Season 6: Episode 9 Transcript
History Lesson
Lee Coffin:
From Hanover New Hampshire, I'm Lee Coffin, Dartmouth's vice president for admissions and financial aid, and this is Admissions Beat.
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I majored in history and I'm always attracted to the stories of the past and how the past informs the present. I also am really fascinated by the history of the work I do because I think I'm an admissions nerd as well as a history nerd, and I found a fellow traveler on this nerdy path, quite by serendipity when we were in Los Angeles at the National Association for College Admission Counseling Conference last month. One of our guests on that double episode mentioned that she taught a course at her school on the history of selective admission, and I thought, well, that's cool, let's do an episode on that. So, today we welcome back a new friend of the pod, Maria Morales-Kent, the director of college counseling from Thacher School in Ojai, California, for a look back as a way of understanding where we are today. So when we come back, we'll say hi to Maria and we will nerd out on all things admission history.
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Hi.
Maria Morales Kent:
Hi Lee. How are you?
Lee Coffin:
I'm good. It's so nice to see you, and you heard my intro, so it's a call to arms for fellow nerds to have a chat about history. So, she teaches a course called The History of Selective Admissions at Thacher, and I haven't told you this Maria, but for 10 years I taught a seminar at Harvard's Graduate School of Education called the Principles and Policy Issues of College Admissions, and the first unit in that seminar was a history of college admissions in the United States. So, we both have taught the same course.
Maria Morales-Kent:
Oh my gosh, that's amazing. So, a number of years ago, the former head of school here at Thacher wanted to do a presentation to the alumni during alumni weekend, and he thought it would be cool to do exactly that, to talk about selective admissions, and he asked me to find him some data and I said, "Okay, what kind of data?" And he's like, "I want you to go back years and years and years and get me some data of how things have changed and why things are so competitive now." And so I said to him, "Well, how far do you want me to go?" And he says, "Ooh, can you get me something from the 70s and 80s?"
Lee Coffin:
So, you got back to the 1970s and 1980s.
Maria Morales-Kent:
Yes, yes. But the interesting thing that I just want to share for anybody else who wants to geek out on the history of admissions, there's a great book called The Chosen, and it's a huge volume and it includes the history of admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. And so, part of the interesting thing for me as I began to do this deep dive was reading through the book, which was really, I'd already read it, but I went back and looked at it, and then I did this thing because I was thinking there must be some data somewhere that I can gather, and I ended up going to the Harvard archives to try to find some stuff.
Lee Coffin:
Well, it's interesting, Maria, as you're saying this, because I also started pondering this topic when I read The Chosen... And for listeners, The Chosen is written by a sociologist named Jerome Karabel; he's at the University of California at Berkeley. And when Maria says it's a big book, it's easily 1000 pages. I heard him give a talk, it might have been 20 years ago, where he traces the evolution of admissions from the early 1900s to the present. One of the things that I was really fascinated by this, we all go through this admission process today, and take as an article of faith that people write essays, and they have interviews, and they do testing, and I don't think anybody pauses and says, why do we write essays, and do interviews, and take tests? Where did it all come from? And Maria, as I was doing a version of your original research, I started going back even farther than World War II, and learned that if you go all the way back to the founding of Harvard in 1636... So, for listeners, that's the first college in America.
And from 1636 all the way through 1900, there wasn't really such a thing as admissions. The colleges existed, but people basically enrolled not wherever they wanted to, but in a much less complicated way. The who, the where, the how had no uniformity. Those early institutions didn't have a uniform way of doing this. They all were thinking about character, family background, demonstrated interest in Greek and Latin, a working knowledge of arithmetic was something that I found as an entrance requirement, and that was it. Now, most of the people going to college up to that point were white men, and they were mostly white men from independent schools, mostly in the Northeast. You hear people talk about feeder schools today, that's exactly when that word started, the boys from those boarding schools were being fed, literally, into this handful of private institutions in New England, and that's how the class came to be.
