Season 3: Episode 15 Transcript
Season 3 Finale: Live With Parents!
Lee Coffin:
From Hanover, New Hampshire, I'm Lee Coffin, Dartmouth's Dean of Admissions in Financial Aid, and this is the season finale and the first live audience recording of The Admissions Beat.
(music)
Today we have the season finale, and we're doing the recording at the accepted student open house at Dartmouth. So about 25 parents who have wandered to Hanover with one of their children have joined us today. I'm joined again by Jacques Steinberg, my friend and colleague and former New York Times reporter and award-winning author of The Gatekeepers and The College Conversation, for an episode framed around parents, and what you learned as you drove or guided or followed your children from the beginning of a search to the moment a student has to declare an enrollment on the national candidate's reply date. When you hear this episode, it will be the day after.
You are witnesses to this really interesting transformation. I always start doing junior conversations January, February of what would be the junior year, and it's like little Bambis wandering up to the beginning, and you are maybe little older Bambis looking forward with nervousness, excitement, maybe some anxiety. Then as the search plays out month by month, your students get more savvy about how this works, and I watch you, particularly if you're the first time parents, also figuring out what counts, what matters, how do you read the tea leaves as you go in and out of a campus program? How do I assess headlines that keep coming at us from mainstream and social media? How do you give good counsel to your son or daughter as they start to think about what comes next?
Then ultimately, when we get to decision point, that's emotional in a lot of happy ways, and sometimes disappointing ways, and how does that play through for you as a parent, and what wisdom do you have for parents who are right behind you in this never-ending cycle, where I say, "Godspeed" next Monday to the class of '23, and I'm turning right around and I've already started talking with the high school class of '24, and we just keep going. So Jacques, what thoughts do you have as we welcome this group of parents?
Jacques Steinberg:
Well, first of all, it's a pleasure to see you all, because all season, we've been imagining you, and here you are, and as we thought about the podcast all season, we really thought about listeners who were on two paths. One is the path that you all are on, families of high school seniors preparing to make the transition to college, and then families of high school juniors as they prepare to make the transition from discovery and search to the actual application process, and it's exciting for us to put you all to work a little bit.
Lee has talked to a number of experts, people who've been through this process, students as well, counselors, other admissions deans throughout the season. Today, our experts are all of you, and you have much to offer those who are going to be coming after you, families going through this process, you learned a lot that you can share, and so we hope to put you to work a little bit later in the broadcast. As Lee talked about, I'm a writer, and if this season were a book, we're going to write together the conclusion to that book and a little bit of an epilogue and afterward, and we're going to enlist your help in that.
Lee Coffin:
I like that metaphor.
Jacques Steinberg:
So let's start. I'd like to prime the pump by asking Lee a few questions, and then we're going to have you do a little bit of work here as well, but Lee, I'm struck by your position here at Dartmouth as the dean of admissions and of financial aid, and your observation of this year's process, not just here, but at lots of other colleges and universities and in high schools as well. So what are some of your takeaways from this admission season?
Lee Coffin:
So the takeaway that is surprising to me three years later is that the pandemic volume that kind of erupted in the cycle of 2020, 2021 has held for three cycles in a row. I don't know that I anticipated the kind of growth in application volume we saw when the pandemic began. It held the second year, and it's repeated this third cycle that the parents are concluding, but I noticed that some of the volume is starting to cool a little bit. So if it were a housing bubble, I think the bubble is starting to contract just a smidge, and at Dartmouth, we had a record pool, but it wasn't explosive growth again.
Personally, as a dean and as an initial officer, I'm relieved to see the volume starting to slow down. The volume has also generated continued selectivity that the media has been reporting, because most of us have not increased the size of our incoming class, and so the arithmetic of admissions is always constant number of seats, more applications, you have a lower admit rate, and that dynamic is one that I think characterized this year... There was a story last week inside higher education documenting the continued volume twined with selectivity that is making some people step back and say, "This is exhausting."
