectives to this as well as one from our friends out west. So hi Geanine. Good morning.
Geanine Thompson:
Good morning. I'm so excited to be here.
Lee Coffin:
So I named this podcast the Admissions Beat in part because the media, whether it's mainstream, social, or just cocktail party chatter, is very animated about the work we all do. And in the back-to-school moment every year, there's a boatload of stories that swirl around the topic of college rankings, which of course is directly connected to the idea of prestige and reputation. And I think this year, maybe even more so, there was an accentuated buzz as the media focused on the idea that Columbia University dropped from number two to number 18 in the U.S. News & World Report rankings after some of the data that was submitted was verified. There was a story in The Washington Post that underscored what it called the chase for prestige. There was a story in The Boston Globe where it was lamenting the faux precision of the rankings. U.S. Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, called the rankings a joke.
So strong words coming from lots of different quarters. And I'm wondering for the three of you, what do you see with students and parents as they both listen to this media but also try to make sense of it?
Steve Soud:
I've been fortunate working mostly in the Southeast, actually entirely in the Southeast, my career. And there's not quite the anxiety that I hear other of my colleagues. Kate could probably speak to this and Geanine as well, that we have some kids who pay attention to the ranking, some kids and families. But it's a relatively small number here and I'm grateful for that.
Lee Coffin:
Geanine, you're nodding. Is that true for you?
Geanine Thompson:
No. I'm in California and I have clients all over the country and I actually have some out of the country and they do pay close attention to the rankings. So I do try to have those conversations and say, Okay, this is a great starting point, but let's go beyond the ranking. Let's dig deeper.
Lee Coffin:
But Geanine, when you say they zero in on them, what are they zeroing in on? What's the comment you hear most often?
Geanine Thompson:
Well, people do care. It's like, "Oh well, I understand this school is the best, so I should go here." And I'm like, "But best for what?"
So I start asking questions because this is what I'm hearing from teens, because that's what they're hearing. So when I start asking questions, I realize that at this starting point, many of them haven't done the research, so they're really picking up their cues from everyone else around them. And so it's my job to say, stop and ask some questions. And then we have a really good conversation.
Lee Coffin:
And Kate, I always think of Metro Boston as the fertile crescent of college admission angst. So you live right in those zip codes. What are you hearing?
Kate Ramsdell:
So Steve, I don't want to paint our regions with broad brush strokes, but what I would say is to do my research, I Googled college rankings last night, first thing that comes up, NCAA football rankings. So in your world, I'm going to guess that matters a whole lot more than the actual ranking.
Steve Soud:
Kate, you were spot on. It's really funny that kids here, even more so than when I was in Jacksonville, kids are super attuned to what's going on in the SEC. And yes, there was a lot of attention paid, Kate to that.
Lee Coffin:
Steve, is that a type of prestige? It's a different type of prestige, but isn't it the same topic?
Steve Soud:
It is, on a certain level. I do think it gets what the kids are looking for when they talk about that is spirit. And you talked about the five P's. And I think when you combine program and place, you get something closer to what I and more fancy academic jargon would call ethos, or perhaps more in popular terminology, the vibe of the place. And kids are looking for that vibe very often. I never begin a conversation that's going to lead to a college list, but it always begins with who are you? Tell me about yourself and let's let that drive the search.
Lee Coffin:
Kate, back to your-
Kate Ramsdell:
I just want to pluck on something Geanine said. She used the word "anxiety," which is so prevalent in our work. And even if it's not full-blown anxiety, it's worry. So I think there for me, and I think probably for all of us, people come to this with the rankings as almost like a centering for themselves. Something has to matter in this. So let me start here because the whole world is telling me that this is important. So we try, at least I encourage everybody in our office to try to think about what are the different reasons that people are clinging to those rankings. And I think they're different for different people, but it depends also on who you're working with. It could be somebody who had the chance to go to Dartmouth, Lee, and they're desperate for their child to follow in their footsteps.
