Season 3: Episode 4 Transcript
Imagining Your College List
Lee Coffin:
From Hanover, New Hampshire, I'm Lee Coffin, Dartmouth's Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid. Welcome to the Admissions Beat.
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So it's time to get real. We have prepped you as juniors and parents with how to imagine your college search by taking a selfie and assessing it and being true to what you're seeing and feeling. We've given you some advice about how to navigate the media chatter that pecks its way around this topic. And now we want to focus you on a to-do list. And by a to-do list, I mean a list that takes shape, place by place for you to explore, for you to investigate, for you to start to feel in whatever way you want to feel it.
And that list that begins to take shape in the winter of junior year and will evolve over the next many months and weeks, and that's organic. So we thought today it's time to bring two experts into this conversation and give you some practical tips about how to create a list, how to explore that list, and how to know when to delete something from the list when that moment appears. So when we come back, we'll meet our two guests and have a conversation about list-making.
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I'm joined today by two friends of the pod. Darryl Tiggle and Jen Simons have appeared on previous episodes, but it's always fun to bring them back and in this instance, together, to see what kind of sparks and fireworks ignite as Jen and Darryl join me in this conversation about list making. Darryl is the Director of College Counseling at the Baltimore Friends School, and before that, a longtime admission officer at Tufts and at Union College. And in 2021, Darryl was honored by the Colleges Who Change Lives Organization as a counselor who changes lives. So Darryl, always great to have you on the podcast. Welcome back.
Darryl Tiggle:
Well, great to be here and I'm looking forward to this conversation. It's always a good time.
Lee Coffin:
And we're joined by Jennifer Simons, the senior manager at Bright Horizons College Coach and a former admission officer herself at Tufts, at Barnard, at Connecticut College, and a college counselor at Ramaz School in New York City. So Jen's covered a lot of ground in her long and impressive career. And Jen, it's always fun to have you on the pod. What can you tell our listeners a little bit about Bright Horizons as we start?
Jennifer Simons:
Sure. I'd love to, because I love to talk about our organization. We are what they call a family solutions company. So a lot of folks know about Bright Horizons because they offer childcare centers to families, and backup care. But what Bright Horizons College Coach does, as a division of the larger organization, is we offer college solutions to families that are obviously looking to plan a college search. It's a free benefit that their companies or organizations give to them.
So I can talk to, in the span of a week, someone who works as an administrative assistant at a company that provides its employees with our benefit, to a vice president of a company and everyone in between. And what's really nice is that I get a full spectrum of the U.S., primarily. Our clients are mostly in the United States. So one morning I'll speak to someone from Seattle and then someone from Florida. So I get a really diverse spectrum of folks that get our benefit.
Lee Coffin:
No, that's really helpful. And it's kind of like this podcast. I mean as I watch the analytics come through, we're touching people all around the U.S. and increasingly around the world with that same goal. And so in today's conversation, what I'm hoping to do is help listeners who might be in schools where there isn't a Darryl who can close the door and have an honest conversation about list-making, to empower them to do it and to find the resources and the way of thinking about exploration in a way that moves them forward.
So in our previous episode, we had a group of students talk about the self-assessment that takes place at the very beginning of a search, and the advice being before you start to identify where you have to start with who and the who is you. We've done that, so now it's time to sit down and start to actually put a list together. So Darryl and Jen, how do you do that? What are the first couple of steps a family or a student must take to start to identify what places should I be investigating?
Jennifer Simons:
Well, Darryl, if I could take a shot at it first and then I'll let you follow up. First of all, Lee, I love that you talked about the list as being organic. It's a living document, in my mind. It's not static. You think about what you were interested in last year at this time in your growth. It might not be the same thing. And that's essentially what's going to happen. This list is taking us through a process that's going to take many months.
And the first thing I always encourage families to do is to have a very honest conversation about limitations. So I normally don't start with negative, but I think that that's really important. And I think that sometimes parents are reluctant to say, "We can't afford X, Y, or Z. Here's how much financial aid we need." Or "You have to get Merit Aid," or limitations around geography. "You want to go to California even though you live in Maryland, we don't want you to be a flight away from us."
So I think that the first thing to do, and Darryl will probably phrase it in a more positive way because there are certainly positive parameters in place, but the first thing that I think that the family needs to do is assess what the non-negotiables are in terms of cost, location, things like that. If you get that out of the way, it's going to save a lot of potential stress and heartache later on.