So I think that's one takeaway, but I've been struck last week and this week, as families have come to campus for our open houses, by stories that defy that macro story, and maybe some of the parents here have a child that's considering one, two, three places even as April runs out of sand in its hourglass, and I think that's so interesting that despite these tiny degrees of selectivity, strong students still have strong options and a degree of choice around where to enroll by May one, and I think that's a harder story to cover in the media, because what I think that means is at the top of all of these pools are strong students who tell their story well, who still have access to places that seem inaccessible, and perhaps some of the volume is at the lower end of a pool, where people might be applying to more colleges than they should, and they're not getting in, but that doesn't mean the students who are competitive broadly don't have outcomes when we get to that stage that are appealing. Does that make sense as a more nuanced version of that story?
Jacques Steinberg:
Yeah, and nuance, as somebody who's written headlines, nuance can be hard to transmit, to convey in just a few words in a headline. It's really, really hard, and one of the nice things about a podcast like this is that there is nuance.
So imagine Lee, a family of a high school junior reading those horse race headlines, where sometimes colleges sound as if they are candidates running for president or running in the Kentucky Derby. What perspective can we give them in part by reminding them that there's 2000 four year colleges in this country?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, I deliberately hold back some of the data, and as parents, you might have noticed Dartmouth didn't put out a lot of numbers when we cleared March 30th and have moved through the last four weeks, and we talked about the size of the pool and the acceptance rate, but I've been very conscious about trying to steer the conversation away from the statistical framing and more towards the "who." Who are we trying to enroll, and in what ways should they, as accepted students, be thinking about the options or options they have?
The advice I would give juniors and their parents and guardians is stay away from the catnip that is admission data. I know it's easier said than done, but the stories about volume and selectivity alarm you more than reassure you, and I think early on, plant the seed that this is an impossible journey. It is not, and the parents here today are proof points of that. Your students got in, and they don't wear capes and fly around their neighborhood as super children.
Good, normal students get options that are high quality at the end of these cycles, and if a search has been constructed thoughtfully, so that it's not all top heavy, in terms of, "Let's load up on the most selective places I could possibly consider." Then you're rolling the dice towards outcomes that might be a bit more disappointing, but for the juniors who moved into the summer, I look forward at August 1st is the next date on my calendar where the common app goes live again, and the college class of 2028 can begin to construct its application. So for juniors, that's the first moment of action beyond discovery, where things are... But between now and then, try not to get distracted by the statistical profile of admissions that says, "This can't happen," because it can happen.
Jacques Steinberg:
In a few moments, we're going to be asking the parents here in our audience for any advice they might have for those who will come next, but as you, Lee, reflect on this cycle in particular and imagine a family going through this process next year in terms of applying, in addition to sort of tuning out the noise, what other advice would you provide?
Lee Coffin:
The most overlooked part of the act of applying is being focused on the narrative a student is sharing with the colleges to which she applies. A lot of attention gets placed on the GPA and testing if it's part of the arithmetic. That's the data. It's important, it sets the stage, but in the pool where I work, that doesn't get me towards the accepted class, because so many students have profiles that meet that expectation, and so for students who have aspirations of a very selective college outcome, know that a strong high school transcript, and testing if it's available, are the foundational elements of the application. We start there, but being aware of and attentive to what questions are these colleges asking me through the common application, through a supplement, that help me tell my story in my own words to the place that is considering me.
If I'm using McDonald's, that's the special sauce in the Big Mac. That is the piece of this that, as we read, we notice and we document, and we shape the community from that qualitative information. It's much more subjective, it's much more open-ended, it's harder at the end for me to come out and say, "Here's the creativity quotient of the class we just accepted," but if a faculty member were to say to me today, "Did you accept a group of creative students to the class of '27?", I would've said, "As many of them as possible." Were they curious? Yes. Are they collaborative? Of course.
I can't measure that in ways that land in the data point, but those are really important qualities, and the stories... As you meet students on the campus, whether it's the tour guide or you're in an overnight, each of the people who makes up a campus has that storytelling component to their identity, and that's, to me, the art of the work, and it's the piece that any student can do, from any background. Owning the elements of the application, bringing their best self forward in whatever way it makes sense, and when students say to me, in that kind of pre-application moment, "What do you want to know?", I turn it back and say, "What do you want to tell me?" I don't know what I need to know until you frame the storytelling through the application, and if I had a yellow highlighter, I would just amplify that as many times as I could, because that is where, in the selective space, the decisions are made
Jacques Steinberg:
So if you listen to the podcast on a regular basis, you know that Lee has a tremendous curiosity, and I recognize that curiosity in part as the curiosity of a journalist, and I think there's more than a few similarities between journalists and admissions officers in terms of asking questions and listening, and over the course of the last few weeks, certainly since the end of March, early April, you've had a number of conversations with parents. Parents at the very stage of the folks who are here with us today. Wear your journalist's hat for a moment. What are you hearing in those conversations? What are you learning, and what might we all learn from those conversations?