It could be somebody who has a child who's going to be the first in their family to go to college and this is going to be a mechanism for shifting their place and their income and their opportunities in society for a generation of people. There's people who are coming to this country, they were educated somewhere else and the way they were educated, it was all in thinly veiled meritocracy maybe, but much more numbers-driven and easier to understand the way colleges were going to admit kids so that when they come here, it's like my British parents going, "Why do they care about clubs and organizations? Who cares about clubs and organizations?" So I think that's an interesting question to ask people, what's your why? So I think that's an interesting question to ask people. What's your why around?
Lee Coffin:
Well, and I just wrote down "rankings as centering." I thought that was such an elegant way of centering this topic too, where there is a lot of uncertainty, a lot of ambiguity, a lot of what goes on behind the closed door, questioning around the way a selective college does its work. And I hadn't thought about that before, that the rankings create something that is perceived as being transparent.
Kate Ramsdell:
And I think let us maybe not forget that you're paying more for a college education now in many cases than most people are ever going to either have or pay for a house. So there's some portion of this that has to be driven by the rising cost. I would imagine.
Lee Coffin:
I go back to my own college search and the very early 1980s. And for parents, I'm guessing you're broadly in my age band and those of us who went to college or thought about college in the eighties did so before rankings were a thing. I'm always struck even in the Ivy League, the Ivy League wasn't informed until 1954. In that same vein, U.S. News & World Report did not offer a college rankings list until 1983. I would say reputation was not a new phenomenon in 1983, but that was really the first time it was quantified in some way that you can look and say this is number one, this is number 10, this is number 11. And Steve, Geanine, I'm guessing you might remember that moment as well.
Geanine Thompson:
I do remember the conversations then and they do not compare to the conversations we have today for sure.
Steve Soud:
I might be the oldest person in this podcast. I'm 60, so I graduated a class of '80. Who thought about rankings? But I entered the admission world when I was a cub admission counselor at Davidson starting in 1984. Those rankings had just come out and it dropped a bit of a bombshell on the profession at the time.
Lee Coffin:
No, it did. And here we are in the fall of '22 and headlines at CNN and the Washington Post and the Boston Globe and media outlets, big and small, all around that focusing on this same topic. So what do you three see as the intersection of prestige and logic?
Kate Ramsdell:
Logic goes out the window when you put all of this in front of somebody. We have said in our office we use a ranking system or rating system that has four parts, far reach, reach possible, likely. It's driven by the database that we use, Naviance. But we've actually scratched our heads a little bit and said with a group of high achieving kids, when you tell them something is a far reach, it's what they want, that's what they want to go for. It's such a conundrum in some ways because what you're really trying to do is set their expectations and guide them towards a reasonable choice set using logic. And yet their emotion and this concept of what they deserve and how they're going to get there seems to take over any rational thinking. Because sometimes if I call this a possible, they're not going to want to go there. Should I, within reason, call it a reach to make it more appealing?
Lee Coffin:
Because reach has a little bit of cache.
Kate Ramsdell:
Reach has a little more cache, right? Reach is a reach. So if you're looking at an excellent school, we pick on Hamilton College all the time, it's an extraordinary place, Hamilton is a really good example of a place that's actually climbed the rankings pretty substantially in the last, I don't know, five, 10 years. But for a top, top scholar it may be a possible, but it could be a great fit. They want an open curriculum, they want a small college, they want it to be rural. And then they get obsessed with the, it's neighbor Amherst College, that they can't maybe get into. And you think to yourself, they're almost identical and you can get in, why wouldn't you love it? And that's a small example of people letting rankings hijack their thinking.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Geanine Thompson:
I agree with Kate when you pose the question I thought, ah, rational, what is that? It's all about emotion. And we have those conversations and I really try to talk through the process. So there isn't this angst about it. And it's really, I love what Steve said, I start there too. Let's start with you first. What do you want? Have you thought about this? Have you thought about what you'd like to study? Have you had a chance maybe to look at a couple of colleges and campuses? Do you like a larger campus, a smaller campus? Spirit, team spirit falls into that. Do you want to go to all these great football games? What activities do you want to participate in? Are you a kid who wants to do music? You're a theater person? We need to talk about those conversations. What are you going to actually do when you get there? That is what's really important. And you can do that at a lot of different places.