Darryl Tiggle:
Yeah, I think those things are ones that early on can be defining factors, but some things need to be non-negotiable to help shape the list, totally.
Lee Coffin:
Let me put you in a therapist's seat for a second. So I'm imagining a family where maybe a parent or guardian and the senior/junior don't see eye to eye on this. How do you work through that preliminary assessment of what are the boundaries here?
Jennifer Simons:
Well I think, again, it depends on what the digging in is about. I literally had a conversation with a lovely dad this morning. I recommended a school and he was like, "I just can't get beyond what I thought of that school when I was a student," and the college was a place that his son wanted to go to. What I say to parents routinely is that if you are old enough to have kids that are even thinking about college or in high school, everything that you have experienced is almost irrelevant and unhelpful.
Sometimes I have parents that weren't educated in the U.S. and of course they feel like they're at a tremendous disadvantage, but I say to them, "In fact, you are at an advantage because you don't have these preconceived notions of what places were like, what acceptance rates were like." So it's interesting. I mean even with non-negotiable, something like cost, I think it's very helpful when a family says, "This is how much we can spend," because what that does is it opens up the opportunities for merit aid, let's say, which might come, and it might mean looking at places that maybe aren't an Ivy League school or a Stanford university or something like that.
But how willing are you to expand the list? How willing are you as parents to think about things differently? And what I always say in the beginning of the process, so this is me with my therapist hat on, is saying, "Where you look is not where you're going to apply. Where you apply is not where you're going to enroll. So I want you to cast a wide net now and nobody say, no. Let's come at this from a position of yes, here's what we like and if you bump up against anything that's really, we absolutely cannot afford $80,000 and we will not get need-based aid and they don't offer Merit Aid, then it gets taken off the table."
But I think that you come at this with a position of yes, wide net, and you narrow, narrow, narrow, and sometimes the things will be narrowed for you. So you have to be open as a family to really truly hearing what other people in the room have to say, including a counselor because it will come to that. Except if it's Darryl, in this case, he's full of baloney.
Darryl Tiggle:
I think a few areas where parents may dig in or families may dig in, and Jen touched on both of them, but I think in terms of the historical data, and I'm going to say fortunate to be the age or a little bit older than most of the parents with whom I deal. So I kind of understand and I was in admissions long enough to see how admissions has evolved. So they'll often living in the time where they and I applied to college and, to the extent we've formed a relationship where they and I can exchange quickly or peacefully, I say, "The stuff you were talking about with your cousin and your sister and everyone else who went to these places, what did gas cost then?"
And they're like, "Oh, my gosh. Oh, my goodness." I go, "Look, it is just like that." And then, if they're open to that, I give them some examples from my experience in admissions. And I say, "A couple of things happen and this is the historical data that's super important. Around the turn of the millennia, baby boomers kids became college-age like crazy. The common app became ubiquitous everywhere. And then the internet hit net happened where everyone could access it. It totally transformed college admissions in a way that it's way different than it used to be when we were looking at colleges."
And then, if they want to go deeper, I even give more numbers. And then I say," The known-ness," and know-ness is a term that I'm going to offer up to Websters. "I have never heard of that place before. I don't know it." And I say, "I need you to think about college, other things that you might access." And arguably some of the best things you get, cars, clothing, the very best of those things, or really good versions of those things, are brands that people have never heard of before. That does not diminish the quality of those places. So, like Jen said, let's be a community of yes and be open to the places you've not heard of yet.
Jennifer Simons:
Darryl, I would also add, and Lee will be angry at me if I don't add this because this is my bailiwick, but the idea that when we were applying to colleges because we're the same elderly age, the international population wasn't what it is now. And so you didn't have the wealth that you have in places like China and India, which are the major feeder countries for the US and you didn't have the outgoing population, students going to Canada, the US.
You also didn't have American students going abroad as much for university, whether it's through American college programs that have campuses abroad or whether it's just through places like Edinburgh or places that are excited to accept more Americans. So there are so many more options and there are so many more students right now than there ever have been.
Lee Coffin:
I hear you both saying that, if you're a parent, one of the important reality checks, as a list is created, is to not be distracted by a misperception of a college's quality based on something that you might remember from your own college experience 20-plus years ago. And that concurrently the landscape around college admission has really changed quite a bit in the last 20 years. I mean I've witnessed that just in my own career. For all the reasons Darryl has described, I said the perfect storm of those things around 2000 created pools that were larger, more heterogeneous, more geographically far-flung and dynamic in ways that 10 years earlier were not true. And so part of this list-making is the need to be pragmatic.