Lee Coffin:
So the conversations I've had with parents, both on campus and I've been on the road a bit, I think there's a sense of relief that this college admission process is winding down. There's been some surprise that child has had outcomes that defied expectations, and that's always a happy surprise. We haven't really talked about the disappointments that are organically part of this work, but I know that's there too, but more the parents of accepted students have been appreciative of the opportunity for their child to consider this option as one of their enrollment options.
The parallel conversations I've had since March 30th with the families of students who were not invited to join the class, those are poignant, they always are. It's hard, one by one, to reconstruct the admission process from February and March, because individually, most of the students were wonderful, and it's the collective assessment when we're in that round that makes the decision making move forward, and the guidance to families who are counseling someone who's disappointed, whose outcomes don't look like what they hope they would look like. That's always hard. It's not why I do this job. I think those are the families that feel a bit more bruised by the volume and the selectivity.
Jack and I have had conversations several times about some of the letters and emails I get from disappointed families, usually the parent, and I've learned over the years to take that in stride and to not get distracted by what can sometimes be, well, mean spirited, but I understand where it comes from. There's disappointment, and I am the representative of the college that said no, and my name is on the letter, so I get that, but that is true when I was a brand new dean in the mid-nineties, and it's true today. There's an emotional element to college admission, especially selective college admission, that's unavoidable. That's always kind of the reminder to me, as I move from March into April into May, that I work in a rare place, and I try and be humble about the opportunity to create this entering class from that pool without getting to peacock-y about what we did.
Jacques Steinberg:
So I know a number of your admissions colleagues are in the room with us now. I've had a chance to actually sit in the admissions committee process with you all. I think it's important for people to know why you do this work, and you've sort of touched on it a little bit, but what made you want to be an admissions officer, and why do you continue to do this work?
Lee Coffin:
The origin story for me was I am the graduate of a public high school that did not have noteworthy guidance for the 525 students in my senior class. I was the first in my family to go to college, and when I went to see my guidance counselor for the first and the only time, he looked at my transcripts, I was in the top 10 of the class, he said, "Ugh, I don't have time for the smart ones. Go back to class, you'll figure it out."
That was 1980. It was a long time ago, but I was on my own. I did figure it out, and landed in a wonderful place, saw the way college changed the arc of my life and where it was going, and when there was an opportunity to be an entry level admission officer, I thought, "This sounds like an interesting job for a couple of years or a couple years before I go to law school," and then I woke up and said, "I don't want to be a lawyer."
The work I started and I've kept doing now for 30, 33 years has been really rewarding, and to me, a rare role where I can make an impact on individual lives every year and help people from backgrounds like my own that don't have the infrastructure around them to see opportunity and move towards it, as well as students from places where the infrastructure's there, the family support to navigate it, and in both groups, to help them see the opportunity of college, and that gets me up in the morning.
I often think, "What would I do if I didn't do this?" and I might have been your sidekick in journalism. That is the thing that kind of pulls me back towards it, but I think I have one of the best jobs at college, and to be able to represent the institution every year to a new crop of applicants and their parents, help them see the opportunity. Today is a good example of this, at the open house. I watch students pop in and out of the day, and at the end, they're holding the bag with the sweatshirt, and if they had a tail, it would be wagging, and that sweatshirt is the sartorial representation of choice, and you're putting it on because it fits, and that's fun every year. It never gets old
Jacques Steinberg:
I love that phrase. "To see opportunity and move toward it" is one that I've not quite heard it put that way before, and that's going to stay with me, I think.
All right, so now parents, it's time for your exit interview, as it were. We're going to put you to work as our experts. Imagine those who are going to be coming after you, and some of you may have repeat... You may be doing this process again. This may have not been the first time you did this process, but think about those who will be sitting where you were last fall in this coming fall, or imagine them now as they're starting the discovery process, starting to think about schools they want to visit, visit those schools. Kevin is going to help us pass the mic.