Lee Coffin:
So how do you diffuse the emotion? It's organically part of what we do. The three of you bring logic, wisdom, the lessons of history to the conversations you have. I know you look two recent years and say a student who looked like this from this place did or did not have a successful outcome. And I've heard colleagues say, nobody wants to listen to that. There's this, well, let's just see what happens mentality. I'm going to ignore the wisdom and just go anyway because it's an outcome that feels like if I can get it, I have won. Does that ring true?
Steve Soud:
Lee, you talked about the emotional aspect of this. And so much of this process I think is driven by that family dynamic and relationship. And we're very candid with parents. And families have had this, hopefully, deeply intimate relationship for 18 years. And now the child is leaving the nest. And so parents have a deep investment, a deep psychological, and sometimes social investment if they're paying attention to what everybody else is doing and they want to make sure that whatever nest that they're little fledgling is leaving for is nicely feathered, let's put it that way.
But the kids, and I think this goes misunderstood and overlooked very often. At the end of the day, kids want to please their parents. And when you're a parent and a 17-year-old is yelling at you and pushing back and doing whatever they do, you don't think your kid wants to please you. They've spent their teenage years evidently trying not to please you.
Lee Coffin:
And to defy you.
Steve Soud:
Yeah. But the reality is at the end of the day, kids want their parents to be proud of them. And so I think there's this deep emotional push and pull both on the parental side and on the student side as they go through this process and this process, it sort of distills all of that and puts it in one place that people can focus on a little too much quite frankly.
Lee Coffin:
Okay, so let's ask a practical question. So in the spirit of news you can use, I'm a senior, it's early October, I've got a bunch of places I'm still thinking about, but I need to have some kind of sorting mechanism. How do I create my own individually focused mini-ranking?
Kate Ramsdell:
So I think I would ask kids to build themselves a rubric of sorts and we've worked on all kinds of frameworks for our kids over the years. And I actually got this idea from a history teacher who uses this to evaluate writing. And it's an extremely simple three-column rubric, where in the middle you put what your criteria are. And so it could be the size, the location, that it can meet your full need, that it has certain special interests that align with yours. And then on either side the first pass is that you kind of go through it and you say, either meets or does not meet and here's why. So that's a very simple first rubric. But I do see it as being effective because it just makes them think a little bit harder about even within this set of negotiables or non-negotiables, I have what is most important now. And so that would be a one practical way you could approach doing a ranking system for yourself.
Lee Coffin:
Geanine, would you amend Kate's rubric in any way?
Geanine Thompson:
I think it's a great idea. I find for students who are really lost and have no idea, of course I start with the common things like major, let's talk about your major. Can we not choose a school that does not have your major, please? This happens. So there's that. Is geography important to you? Are there social things that are important to you? What kind of experiences do you want to have? Do you want to study abroad? Are you someone who's into political science, so you want to be in DC having some great internship? We look at all those pieces of data, and then speaking to Kate's point, rank them and decide, okay, these are my pros, these are my cons. And where does my school fit?
Lee Coffin:
Steve?
Steve Soud:
Well, I'll say two things. Number one, Kate, we actually, eight or 10 years ago, when I was at Bolles and we use it at Newman as well, we came up with a college decision matrix that is the spreadsheet you're describing. I think Kate, one of the insights I'm going to take away as a college counselor from this podcast is maybe we need to be using that a little earlier in the process. Because we would give that to kids in March and April as they're trying to make a decision. But maybe we need to be using it a little earlier in the process, so that's great. And the other thing I think is U.S. News doesn't go to the campus. They don't do site visits. And not just U.S. News, but lots of the rankings don't do site visits. It's all called from data. The organization that I'm aware of that does do site visits is Phi Beta Kappa.
And when I say I'm aware of, I was not Phi Beta Kappa member, let me be clear about that. Am not, was not. But they do site visits and I think probably the closest thing we have in the profession to a good housekeeping seal of approval is a list of colleges that have Phi Beta Kappa. And very often that will surprise parents at some of the places that are on that list or aren't on that list. That's not a bad place to start for a kid who's maybe a little further in the process, maybe not, and Geanine talking to the kids who have no idea. That might not help a kid who has no idea, but it might help a kid got some idea.