Maria Morales-Kent:
Thank you for taking us even back further.
Lee Coffin:
Way-back machine..
Maria Morales-Kent:
Because I remember reading about that and thinking about my days in the admission office at Penn, back in the 80s, when we would essentially collaborate or really engage with so many of the prep schools that were on the Eastern seaboard, because even back then there was demand, but it wasn't the demand that exists now. And so, these institutions had such a tie and such a connection to all of those secondary schools, and that was enough to keep things going, to fill the beds, and make sure the school was moving forward. And what really prompted this national movement outside of the Northeast? Birth rates. Birth rates that were going to impact, could potentially impact matriculation in the late 70s, early 80s.
Lee Coffin:
But Maria, let's back it up for a sec. So, Karabel is a really interesting read for anybody, just because he tells a pretty vivid story about the way the elements came to be, and in parallel to that is another book by Nicholas Lemann, who's now the former dean of Columbia School of Journalism, who wrote a book called The Big Test. And The Big Test is the history of the College Board, and again, that probably sounds like a snooze, as I say it, it's one of the best books I've read around higher ed. It reads like a novel. When you go from 1900 into the 1930s, the volume was starting to pick up, still not the selectivity we talk about today, but you saw more and more students with an interest in applying, there were entrance exams. So, the College Board was born in 1900; it was a membership organization, as it still is, and their task was to administer what are basically achievement tests, or subject tests in a more contemporary framing, so that the admission process was as simple as, here's the test, if you pass the test, you get accepted.
And for international listeners, you're going to say, oh, that's how it is in my country, and that's how it was in this country too for the early part of the 20th century. But two things happened, one ugly, one interesting. On the ugly side, Jewish students from New York were being coached by a guy named Stanley Kaplan, so that's an actual person, unlike Ronald McDonald. Stanley Kaplan is not just a fictitious name of a company, he was a teacher in New York who coached the children of Jewish immigrants on how to take these achievement tests, and they were doing quite well, and the enrollment of Jewish students at places like Columbia, and Penn, and Harvard, and Yale was growing.
I say it's ugly because there was a significant degree of anti-Semitism that prompted these schools to implement other elements of the application besides testing. The official line was they gave an administrative office, now known as admissions, institutional discretion to say no. Because they needed a reason besides the entrance exam, because if it was just, here's the test, how did you do? You get in, the enrollment was whatever it was. But in the early 1920s, colleges started to create admission offices. And if I look in, there's a wall at Dartmouth, there's a portrait of all of my predecessors, I'm the ninth person in 124 years to be the lead admission officer at Dartmouth. And the first one was appointed in 1921.
Maria Morales-Kent:
Which is crazy, right? But I think that just exactly what you said, this opportunity, they created an opportunity to be able to make their own discretionary choice based on their own, whatever their own priorities were for a given institution, and so I think it's really interesting for me as a college counselor now, having been on the other side as an admission officer, when I think about how all of those little pieces were put into place and how the process was created.
Lee Coffin:
I vividly remember sitting in a lecture hall in Boston, listening to Karabel introduce his book. I didn't know any of this, and I was in my first or second year as dean of admission at Tufts, and I remember being dumbstruck by this idea that holistic admissions, which today, and even 20 years ago, we talked about is this is the gold standard, this is how we celebrate you as a whole person, and how it is a tool today to meet students in the context of where they live, to bring their narratives into the story, to be able to create the diverse student bodies we've had for a couple of decades at this point, but the origin story of holistic admission was a tool of exclusion, not inclusion.
Maria Morales-Kent:
Correct.
Lee Coffin:
And what I continue to be so struck by is the evolution of this set of elements that are cumbersome and need a lot of counseling or neither of us would have jobs, Maria. So, the irony to me is these pieces became more and more powerful and the purpose flipped from being a way of saying no to being a way to saying yes. And I mentioned earlier there was an ugly thing, and the good thing. The good thing originally was testing. So, it was the president of Harvard was interested in diversifying the student body in the early 1930s and commissioned a tool to find high-achieving boys at this point, who lived in the Midwest, who weren't part of the existing network of schools that were sending all of their graduates to Harvard, and so that's how the SAT came to be.