Lee Coffin:
Kevins, we have our two microphone handlers coming.
Jacques Steinberg:
Just makes it easier us in terms of remembering.
Lee Coffin:
If you ask a question, when you say hello, if you would just... Name, high school of your child, just to help listeners around the country. We have people here from all over the U.S. and around the world today. So that's interesting to me too, to see what perspective you've brought into this college search from your hometown.
Jacques Steinberg:
If you also want to keep it more general, we're okay with that too.
Lee Coffin:
You can just say "Oregon"
Jacques Steinberg:
Yes, but think about... You all learned a lot. What would you want to share with those coming after you?
Rachel Opper:
Hi, I'm Rachel Opper. My son is coming from Washington Liberty High School in Arlington, Virginia, and just for perspective, I also have a junior so we don't get a break. We're wrapping up here going straight into essay writing very soon, but I just wanted to share, one of the things that I would advise my friends is I think it's important for the parents to educate ourselves that the college admissions process has changed dramatically since we went through it, and I see my friends advising their children based on their own personal experiences, and I think we as parents have... If we want to take an active role, we have almost an obligation to educate ourselves on the new process.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, I think that's really important advice. I've been a dean since 1995, and I've thought a lot about how different it was in the nineties. Everything. Not just volume but tech. There was nothing called social media, there was no internet, everything was paper, and parents who were high school students in the nineties, which tends to be the crop of parents, if that's what you remember, it's a really different landscape, and if you're coming back into this admissions scape for the first time since then, it's a much more multi-dimensional conversation. You're right.
Jacques Steinberg:
A great piece of advice for those who will follow you is that this notion that a school that we back in the day, back in our day, might not have applied to, might not have known about... That place may be very different. It has likely had several presidents, and all kinds of things happen to it, and that being careful to check ourselves as parents, to not provide information for our children that's 25 years out of date, knowing what we don't know. So appreciate that point. Other things that you all learned? Yes.
Rajiv Jayawardhane:
Hi. Rajiv Jayawardhane My son attended Wilton High School in Connecticut. My learning's actually from my first son, who's not in Dartmouth, a different college. What I realized is as parents, we are quite biased about our children, and schools, you having evaluated thousands of children, you would seem to know which kids do well in which schools. So in my oldest son's case, we thought he would be a good fit at a number of schools, but ultimately the one that he got selected to, he's thoroughly enjoying that school right now, and now in hindsight, absolutely that was the right fit for him. So I do trust that the admission offices, with all that experience, can actually determine the kids who will fit best to their schools.
Lee Coffin:
It is what we do for work. When people ask me, how many files did I read this year, as the actual reader, it was 507 where I was the documentary reader. There are others on my staff who are a thousand or more. I read all the accepted recommendations. So I touched 3,000 as we were moving through, and you do develop a sense of authenticity, of perspective, of voice. My sister is a high school English teacher, and I would say to her, when you grade papers, they all read the same book, you gave them the same question and they wrote 25 different essays, and she said, "You learn, as you read one by one, which ones resonate and which ones don't." The A+ gets separated from the B plus from the B, and the same thing happens when we're reading files as you learn which people are good fits for the campus I represent.
Based on the knowledge we have in that moment, and that's a really important caveat, is my read of a file is only as good as the information that's in it, and my tip for the future applicants is when students say to me, "I don't like to brag," I say, "Well, this is your moment, or you're relying on someone else to do it for you." So you don't have to be braggy in an obnoxious way, but you have to learn the art of telling your story, of making your case, just like you would in a cover letter when you apply for a job and you put together a resume. It's one of those adult skills that starts to come into play, and that we then can respond to it to your observation that we do seem to know how to do it.
Jacques Steinberg:
Implicit in the question and in Lee's response is that for applicants who will be in this next cohort, you really do have the opportunity to have the floor and make your case for admission, to tell your story using all the different elements of that application, and you heard Lee say that he's read over 500 applications this year. Colleagues have read upwards of a thousand. Many times, those applications have been read by multiple people and discussed by the whole committee. Pieces of essays flashed on big jumbotron TV screens to be discussed, not unlike this, and so just to know that all that time applicants were going to come next that you spend on that application, that is time well spent, at least in my sort of observations of having seen this process up close.