Lee Coffin:
And that's really helpful Steve. And I wonder if we can talk about the act of narrowing the list. So we're moving through the fall and so the discovery phase is still ongoing of course, but it's time to get serious and come up with almost a more cohesive set of options. And as a counselor, how do you navigate the construction of the where will I apply conversation? Because I can imagine their parental push towards go for this. There's some student instinct to agree with what the parents want. How do you navigate that as a family?
Geanine Thompson:
I'm very honest with families and I say, "Look, we can have these schools on this list and that's fabulous and wonderful yet." Frankly, I pull out the numbers, let's look at the raw numbers and look at the data. And when you have 80,000 kids applying for say 2,000 spots, parents are surprised when they look at the real numbers. And to that point I say "Yeah, we will still do this. We're going to prepare. You're going to work through, prepare the best application possible. You've worked so hard to get to this point. And we're also going to look at a wide range of schools." And that means sometimes having kids stretch. So I really do engage them and really invite them to really expand what they initially have considered. And because we do have a good relationship, I find that eventually we get there.
Lee Coffin:
So Geanine, you pointed me towards numbers, which was something I wanted to talk about because there's so much data. Rankings being one type of a number, but it just broadly, I swim in data. I generate a lot of it. It bombards me from all perspectives. And I think there's a perception among applicants and their parents that the acceptance rate is the mother of all numbers. That prestige and the idea that nobody got in are inextricably linked. And that if it's hard to get in, it must be the better option.
Kate Ramsdell:
"Well, now I need to apply to every top-rank school in the country because if I throw enough darts at the dartboard, I've got to get one." When we know that's not true.
Lee Coffin:
A lot of us over many, many, many years have celebrated our selectivity in press releases and the way we frame the narrative, our institutions. And I think initially it wasn't designed to be something that generated angst, but as the selectivity got tinier and tinier and tinier, how could you do anything but panic when you hear someone say, my admit rate is 4%. Because you flip that around and that means 96%. God and I'm sorry. And I think what you do see among many of my peers is this beginning of a retreat. Stanford started it a few years ago where they said, "You know what? We're not going to publish any information. It's available when it needs to be available, but let's recenter this conversation on something besides the acceptance rate and the yield and the number of applications." And then others follow suit. Last year in particular, there were several that followed Stanford into the very, very redacted press release.
Those campuses were chided for a lack of transparency. And so what is it? Should colleges put it all out there or is there a thoughtful way of lowering the temperature a little bit by talking about different things at key moments of the cycle so that the data that floods us is in a more controlled way?
Geanine Thompson:
I felt it was inauthentic. What does that prove? I read the press releases. "Oh, we don't want to contribute to the discussion." You are already in the discussion. You're already consistently on the top five, top 10 list. So you are part of the discussion, you drive the discussion. So I didn't think that was really fair. I didn't think it was fair to students. I didn't think it was fair to families. So just give us the data please.
Kate Ramsdell:
Geanine, I'm with you all the way. Because I also think that, and this is a cliche, but information is power and the powerful often have information. And it is very difficult for families who are new to the game are not in those concentric circles of access. Let's not take away more. That's how I think about it. Let's not keep taking things away from folks who may not have it in the same way that I think you're right. I didn't suddenly think that Stanford had an 18% admit rate.
Geanine Thompson:
Like you said, power. We have to think about, I think we look at a small sliver in our heads traditionally of who we believe or just from our experience of who's applying to schools. But I know from my experience, I've worked for nonprofits, I worked at the Emily K Center, Coach K's nonprofit for a while. And a lot of my students there were first-gen students. And so it was really important, they were new to this process. And so it was about really an education and sharing a lot of data so that families could understand how to navigate, students can understand how to navigate and make really good decisions. So when you do, to your point Kate, take that data away, it really hurts families.