Jennifer Simons:
Absolutely.
Lee Coffin:
You want to be romantic, you're hoping to fall in love with a place, but there's some pragmatism up front too, right, Darryl?
Darryl Tiggle:
Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I totally agree.
Jennifer Simons:
What I'm going to add, and this is the opposite, I bet, of what you, the dean of admissions at one of the most highly inflective universities, and Tiggle, who works at a really prestigious independent school, I'm going to say the opposite of what most people think about when they think about lists. And that is, I don't want you to start with those "reach" schools. I don't want you to tell me your dream. My goal for you is to have a school or maybe two or three colleges on a list that you like that we can basically tell that you can get accepted to.
And so I want you to start from a place of what some people will call safety. We call them probable. I don't like the word safety because especially now when the predictability, the known-ness, I'm going to take your word in another way, how can you predict it? You don't know. Schools are becoming differently selective, more selective, et cetera.
And so what I would start with is start at the place of "I want you to fall in love with a place that you can get accepted to." I don't like the concept of a reach school being a better school, and too many kids and too many families are like, "Well this is their dream." And the dream usually isn't the state university unless they live in a place with a very, very, very popular state university. But we can talk about that later.
Darryl Tiggle:
I'm 100% with you. And I can even now graphically show it to my children and parents why there's nothing safe. We call them foundation schools, right?
Jennifer Simons:
Oh, I love that. I love that.
Darryl Tiggle:
Wait. Wait till you hear how to sell it. "Foundation schools, your middle schools and your reach schools and your foundation, that's where you are and who you are. And if you are a good student and a good person," are you feeling it, Jen? "Your foundation schools should be good. They should be good. And your middle schools aren't gooder, right? They're just more selective. And your reach schools are, again, they're probably more known, more selective. But if you're a good student, a good person, good scholar, we're going to start with your foundation, because that's who you are and that's who loves you." And I say, "Foundations are your likelys, your middles are your maybes, and your reaches are your hopefullys."
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. But Darryl, to that point, in so many places and so many families, reach equals awesome. Reach means, if it's hard to get, I want it more.
Darryl Tiggle:
You know my style of delivery, I tell them the goal of this process, and I'm at a Quaker school, so they hate hearing this, we're here to win. We're here to win. And I talk with my students a lot and this, and I give them the visual. I say, "We've got to talk about fit." And I argue that the reach schools, they like them for a lot of things, but something tells me they like them because of the name. So I give them a really good example, and I used to do it in person. Now I don't do that anymore. I go "Think about fit in everything that you do." But I go, "I think jeans are ubiquitous. Most people wear jeans, right?"
Jennifer Simons:
Not anymore. Not post-COVID. I can't. I cannot.
Darryl Tiggle:
No jeans?
Jennifer Simons:
When you can have leggings, baby, you don't deal with it. But anyway, I digress. Sorry.
Darryl Tiggle:
It's so refreshing. It's so refreshing to put on some denim after having on sweatpants. But I say, "Think about jeans, think about the different cuts they come in and think about Mr. Tiggle up here in very, very well-known super skinny jeans." Would anyone like to see that? And the kids go, "No, we'd not like to see that." So I go, "Let's approach your college search in the same way. Let's get something that we're going to think about the name and the quality and the like, but we're really going to think about the way that it fits you academically, socially, personally, your future aspirations, and the names of the places are going to be ones that will I think satisfy your desire to have a nice label. But again, you're going to feel good about the places that you are applying to and being invited to attend."
Lee Coffin:
Poke a little bit more on this distracting issue. What else distracts families at the beginning, where you have to say, "You're thinking about something that's not salient right now, focus on this"?
Jennifer Simons:
Well, my biggest pet peeve is when a parent, usually it's a dad, I'm going to be honest, will say something like, "And we're also going to apply," and I'll just keep using Dartmouth, "We're also going to apply to Dartmouth and Harvard because you never know." I get this a lot right at the beginning. "You never know." Well, guess what? And I don't say this, but I really want to say, "I actually do know. In fact, I know that you're lovely, beautiful..." And, "Please don't think about that."
And it's also what I don't think they realize, and I know you are asking specifically about the beginning, but I'm going to fast-forward to October when they're writing five additional supplements or four or three for each school that have to be thoughtful and curated and you can't replicate them at everything. And it's like I do know and I also know, and I'm going to just again defy you as I always do, and fast-forward even more and say, you are not going to feel good when you don't get accepted.