Gary Winzelberg:
So I'm Gary Winzelberg, and my son is at East Chapel Hill High School in North Carolina, and one of the things I'm proud about in terms of how he approached the process is he thought about it deeply, but didn't apply early anywhere, and I think with those selectivity numbers, I sense that students are feeling greatly pressured to choose a school, and he was not ready and found himself quite nervous and kind of taking the risk to put himself out there, and I think that's something that, unless things cool, I wonder whether that's something that more and more students are going to feel like they have to do that to have a chance at one of the more selective colleges.
Lee Coffin:
I love that he bypassed early and just did all of his applying in the regular round, and when you got to the end of March into Dartmouth, did he have options?
Gary Winzelberg:
Absolutely.
Lee Coffin:
So he's a proof point that it happens, and I think the danger of recent history, again, to the juniors, is this early conversation about early. I'm already meeting juniors who say whose parents will say, "We're going early, we just don't know where." So they've made this kind of a decision about when to apply before where has come into focus, and I do understand the logic of that, and if a place has emerged by the fall as a clear first choice, try it, but there's a reason we continue to read applications January, February and March, and offered admission of far more people in regular decision than early decision.
It does work, and I think diffusing the urgency of "apply somewhere" and shifting the dialogue to "apply when you're ready" is advice I would give, but I also, as I say that, I also know that I am increasingly nostalgic for an admission landscape that might have passed me by at this point, but I have not been a big promoter of early over my career. I think it suits some students and some institutions well, but I always appreciate a student who says, "Nope, I'm not ready, and I'm going to have the confidence in my application to wait one more round."
Jacques Steinberg:
I'm the parent of a soon to be 25- year-old and a soon to be 23-year-old, and there's a tremendous amount of development, as you all know firsthand, that happens between November 1st of the senior year and January 1st of the senior year, and soon to be May 1st of the senior year. Happily, this process does afford you options for that child who's not ready on November 1st, and there are lots of different reasons not to be ready and lots of different ways that that process can still work out just fine.
Lee Coffin:
Well, let me ask a question in that spirit back to all of you. Who could share an observation about how your child's thinking did shift as you moved from spring, summer, junior year into the fall and beyond?
Anisha Mason:
Well, this'll be embarrassing for my son, since he's here, but my son Jay went to Lick-Wilmerding High School in San Francisco, California, and he swore up and down he was not going to leave the state of California, and so we did come out here and try to not impose my views, although he would probably disagree with that, and I think over time, did kind of see there was a whole different world out here that he would not have if he stayed in California. So I think that was a pretty significant evolution.
Jacques Steinberg:
So what are we missing as we try to arm those who are going to come after you? What haven't we touched on that's important?
Julie Futch:
So a couple things as my... So first, my name's Julie, my child's from Connecticut. I actually have four children and the child that is coming here next year as a twin. So I've seen a lot of universities in the last eight years, and also there is a huge difference between the admissions process even seven, eight years ago, and currently, huge difference.
I think as parents, it's important for us to let our children go through the process and drive the process, but even just the experience of looking around different schools, figuring out what the difference is between going to a school in the city or a school in rural New Hampshire, and every kid is different. There's not one right fit. So I think that fit thing is absolutely true, and then also as parents, I know this is what I kept saying to my twins, because they both wanted to apply to very competitive schools, and you do never know, I kept saying, "It doesn't matter where you go, it matters what you do once you get there." So I think that just to remind them that it's not about the particular name.
Lee Coffin:
For your peer parents who have twins in the junior class, did they do it in tandem or did they do parallel searches? Did they consciously say, "We want to go together," or, "This is our moment to decouple"?
Julie Futch:
They said they weren't going to base it on any of that. Now this was interesting. As we started looking, it was very specific what the two of them wanted. One of them wanted a liberal arts kind of institution in a more rural environment, very safe. She's a big runner. The other one wanted a school campus in the middle of a city, but wanted it to be a campus. So you ended up wanting just very different things, and by being able to explore what they wanted, it really informed what schools they were going to look at rather than the names of the schools informing what they wanted.
Lee Coffin:
But did you have a conversation as a family about the twins being a package?