Lee Coffin:
It's hard. You're right, there's the acceptance rate that gets put in the headline. It presumes that students who are at the top of, let's call it the academic achievement curve, have a 4% admit rate just like everybody else. And you might have an applicant pool that's bottom-heavy, that a lot of people applied who shouldn't have and they were not offered admission. But students who are more appropriately in the competitive band have a much higher acceptance rate than what gets listed. It's just, there's no way to break that out.
But I take the point about information is empowering, I think that's right. But I would push back on all three of you and say information is also misinterpreted. And I think if I have one ongoing harumph as an admission leader over decades, not just a couple of months, it's the way the numbers generated by an admission process get pulled, dissected, and interpreted in ways that are not constructive and often not true. I wanted to go back to the first gen topic. When are rankings or when is reputation useful? So is there a space in which a ranking or it can extend this idea of prestige, say a guidebook that is giving more maybe qualitative information is in fact purposeful, not in and of itself determinative, but that there's value there?
Geanine Thompson:
I still like the tried and true Fiske guide, to be honest. It's the old standby and they really do their best to be neutral and just share what they see. And I refer to it again and again. I love it.
Kate Ramsdell:
I'm with you. I believe that sometimes rankings have a lot to do with resources, not all. Most of the time. Much of the time. So if you think about-
Lee Coffin:
Institutional resources-
Kate Ramsdell:
Institutional, right.
Lee Coffin:
College, yeah.
Kate Ramsdell:
So you think about a student from a low-incomelife-changing background, first gen or not, and the ability to have their need, their financial need met by a university is life changing. And so more of the highly ranked schools can do that than the lower ranked schools. More schools with resources cannot saddle kids with debilitating debt.
Lee Coffin:
And it's surprising, I think, to many people. If you were to peel back the inputs into U.S. News & World Report, just to pick one, this historically has not been a criteria for their interpretation of best colleges in the U.S. And I think over the menu, the Washington Monthly does a set of rankings that's more focused on social mobility and service, and they have a very different list, one down than U.S News. There's lots of places that are on both. But what gets lost in rankings and in this conversation of prestige is this fundamental question, well what matters?
The inputs to the various rankings are really informative. And I once had an intern who was curious about what would the rankings look like if different categories counted. And he came up with a very different menu of inputs than U.S. News had. He looked at things like Pell Grants and the diversity of the incoming class, both racially, geographically, and first gen. He was focusing on the retention rate from first year to second year. And when he did that, he got a very different list than many rankings often celebrate. And I think in this era where data is plentiful and excel sheets are easy to use, it wouldn't be hard for a family to sit down with someone and say, "Okay, what are the categories that matter to me as attributes of the colleges I'd like to explore? Let me weight these and see what surfaces or not."
Because sometimes the name recognition drives this conversation about prestige, but the reality on the ground might not be the best place. You're all nodding as I say that. That's a much more labor intensive way of crunching data, but it could produce some hot moments that get lost if you just look at this and say, Oh, Dartmouth's number 12. Well, what does that tell you?
Kate Ramsdell:
I was thinking about this. I had my mic-drop rankings moment a number of years ago where "I thought I should retire now, this was such a good move."
I took out the U.S. News & World Report Magazine, and this is actually a little while ago now because we were looking at a magazine together. And I said, "Okay, let's lay out your criteria and now let's go through this rankings list and cross out every school that you can't go to. Military academy, the women's colleges." This happened to be a young man at the time. "You want a school in a more urban or suburban environment." We're checking off all of those things. "You'd like to major in Japanese, blah blah, blah." And the two schools that he had been entertaining the idea of one was traditionally probably more often ranked in the top five. The other was more traditionally ranked in the 45 to 50. And quite literally by the time we crossed off geographic outliers, program, whatever, they were right next to each other in the rankings and it was the best moment.
And I was like, I didn't plan it, I had no idea that was going to happen. But he looked at it and he was like, "Wow, okay." And he ended up going to the not as highly ranked place for a whole host of reasons, but it was awesome.
Steve Soud:
Well, going back to, Lee, at the outset, you talked about Columbia dropping from two to 18. It's a legitimate question to ask and I don't place any real value on either of those two numbers, but do we really think the experience at Columbia changed that much from one year to the next? No, of course not. But Lee, you also asked when are the rankings helpful?