It was introduced to find financial aid students from the Midwest and to find merit in parts of the United States that were not typically in the pipeline. And then, all of these things we're talking about evolved, the GI bill after World War II was the gasoline in the volcano that just ignited everything into the volume proposition we have today. It's like, you can start it literally after World War II, and it's a through line to the present where everything accelerates. And the process we now manage and that students and their parents now come to navigate is in its contemporary format, this multi-dimensional consideration of merits that historically wasn't quite so meritorious.
Maria Morales-Kent:
Correct. When you use the word merit, for example, when I actually hear people talk about this process is not a meritocracy, right? The application process. Because the volume, the sheer volume of students who are in these pools, particularly at some of the most selective schools in the country, all of them have essentially merited an opportunity to be able to apply, and so many of them feel strongly that they should be able to merit an offer of admission. And so, one of the things for me as a college counselor that I always try to talk to students about these days is the process is a process that involves all these different components, and you do your best to put your best foot forward for every single one of those, you work hard in school, you do your best on tests, you spend some thoughtful time on the application, on the essays, you think about yourself and what you've achieved and what you hope to achieve, all of those things, you put your best foot forward, knowing that there's many, many other students who are doing the same.
And that's really the purpose of my spending the time creating this class and sharing slides with my students and also their parents. Their parents heard about the class, and so I sometimes will share pieces of it with them as well. I think it helps them see, understanding the history. It's the power of history in and of itself, that if you understand it it helps you understand your place in our world today, and then maybe things don't seem quite as daunting because you can understand why there are now so many students applying, why it's so much more difficult.
Lee Coffin:
So, Maria, you've developed this course, so a couple questions. Why do you teach it, and what are the takeaways you hope your students, and even listeners of the podcast, but certainly your students, what are the takeaways that you hope the juniors get from this history of admissions?
Maria Morales-Kent:
The reason I decided to teach this class is because going into the college search process with juniors every winter always feels a little bit daunting to them. They're nervous to meet me, they're nervous to start the search process, they're nervous about it because they've been watching the seniors go through it and they're worried, I'm not going to get in, oh, this is just like a lottery, there's no sense to it. And I always tell kids that I think knowledge is power, right? Understanding the history of anything can help you understand why you are where you are today.
I also felt that it would be important... It would be an important way to demystify it, to make it much more real and not so, again, unpredictably scary. I said, let's think about when your parents or your aunts and uncles or possibly your grandparents were applying to school and getting in to those really difficult schools on the East Coast. So, now they're telling you, oh, go ahead and apply to this school, go ahead and apply to that school, I got in, you can get in. And you're looking at the numbers and you don't understand why. And so, I say to them, over the Thanksgiving holidays or over Christmas holidays, people are going to start asking you, where are you going to look? Where are you going to apply? And I want you to have an understanding of how we got ourselves here to this moment.
And so I talked to them about birth rates back in the... Or the results of the birth rates in the 1980s, how the bread and butter states were going to have fewer graduates, and how deans and directors look at birth rates as they look ahead to try to figure out how recruitment is going to take place. Back for the University of Pennsylvania, it was Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey were their biggest states. The drop in applications across the Eastern Seaboard was scary. And so, they began this effort to recruit West. That was another moment, just like when the Harvard president wanted that SAT to build and increase the number, diversify the population, right?
Lee Coffin:
And that's something I think a lot of contemporary applicants don't appreciate. That when I look at our pools in the 2020s, everyone knows they're big, but they're geographically diverse in ways that are historic. And I was at a meeting the other day at Dartmouth, it was at the alumni council, and when I was talking about geography, and I said, the pool we have today is drawn primarily from the South, the West and international. It's almost 60% of all the applicants to Dartmouth College live in one of those three broad regions, and people were amazed. And I said, it's not because we're trying to ignore the Northeast and the Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic, to your point, the birth rate is not as high today in those parts of the United States as it once was, and our geographical framing is moving.