Julie Futch:
Oh, that theory that at some admissions, if one gets in, the other one does? Yes. Yeah, and they ended up both kind of falling in love with schools, like madly in love, and applying early to their institutions, and that actually is also a very nerve-wracking thing as a twin parent, if one would get in and the other didn't. They both were incredibly fortunate, but there were some overlaps that... We didn't have it as a family. They had it. Some schools that were the same just as... In the end, who knows what we'll like, because we might change over however many months of our senior year.
Lee Coffin:
I don't think I've ever covered twin admission in one of the podcast episodes. That's why I asked a follow up, because it's a topic.
Jacques Steinberg:
Yeah. I also heard you use the word "nerve-wracking", and we have covered nerve-wracking in the podcast, and if your family is anything like mine, this can be an incredibly fraught process, as you all know firsthand, imagining that family coming after you.
Any tips on sort of tamping down the anxiety? So for example, in our family, we tried to make sure there were many nights during the week where it wasn't talked about at the dinner table. It's just, "Let's talk about other things," but what advice do you all have for acknowledging and noticing the anxiety of this moment and also trying to manage it and hopefully mitigate it?
Lee Coffin:
Or did you fail at that? Did it just take over your family?
Karen Fink:
Actually, I'm going to answer on that one. My name is Karin Fink, and I'm from Winnetka, Illinois, and my son attends Lake Forest Academy. Your piece of advice right now is actually what I was going to say, is exactly that, and our high school guidance counselors said to us, going into this one day a week max college conversations, that's the one thing I would really advise you to do, and for our family, that has been really beneficial with back-to-back seniors, because we also have two younger kids who are sick of the college talk, so... Exactly.
Lee Coffin:
I'm wondering if you have any questions for me as a dean. Here I am in the room with you, and as parents, you might be curious about this peculiar job I have, but what's itching you to get an answer? There you go. You didn't even wait a second. Your hand shot right up there.
Parent 7:
Yeah, I'm very curious about... You won't be a perfect candidate for Ivy League school like this, but holistically, you want to excel in academics, sports, extra curriculum, whatever you touch on, but how do you assign weight? Is there any magic formula? Is there anything to give them a peace of mind? You are there. You don't need to kill yourself.
Lee Coffin:
The magic formula—I'm going to patent it, and that's my retirement plan, but the magic formula doesn't exist. As we're reading a file, what's always intriguing to me as I start reading is I don't know which piece of it will pop the most. Sometimes it's a part of the extracurricular section where I say, "Wow, this student has a really clear and passionate interest in fill in the blank, and I can see that being part of this campus.
Dartmouth, we are the national champions in debate, so sometimes people apply with debate as part of their extracurricular signature, and that piece in combo with academics move someone forward. Sometimes you get all the way to the end of the file and you read a peer recommendation, which is a distinctive part of the Dartmouth application, in the words of the peer, help illuminate a candidacy in a way where I say, "There it is." That friend of the applicant has knitted this together in a way that that helps me see the personality, the character, the way someone will live on this campus, in the residence halls or in a laboratory or in a classroom.
Sometimes it's a little bit of all of those things, where you get to the end of the folder and one of us writes, some of the parts, this is an admit. They were good or excellent across lots of different things, and sometimes it's one really clear thing. Sometimes... My colleague Kevin is sharing the microphone duty today. We were in a committee where it seemed like every other student was interested in mushrooms this year, and over and over, mycology kept popping up as an interest, and we happened to be in a territory where mushrooms were a bit more present, and the first one, we were like, "Wow, mythology, mushrooms. Interesting," and then the fifth one, we were like, "Another mushroom kid? What's going on?"
I tell that story, is they were all interesting, and it helped us think about, we have an organic farm and we have an environmental studies program and we have students looking at kind of a sustainable agriculture, and that all fit into that, but two months earlier, I don't know that I would've said mushroom research is going to really emerge for me as something noteworthy, but it does. So it varies. The key piece of this for any applicant is to ask a key question before the application is constructed. What am I trying to tell the college about my academic interests, my background, my achievements, where I think I'm going, and does this college do what I hope to do? So to that mushroom researcher, we are in a location where that makes sense. Some other places might not see it in the same way we saw it.
Jacques Steinberg:
I'm so struck by the use of the word "formula" in the question…
Lee Coffin:
Magic formula.