When I have a kid who's really interested in social change, community change, I always love to pull out the Peace Corps rankings and they break them out by size of college and everything else. But who sent more kids to the Peace Corps the past year? And that's a real eyeopener for kids because it's not the places they expect. And so there is value to rankings when you can use it to expand kids' notion of what would be a good fit for them.
Lee Coffin:
No, that's a great point Steve. And are there other rankings any of you use that are not U.S. News? The Peace Corps ranking is a great example. What else is out there that a listener who does not have the benefit of a counselor like one of you in close proximity? What other lists in the internet or book-based space can someone access?
Kate Ramsdell:
I like to use the Pride index when I'm working with a student who may be thinking about a place that's got a more inviting and inclusive space for LGBTQIA+ students or students who are trans or non-binary. And it's not a perfect measure, but it's a great jumping-off point and gives you a great set of resources for kids. And it helps kids do a little bit of a deeper dive. Is this a campus where not only are there active affinity spaces, but I might be able to live in non-binary housing? Or I might be able to have access to more resources for mental health, for physical health to feel safe on a campus? And it's been a real game changer for some kids, is actually really shaped some lists for my students in the last couple of years.
Lee Coffin:
And I'm guessing some of the places on that list might not be top of my names in every case.
Kate Ramsdell:
Well, yes. And it's especially good because my flagship institution, UMass Amherst, is incredibly highly ranked. And unlike the south where lots and lots and lots of kids love to go to their state flagship who come from independent schools, that's not always the case here. We have lots of applicants, but it's a nice way to highlight that UMass is an incredible place for kids from all different kinds of identities to find a home.
Lee Coffin:
Steve, you once were a professor. From that campus classroom perspective broadly, did your sense of prestige shift when you were standing in front of a room having a conversation or teaching or grading? Or did you hear things from your students where you thought, what once they matriculate, prestige stops being a topic?
Steve Soud:
Well, the place I worked Maryville College, it's in east Tennessee. It's just outside Knoxville. It's one of the 50 oldest colleges in the country, founded in 1819. It was founded by a Princetonian. And so to this day, every Maryville college student writes a senior thesis. But it really focused on educating kids from rural and Appalachian backgrounds. And the education they got was really remarkable. It's not where you go, it's what you do when you get there.
Lee Coffin:
Geanine, did that resonate with you? Or you want to challenge it?
Geanine Thompson:
There's a caveat to that.
Lee Coffin:
Okay, go. Yeah.
Geanine Thompson:
So I do believe that it is important and cast a wide net and all of these things. However, the numbers show that if you are a person of color, it actually does matter where you go to school. And that's the unpleasant truth of the world we're living in. And so I'm very clear with my students of color that it does matter. So they do need to get into more competitive schools because it is going to make a difference in terms of when they walk into doors and people are going to give them more of a benefit of the doubt of, "Oh, you went to school here." That's a conversation people don't like to have. But I do need to bring it up because the numbers really support it.
Lee Coffin:
No, I think social mobility is a fundamental part of the work we do in college admission counseling. And I think there is an undeniable connection between alma mater and your resume and your ability to be seen as a viable candidate for certain jobs. That's another representation of prestige. It's like you borrow some of the institutional prestige and append it to yourself almost.
Is there anything, before we wrap this wonderful conversation, as people working with students directly, is there any question you want to pose to me, as a Dean of Admission, on this topic of prestige? It's come up a couple times, but is there some spotlight you want to swing back at the colleges and say, Hey, own this, talk about this?
Kate Ramsdell:
I have an unformed thought, but the question is, if tomorrow the rankings were to disappear, how would it change your student body?
Lee Coffin:
How would it change our student body? I think it might change my applicant pool. To the conversation we're having, I think some students who toss applications into the mar of selectivity just to see what happens, I think some of those would disappear. I have the privilege and the challenge of working at a college that is known as an Ivy quote, unquote. And I think that invites, that reputation invites some interest that's not always fully baked by a close inspection of the campuses. I'm always struggling when someone says to me, "I applied to all eight Ivies." And I think, why? Because each of them is such a fundamentally different place. We share an athletic league. Over time, it's become a type of higher ed brand. I get that if I don't like that. But the distance between each of us is more than geographic. We're profoundly different places.