I don't care if you tell me that "I know I have no chance of getting into Yale. I'm just going to apply because why not?" Why not is because if you even typed your name into the Yale supplement to put... You're wasting your time and you are going to feel bad, I promise you. And I don't want you to feel bad because you're such a great kid and you're going to have so many amazing options.
Lee Coffin:
Well, it's to a point you made earlier, Jen, about your list is a living document. And that this beginning moment, the exploration season, phase, where you're discovering, you're comparing, you have a gut check moment from time to time. That needs to play out. So let's go from a blank sheet of paper. You start listening options, because these are not choices at this point. You as a counselor are saying, "Based on the assessment you've done, based on what you're telling me matters, here are some places to begin to consider." How does the family do that? How do you do the research?
Darryl Tiggle:
Yeah, I think there's a lot of data out there. And I think in so much as Jen mentioned, there's some non-negotiables rights, there's a couple non-negotiables that's helped define a student's and parent's and family's college search. I go, "Look, there are a couple, not a lot, but here's at least one or two non-negotiables on the college side. The admit rate is kind of not negotiable. That's probably not going to change during your time."
So I say, "As we set out and go see places that are sort of aspirational, places that are within our reach and places where we'll be super desirable, understand how admissions works at those places." And we're fortunate to have a lot of data. We've got a platform called SCORE where students can do research on the schools, do a virtual tour, see how our kids have done over time.
So I say, "Use those resources so that you can get an idea of how the school feels, look at the charts, look at the graphs, see where your dot lands. And if it's in the ballpark, go and see the place. If it's way out of the ballpark, make that a maybe on your list." So I tell them to do the research upfront, and we probably give them a dozen schools to start off with and we say, right away, "Get rid of the non-negotiable ones and then tell us why you didn't like them and why you do like the ones that do resonate." And then we try to help them get other like-sized shaped schools.
Lee Coffin:
So focus on the ones that resonate and look for more versions of that and start to shift away from places that seem to fizzle.
Darryl Tiggle:
That's right.
Jennifer Simons:
You'll talk about this more with the visit. The visit, people always say, It was raining so I didn't like it." So let's not go to the visit yet. Let's go to the place of, I tell families to buy a Fiske Guide. I really like the Fiske Guide because I think it's a reliable bit of information. I tell them to save all of the actual mailed material because colleges are still mailing. I think we're all a little bit, and I know students are incredibly overloaded with emails right now, and it can be refreshing for families to sit and look together over actual paper, over the kitchen table.
So whether it's the book or the materials, look over that. I encourage students to do sort of the Instagrams, whatever other social media platforms that they use to find out about schools. TikTok, for better or worse, is where they're going and that's how they find out a lot of information. But I think I would start with that. And then when they set up the visits, you go to Mr. Tiggle and you say, "Okay, we're going to California and I know I'm not going to going to a UCLA because it's too big, but could you recommend something that's in that area, similar?"
And you go, "Okay, go visit Loyola Marymount," just swing up. I like it when parents say, "I'm spending a week in the Midwest, I'm visiting X, Y, and Z. What haven't I thought of?" And do that. That's why I actually like the Fiske guide for its section that's like, "These are the overlap schools. If you like Dartmouth, you will also Middlebury," or whatever.
Lee Coffin:
You're advising families to be a bit more relational and comparative. Something that feels right in that Goldilocks scenario, look for more options that have those characteristics. Because that be something that's speaking to you in a way that is sometimes hard to put into words. I have listened to lots of families over the years struggle with trying to quantify a feeling.
They're exploring and something clicks, but they can't put their finger on what it is. And so somehow it's less legitimate because it's a feel more than a think. Darryl mentioned data, there's a lot of data and the data is helpful, but in a lot of spaces we're talking about more of an emotional tug towards the finish line, towards clarity around what matters, what feels right. Is that a fair way of saying it, that they can trust their gut?
Darryl Tiggle:
I tell them if they do the frontend work, if you're thorough in the selfie, on the frontend, if you metaphorically measure yourself for your jeans and then you do the research at the right places, you can 100% go with that. Using the jean reference, you could say, "Oh, I definitely want those." You put them on. You're like, "Ugh." But the way it feels if you've done the front-end work is the science. That is the scientific proof.