Jacques Steinberg:
I have spent my entire professional life, almost like Indiana Jones, in search of that formula, and the New York Times paid me for many, many years to ask the question you asked of people like Lee, and as near as I can tell, it just doesn't exist, and I've been in so many rooms with parents where they don't believe me, but I hope you believe Lee and me. It's just so hard to characterize this process in a formula. I describe the process as messy, but not as a criticism. To the contrary, it's a very human process, and it's human beings likely, and these colleagues in the room with us, making impossible decisions with all these variables that have been discussed coming at various times.
Also, in the question you used the word "perfect", and perfect comes up so often in the admissions process, both of the perfect college, but also in the context you used it, the perfect applicant, and fair to say, Lee, no such thing.
Lee Coffin:
No such thing.
Steve Gu:
Hi. My name is Steve. This is my wife, Lili. We are both from California. We are actually twin parents, as well. Both of our boys are admitted to Dartmouth.
Lee Coffin:
Very good.
Jacques Steinberg:
Yeah.
Steve Gu:
We very much appreciate that. Yeah. Well, since we have two admitted, please allow me to ask you two questions. Well, the first question is regarding the twins. They are from Palo Alto High School in California. Based on our family observation, based on their actual admission results, it seems like when they apply to private universities, they are either both admitted or both rejected. But to public universities sometimes one is accepted or the other is rejected. So it just seems like based on our observation, this theory of a twin package actually is true probably for private universities. So I may want to ask you, I think, to share your insight.
Second question is just to share another observation. We are from the Silicon Valley, so it seems this class of 2027 may be the last class that does not fully utilize ChatGPT for college essay writing, right? Starting this year for class 2028 with the ChatGPT-4, the ChatGPT-5 that's going to come out, how do you foresee changes in the admission process? Basically, how can you tell a beautifully composed essay is written by human or by AI?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Steve Gu:
So those are just my two questions. Thank you.
Lee Coffin:
Wow. Time to go. Now the twin, I mean back... There's Julie, right? The twin topic does come up. You think, are these two people moving through this process together? And wherever I've worked, there's a loose philosophy of, you should try and keep them together as much as you can. Sometimes the decision goes separate ways because they're distinctly different people and you read them differently. But I think what you're seeing in the decisions for your two boys was a shared view that you try and do the same thing if you've got twins.
The chat, the AI introduction to the work we do, I don't have an answer to yet. To be really honest, it kind of came into the landscape really quickly. I caught myself wondering if ChatGPT is to essay writing what the calculator once was to mathematics. I'm old enough to remember when the college board allowed students to have a calculator as part of the SAT math, and at the time it was like, "Whoa, that feels like it's cheating". And I thought, "You still have to know what formula to plug in. You have to be able to use it to be able to come up with the correct answer." And I'm wondering if we're moving into this digital humanities space where the way we write is informed by a similar kind of intelligence as a... we're both writers. I was a humanities major myself.
My pen and my notebook continue to be things I like to do in longhand, dinosaur that I am. But what I've started to think about, and the answer to your question is, when I read an essay as part of an application, am I paying attention to the quality of writing or am I paying attention to the content? What is the person telling me that helps me make a decision?
Now, the quality of writing is important, and in our pool, often universally strong. It's a rare... Sometimes with the international students will have a moment of like, "Oh, has this curriculum and another language really prepared someone to come into the Dartmouth curriculum and move quickly through a writing centric format?" That's going to be a worry. I've wondered if we start to pivot back towards a writing element of the standardized testing. So you come into the room to take an SAT or an ACT, and part of it is you have to write out your essay then, and we have a writing sample that way that cannot be, AI'd. Imagining that, I don't know that that's even a... But I come back to this sigh of the way the admission landscape continues to evolve really rapidly.
And at the end of the day, I think the answer to this question is, "What are we trying to do by reading this application? How do we try and frame the decision?" So a perfectly constructed essay that was produced by a chat function isn't really helping me understand how a student performs in the classroom. So that's a worry. On the other hand, if it is what it is and we're going in that direction and I have to surrender to it, does the information I glean from that essay still help me know, "Oh, Jack is an aspiring journalist who grew up in the South Shore of Boston and has a passion for storytelling through journalism". That's valuable, no matter whether Jack wrote it or a chat bot wrote it.