So I think if rankings were to go away or if the word Ivy were struck from our higher ed nomenclature, I think the pools would probably shrink a bit. And maybe to your question, Kate, the class that's drawn from that pool might shift in some discreet way. I would say though, I'm answering this question by the applicant pool versus the class. I don't know that we shaped the class at all with an eye towards rankings. And maybe that's me being a kind of classic and old-fashioned, but I'm not thinking about it as we read files and as we invite people into the student body. I honestly don't think about rankings in any way.
Steve Soud:
But Lee, I would argue that's also a function of your position within the hierarchy, right? Because there are lots of colleges, even large state universities, I was just on a college campus of a large state university here in the south, and I was asking about the rankings. And he said, "Yeah, we know that 19 is the magic number." And he didn't mean 19 in the rankings, he meant that 19, that class size. Because one of those inputs that go into the U.S. News rankings is how many classes are under 20? And here's a faculty member saying, we know the magic number is 19. And there's a plus side to that. Some colleges are actively working to make some of their larger sections smaller.
There's a law of statistics, I think it's called Good Hearts Law, and it says when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure. And that's where I think things can get confusing with the rankings for a lot of parents. It's overwhelming. As you know, I'm a wine geek. And you go into a grocery store, how do you know which wine to buy if you don't really, really study it. And you go to the rankings, the ratings, well, here's what Wine Advocate says, here's what Wine Spectators says. So I get why the rankings feel comforting to parents who feel overwhelmed by the process.
Lee Coffin:
No, I think you're a hundred percent right. I see campuses all around me where the rankings have become guidelines. And I love the comment about something you measure shouldn't be the target. And it is in a lot of ways because it's this question of prestige. It's not just on the applicant side and the parent side, it's also the campus itself. Our alumni like us to be seen as a high-flying place and it all wraps around itself.
Geanine Thompson:
multi-layeredAnd let's face it, at the end of the day, the goal is to graduate and go out into the world and create a career. And there's prestige from the organizations that are going to be doing the hiring. It's multilayered.
Lee Coffin:
So the media in their September assessment of Prestige Ranking said it's time to just declare them as bunk. I don't know that we got to that conclusion. I think there's a critique of them as being limited or flawed, but I don't know that they're holy without some value in the way a family should use them. Maybe like testing as a supporting piece of information, not the driving piece of information. Is that a fair parallel?
Geanine Thompson:
I think it's a good place to start. And I accept that for most families, that's the conversation we're going to start is probably going to start with the U.S. News & World Report rankings. And that's okay, but the conversation goes beyond that and that's part of the process. And I am a firm believer and I always say trust the process.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Well, that's a great place to end. Geanine brings us out on a high note. Geanine, Kate, Steve, thanks for joining me this morning on the Admission Beat and to bat around this topic, which whenever I'm in a room of colleagues on either side of the admission desk, this is one of the topics that is never lacking of opinions. So thank you for sharing your wisdom and your thoughtfulness with us today.
And next week on Admissions Beat, our episode will be an encore of one we aired in the spring of 2021 on my former podcast, The Search. And we'll meet two senior administrators from Duke University for a conversation about, does it fit? And the idea being, rankings are helpful, but your first-hand experience on a campus is really what ought to be a guiding impulse for you as you make your way towards an application and a final choice.
If you liked this episode of Admissions Beat, please leave us a rating or a comment wherever you download your podcasts. Your feedback helps other listeners discover the conversation and it helps us make a better show for you. And if you have a question you like us to answer in our season finale, please share it with us at admissionsbeat@dartmouth.edu. That's admissionsbeat@dartmouth.edu. And I'll post it to our panelists on that final episode.
Admissions Beat is a production from Dartmouth College, but it's not about admission to Dartmouth College. It's produced by Charlotte Albright with editorial guidance from Jacques Steinberg and marketing, strategy and promotion from Kevin Ramos-Glue and Sara Morin. For now, I'm Lee Coffin. Thanks for listening.