These elements of merit, this holistic application we all have are the tool for students from places that aren't "feeders" to tell their story and show their achievement. I think the hidden part of this work is the idea that demographics come and they go, you had the baby boom after World War II, and then it sagged, and as you're saying in the 80s, and then it roared back to life in the 90s and the 2000s, and then you had a recession and everything dropped, and then internationalization started really in the last 10 to 15 years... That's part of the way we adjust our work to respond to the current moment.
Maria Morales-Kent:
Right. It's interesting because just as you were talking about that alumni, the comment that you made to the alumni council, I'm looking at some of my slides from my little talk to my students, and I have something from 1982, President Sheldon Hackney wrote to the board of trustees at Penn, and said, "Our intensified recruiting efforts outside of the Northeast have brought us more students from California, Texas, Ohio, and Illinois. There is also a welcomed surge in the number of foreign students in the class of 1986 compared to 26 in the class of 1985." And then, if I look at Penn's numbers this year, or back when I was looking at their numbers here in my slide, In the depth of the pandemic, it was 13% international students. The other piece is students of color, back in 1978, it was a total of 12%, which I think is pretty impressive overall at Penn, but in the class of 2021, again, the slide that I have in front of me is 50%.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. The other part of the history of our work that I think merits a mention is the internet. Which, we all take for granted, and we walk around with our phones in our pocket, and you Wi-Fi everywhere. But I was working at Connecticut College when the internet came into everybody's life, I remember the first email I got, it was in 1994. But we were paper-based, everything came in the mail, we opened it, we put it in manila folders, with the colored stickers, and we read it with a pen, and took notes... And in the late 90s, the Common Application became electronic. And I remember one by one, as we all adopted this new electronic Common App, which seems so magical, the volume started to accelerate because it was easier to apply. And that has not stopped.
Maria Morales-Kent:
Right. Trying to make it easier for kids to apply. Meeting kids and trying to make it easier, because at that point, certainly when I applied to University of Pennsylvania many years ago, I filled out a paper application. I filled out a paper application for everyone, with different essays and different requests. And the Common Application was going to allow for a singular app, in fact, back then there weren't any supplements that you had to submit, right?
Lee Coffin:
So, imagine that listeners, we're not talking about a day that long ago when there was no supplement.
Maria Morales-Kent:
There was no supplement.
Lee Coffin:
There was no supplement. But you also weren't applying to 15 or 20 places, you might've applied to six, eight, maybe 10 if you were really feeling like you wanted to throw a bunch of apps out there. And that example, on other episodes I've talked about, shape your list with intention, because you're telling your story across all of these different campuses so that they can meet you and say, I see you here. Easier to do when you apply to five, it's harder to do when you apply to 20. And that's where the electronic application in this history of college admission really changed the volume proposition for all of us. For the college, certainly, we're getting more applications year by year by year, but for you as an applicant, you're applying to more. So, it's a two-way street. These two things are twinning together and creating these policies that we talk about.
So, supplements, early decision was something that has been around since the 70s and 80s, but it didn't really become a meaningful part of our work until the mid to late 90s, and it became meaningful because the number of students was declining, the economy was a little flat, and colleges started to say, oh, Maria wants to come here, she's made a binding decision to enroll, let's use early decision to stabilize our enrollment. And it was a pragmatic response from the colleges that 25 years later has turned into a really important round for students and colleges alike. The current landscape reflects these historical moments, and you don't always know it when you're in it... In the 90s, I don't know, we all said, oh, this thing called internet is going to become a way of life, that changes the way, in this case, how we recruit, how we gather information, how we apply, how we send decision letters...