Jacques Steinberg:
What Lee just said is true about me. So it was sort of like chat psychic ChatGPT.
Lee Coffin:
You're a chat bot.
Jacques Steinberg:
As a writer, all my life, I'm struggling with this including in real time as I listen to this conversation. But if I were a high school junior who's going to have to write these essays this spring and over the summer, and one of questions people like Lee and colleagues ask is, "Who are you?" I'd be loath to turn that over to AI.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Jacques Steinberg:
And I would think long and hard before doing that. You really want, when Lee is sitting down to read that application, or Kevin or Kevin and others who are here as well, you really want them to have the sense that they're actually sitting across a table from you having a cup of coffee and getting to know you. I'm loathe at this point to relinquish that to a bot.
Maria Takacs:
My name is Maria Takacs, and I'm from New Jersey. My daughter Samantha will be in the class of 2027, and she is a student athlete. So our process was a little bit different, but my question, I'm just so curious how a smaller college like Dartmouth gets through 29,000 applications.
Lee Coffin:
A lot of coffee and a lot of wine. I'm only partially kidding. I have stubbornly held to the idea that we need to read them all the way through holistically to learn their story, and my colleagues will tell you, he does make us do that and write it out in evaluative form, but it's pushed against the limit of our ability to do that, given the volume, the date of the calendar. We haven't added days to the calendar together from the deadline to decision release.
Jack used the word "messy," and that was true in the nineties when I was working at a college that got 3000 applications for a class of 400, and that seemed like a lot in the moment and it was true. I remember when we hit 10,000 and then 20,000 and then 25,000, I went, "Woo-hoo, this just keeps going." So, many of our peer schools are seeing over 50,000 applications, and we've expanded staff and the number of people reading...
Back to the question, we are using AI to a degree, so, guilty. We are starting to sort the preliminary pool in some ways, because we have to figure out, what's the first wave? What's the second wave? Which students are structurally more challenged by their academic elements, and they move into a faster track, but it's a long, slow march through the 12 weeks where we're reading and then selecting, and for teachers, I'd say it's like grading final exams for three months straight, and to students, I say it's like studying for final exams, where there's always something to do. There's always another application to read and to think through, but I also think for students applying to a college like this one, where we're selective, where we have this lovely pool of options to frame the next class, that's our commitment to the pool, to be able to read it, to think about it.
So many parents have said to me today and last week, "You really do seem to have your bead on 'who,'" and we're able to do that because we're interviewing people and we're reading the interview report, we're reading the recommendations, we are seeing what the quality of writing is, and thinking as holistically as we can about the community that we're trying to build here in Hanover.
Jacques Stenberg:
So I'm feeling a little misty and nostalgic as we bring season three of The Admissions Beat to an end; what's the last note of the season you want to hit thinking of our sort of dual audiences?
Lee Coffin:
So to the seniors who have now landed in an entering class somewhere, take some time to savor it. Don't keep churning forward at 150 miles an hour. The summer between high school and college is a moment to catch your breath. It's important that you get to September refreshed, ready for this new challenge, and clear-eyed about college is not going to be easy right out of the gate. You're away from home. You've got a college curriculum that builds on what you did as high school students, but it moves quickly. If you're coming to a place like Dartmouth, you are surrounded by peers who are all high achievers in their own right, and you need to recalibrate a little bit about being the big fish in your pond.
I always joke at matriculation, there'd be some number around a hundred senior class presidents in the enrolling class. I was like, "That's a hell of a primary. Only one of you can be the first year class president. What do the other 99 of you do? How do you translate leadership into some new space when you get to campus?"
So that's the good news from the search, though, is we saw in you evidence of a student who is successful, and part of that evidence tells us you can adapt and you can come into a new community and move forward and thrive, and to the juniors, we will be back in September for season four of Admissions Beat debuting sometime in mid-September. We will probably have a special episode or two as we move through the summer. Our friends on the Supreme Court have something up their sleeves, so I think Jacques and I will be back for an episode or two to think about what happens, but for now, with a live audience watching me, this is Lee Coffin and Jacques Steinberg signing off from season three of The Admissions Beat. Thanks so much for listening. See you in the fall.
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