If it feels good and you've done the thorough, thoughtful research, that feeling is super important because often when we start at the beginning of the process, and I'm going to pick on your group of schools, my parents, if I have a high achieving student says, "Hey, we're interested in going to the Ivy League." I go, "You mean a good school?" They go, "No, the Ivy League." I go, "I think you mean a good school."
They go, "No, definitely Ivy League." I go, "No, those schools are super different from each other. And some of them, if you like one of them, you would totally not like the other. So let's think about goodness of school and what makes it good for you." And I think that, again, if they've done the thoughtful work that how it feels in their heart, I hope they all get it. And we're going to find a way to make them trust that feeling because that's the magic.
Jennifer Simons:
It's the culture of the school. I love that both you and Lee, if I had to pick the two best dressers I know, it would be you and Lee and you have totally different style. So I think that that's actually very interesting, just to continue with your point with the clothing, with the jeans, but I also find it interesting because we all come from, whether it's an exclusive liberal arts sort of place or not, this idea that the culture is really important, the fit, the feel, the vibe. And I'll say, "Well, how did you feel?" And then the dad, the mom, whatever, they all push back on me and say, "But what is their mechanical engineering program ranked and everything?"
And so on one hand, in my experiences on the admissions side, for every five kids that would come in wanting pre-med and were sure 100% that they were going to be doctors, you'd have four out of those five either flunking organic chemistry, deciding that they wanted public health instead, discovering something else. So on one hand I want to say, "What you want to major in now is flexible and it should be flexible." On the other hand, I say to them, "If you want physical therapy, if you want aerospace engineering, if you want computer science or computer engineering or business, to a certain extent, the culture is secondary to the major." And so that's changed a little bit, this sort of balance between, does the school have what I want? Is it perfect in every other area? Yes, but it doesn't have nursing. Well then that's going to be a no-go.
Lee Coffin:
You took me organically to my next question, which was about program. I advise you to just think about the three Ps, program, place, people, with price being an important fourth P for lots of families. But that program P, which is what you just took us to, a major, a type of curriculum, a specialization, a more liberal arts exploration. Where does that fit in this list-making? Is the goal to, if you have very clear focus, to load up on that focus? You mentioned nursing, you just look at nursing schools? Or is it wise to mix it up and to have a way of cross-checking yourself as you start to explore?
Jennifer Simons:
I'm going to say, and then I'll let Darryl take it, what I insist that students do is when you tell me that you want nursing, you explain to me why you want nursing, how you know you want nursing, what you've done in the medical, what's your volunteer experience been like in a hospital? Have you read the course descriptions for the courses that you're going to have to take? You're probably going to have to take additional testing or have a higher GPA. Are we there yet? How do you know you want nursing?
Nursing, again, is very specific, but now what I find is a lot of kids want engineering, let's say, without knowing what engineering is. Or they say, "I want business." "Well, do you want finance? Do you really want economics? Do you want marketing? And how do you know? Do you just want to make money? It's okay if you say I want a job that will make a lot of money, but let's explore that a little bit."
So even before anything else happens relating to colleges, we have to go and look at the course descriptions. We have to go and look at, one of my favorite, favorite websites is the Bureau of Labor Statistics has the Occupational Outlook Handbook, OOH. So bls.gov Occupational Outlook Handbook. What do you have to do to be a nurse? What degrees do you have to have? How much is your median pay? How many jobs are available? Et cetera. So then we'll talk about college after. If you're so set on this major, prove it to me. I really sound like a very mean, nasty person and I don't mean to come across that way. I am a nice, lovely, charming person that wears only leggings and no jeans.
Lee Coffin:
I don't hear you being mean. I hear you being clear. You're guiding a family towards some proof points that get them away from just this fantasy that they've sketched out about "College will look like this." I agree with your point about business or a very pre-professional course of study. My brother went off to college to study business and I said, "How do you know you want to do that?" And he hated it. He lasted a month or two, but he had chosen a college that only had two courses of study. And so he ended up in the other one by default.
But I don't think he thought about it. Business seemed like... He thought he knew what it was, and he didn't know what it was. And I think that's one of the sticky moments when you come out of high school, is trying to figure out what's my learning environment and then how does that three, four years later set up a professional moment? They're not always the same thing. There are some things you have to study to be able to be that. But, Darryl, how else do you do that?
If you've got the student who's thinking engineering, how do you poke and make sure that the list you're putting together helps them understand what's the curriculum, what are the prerequisites? Because when I read an engineering application, whether I was at Tufts or now at Dartmouth, I'm looking at a transcript in a very different way than if a student writes creative writing. I mean they're just different ways of learning that I need to make sure someone's touched.
Darryl Tiggle:
With you 100% there. And I wrote down, as you think about how the list-making intersects with their potential majors, where it's maybe hard to predict what they're going to study. The three groups I put, and Jen really nailed the nursing sort of pathway, I wrote down engineers, nursing and fine arts. And engineers, I get a lot of students who are engineering students. And then I talk to them about both their math and science history and whether they're taking pre-calc or if they're taking calc, or if they're taking physics or if they're taking advanced physics.
And I often, and this really helps me with the list-making, I ask them why they chose Friends and why they chose to stay at Friends. And if they say, "I really need the individualized education. I like meeting with my teachers after class." I go, "Well, as an engineer, I need you and I love this place. We're in the state. I need you to apply to UMBC, which is a small public sort of liberal arts college in the Maryland system that's one of the best STEM colleges on the planet, instead of University of Maryland. Because of your path here at Friends in a smaller, more intimate community where you've thrived, I think that would be a better match for you than a place that's much bigger, as an engineer. As an engineer, you're the kind of engineer who needs an intro class of 50, not of 500."
So engineering, I talk to them about how their academic history, their match with our small place and the track that they're on math and science because we enable our students to bump up a little bit. And I said, you know what? And I may be overthinking at the advanced science, advanced math folks, they can maybe go to an institute of technology where I want my good at math and science and burgeoning to be outstanding STEM scholars. I'd like them to go maybe to a smaller or medium-sized place if engineering is their goal.
Lee Coffin:
But what about a student who's undecided, as many people in high school should be? So they show up in your doorway or in your Zoom and they're trying to put together a list and they say, "Ms. Simons, I don't know. I know I'm going to college. I'm smart. I don't know what I plan to study." How does that search begin?
Jennifer Simons:
Oh, that's the best. That's my favorite. Because then you can really dig into the culture. Then it becomes more about the culture and it becomes more about the vibe and it becomes more about... And I say even if you say you know, want to major in X, Y, or Z, you're probably undecided because you're going to get to college and you're going to take a class in anthropology and you've never taken a class, I bet, in anthropology or in women's studies or in earth science, whatever it is. And so that's part of the beauty of discovery.
One of the things that I'm up against a lot, and I'd be curious, Darryl, if you are, too, is that parents don't necessarily believe that undecided is okay. Because, to be honest, at some places, and I've heard this on tours that I've gone on, I heard a college rep say, "If you apply as undecided, I don't know what to do with you. I don't know what to do with your application."
Whereas I spent many years at Tufts and Khan and even Northeastern, which is the most sort of university, it has colleges or schools within the university say, "It's okay to be undecided. It's perfectly okay to be undecided." I think that people are afraid that being undecided will put them at a disadvantage. So I always encourage check at the individual schools, but in my vast experience, it's not a disadvantage at all.
Lee Coffin:
But if you're undecided, do you need to look for a different type of college as the list is coming together?
Darryl Tiggle:
It's okay to be undecided, especially if you're applying to certain types of colleges. But I think, as we think about fit, and if there are colleges for which you have to declare a major and then have to enter the school in that program, that's when I might have a conversation with that student about fit and match and whether or not they are going to be able to... They're thinking about business, but they have to start taking Business 101 in September of freshman year. I say that might be a thing that you need to give more to consideration to in terms of your learning style and how you'd like to become whatever scholar you'd like to be.
One of the statistics I give, and I think since some of them are old, I have to check them. When I worked in admissions, I'd say about half of the students who enrolled would arrive with a deciding major. Fewer than half of them would graduate with that major. And that discovery is excellent. You go to a school that has either a liberal arts curriculum or a school of arts and sciences and a school of engineering that allows you to jump over each fence. That might be a super good environment for someone who's undecided because they can explore the curriculum. And I say, "There's a good way for you to go and check out schools, look at schools that have a breadth of curriculum that give you some freedom of choice and time to decide."
Lee Coffin:
So let's talk about list-making from a type of institution perspective. So there are places everybody has heard of, and you've mentioned liberal arts college. How do you suggest to someone, "Let's look at a women's college." I mean, Jen, you went to Wellesley and worked at Barnard. For many high-achieving young women, that's a great option. How does that come into this? Or historically Black college or maybe one of the military academies, different types of places. How does a family know when to include these different types? How does that list-making play out and how should someone know, "Yeah, I need to explore this, or not"?
Jennifer Simons:
That's a question that we put on the questionnaire to create the list. And so would you consider a women's college, a historically Black college, Hispanic-serving institution? Those are questions. And certainly the military academies, ROTC. Another big question is religious affiliation. And this is where it's interesting, there's a almost a little bit more wiggle room, but with women's colleges, in my mind, I would like everyone who identifies as a woman to look at women's college. I feel so strongly about that. I will try to put it on anyone's list.
I think that for a military academy, first of all, the process for applying is so different. And you can apply, let's say, if you have a disability. I mean, that's a very clear yes or no, there's more room. But one of the biggest growth opportunities or growth experiences I had when I started running lists for students across the US was realizing how many colleges there are that have a religious affiliation, how many colleges people think have a religious affiliation and don't have a religious affiliation.
Like your alma mater, Trinity. Like Brandeis up the block. People say, "Oh, I can't go to Brandeis, I'm not Jewish, I can't go to Trinity, I'm not a Catholic." Well guess what? Neither are they. But then also there are hundreds and hundreds of small colleges, large colleges that are religiously affiliated that you might or might not feel comfortable. So that's actually another factor. Would you feel comfortable at a place where you were in a religious minority and still had to take a religion class or things like that. So that's another factor. But if you identify as women, I'm going to say, "Please apply to a women's college because they're so fabulous."
Lee Coffin:
Okay, so before we wrap this list-making topic, what is your best piece of advice to a family at square one? You've done your assessment and the list is the first step forward. What's your best wisdom to the juniors of the world as they start?
Darryl Tiggle:
Jen, you go first because I've got a beauty. I've got a beauty.
Jennifer Simons:
You're afraid I won't be able to follow?
Darryl Tiggle:
I just don't want to put you in that position to follow my foolishness.
Jennifer Simons:
I think again, it's just approaching this with an open mind. If you haven't heard of a school, that doesn't mean that it's not a great school. And exploring and realizing that some of those foundational schools are going to be the ones that give you a lot of money and a lot of opportunities. And so don't overlook them. Don't just go for status. This is about fit. This is about personality, yours and theirs.
And I will also add, and even if you are working with an independent counselor, even if you have a corporate benefit like ours, I would say that your college counselor, your school counselor is a very, very important part of this process. Even if you go to a large public high school, make an effort to get to know the school counselor because they are pivotal, they are crucial, and they're going to write a letter of recommendation for you, ultimately, that's going to be read by all the colleges. So the more you can do to engage with them. Some places they have no choice and it's obvious, but at other places it's not. So they're an important part of this process, too, especially for the list-making.
Lee Coffin:
Darryl?
Darryl Tiggle:
This is really to help them conceptualize the list and to mitigate that rushing to look at the reach column. I tell them to think about this metaphorically, and I tell my students in class to close their eyes. I go, "Hey, everybody, has anyone here ever had a crush on somebody? Raise your hand." I go, "Keep your hand up if that crush didn't return the same amount of love to you. Raise your hand if that felt good." Every hand goes down. I go, "Everybody, again, close your eyes. Raise your hand if you've ever heard that someone had a crush on you. Keep your hand up. Regardless how you initially felt about them before they had a crush on you, keep your hand up if it felt good." Every hand stays in the air.
I go, "That's your foundation list." Look very, very closely at your foundation list. They have in what I think they call Boston, a wicked crush on you, right? Where the other schools, you've got a crush on them. It might be quite requited, but it may not. But we already know right now, these places, they love you. They love the way you look in those jeans.
Lee Coffin:
That's hard to top, Darryl. But the brochures arrive, the colleges have identified you as someone we'd like to get to know. So when a piece of mail shows up at the end of your driveway or wherever your mailbox might be, it is a signal from that place, "We want to get to know you a little bit better." So that mail and the email, too, are ways of exploring and just seeing. Maybe you discover something that you didn't know was there.
So Darryl and Jen, as I knew this would be, thanks for a fun, informative conversation about making a list. And next week, everyone, we will take this one step further and bring you from the list to the campus tour and have a conversation with two deans about what happens when you visit a campus and what should your antenna be registering as you walk around. So that's next week. For now, this is Lee Coffin from Dartmouth College. Thanks for listening.