Maria Morales-Kent:
When I worked at Penn, the early decision process was a really important tool for the university. I remember it very clearly back then, we would kid that Penn, Brown, and Columbia were always trying to move their way up the pecking order to get closer to HYP—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. And I remember that my boss back then really loved early decision because he felt that that was a way also to identify the kids who really were passionate about the university, who wanted to be at the university, and he said, "These are the kids who make up the core of who we are every year, they're the ones who insert that powerful energy and love of the institution that is so critical to our growth, and it's so critical to how the community feels the vibe of the place when they walk on campus."
Lee Coffin:
And that's still true.
Maria Morales-Kent:
It is. Absolutely, it is true, and I think that that's part of the reason why he used to say to me, or to all of us, "Tell kids that if they're applying to us early decision, it should be about passion for the place, not about a way to get into the place, because we take it seriously, we do take that commitment seriously."
Lee Coffin:
Do you remember what the acceptance rate was at Penn in the early 80s?
Maria Morales-Kent:
Well, in the early 80s, it was about 50%.
Lee Coffin:
50, 5-0. So, listeners, just as an example of the history of college admission, that is when I was applying to college, and these really high profile selective institutions, selective meant you admitted 50% of your pool or less, not 5%.
Maria Morales-Kent:
Right. Correct, correct.
Lee Coffin:
So, let's play a little game. So, in the class I taught, I've got my little slide deck, and I was flipping through it, and I've got a slide called The World as We Know it, 1982 to the present. So, 1982, so I think we were both in college, so listeners in 1982, The Fiske Guide to Colleges was published for the first time, it was the very first college guidebook. Before that... So, I applied to college in 1981, there was no guidebook for me as a high school senior, or Maria in 1980. So, '82, The Fiske Guide pops up. And it was the first time a non-academic entity, so in this case, a journalist from The New York Times, offered his opinion on campuses around the country, and boom, an entire little industry started.
Maria Morales-Kent:
Yeah. Yeah.
Lee Coffin:
Maria, do you know what happened the next year, in 1983?
Maria Morales-Kent:
I don't know what happened in '83 here, I do have in 1975 is when the Common App was found.
Lee Coffin:
Oh yeah. So, that's right, 1975 is when the Common App launched with six places.
Maria Morales-Kent:
So, I can tell you that by 1980, there were 15 schools who had joined. Because they saw, those 15 saw the power of that tool to generate applications.
Lee Coffin:
So, '75 Common App becomes a thing, not widely used, but the beginning of this shared platform. '82, you have a guidebook. 1983, U.S News and World Report issued its first best Colleges Edition. So, back to back years, and I remember this really vividly. You had guidebooks and then you had this ranking. And I remember the student newspaper on my campus in a tizzy about where... It was Trinity. Where Trinity was on the list. And it started almost immediately, there was this conversation about why are we this number versus that number? But it was the first time there was this visibility of all the data that goes into our work because it was funneling into... In those early days, the rankings included your acceptance rate, your SAT averages, your class rank.
So, really fundamental parts of data from admissions were part of U.S News and World Report. That's not true anymore. Parents, if you're listening to this conversation and you were in high school in the 80s, or maybe even the early 90s, at this point, these things were talking about were really embryonic parts of our work, versus what your kids are experiencing, and I'm guessing when you teach the course, Maria, this is part of the lesson you're trying to give students and parents, is that what we know today wasn't necessarily true when the parents applied, and we're navigating really different circumstances.
Maria Morales-Kent:
Right. What my predecessor once told me is that so much about the admissions process is really about perceptions that people have about the process. And sometimes the perceptions are based in reality and actual data that you can look at, but a lot of times they're based on social ideas, and social norms, and social values. So, what the U.S News and World Report did, as far as I'm concerned, is it made education a commodity. Right? It took the notion of going to college as a wonderful milestone and part of a student's growth from high school to adulthood, that was just a milestone, right? So, you could get excited about going to your neighborhood college, or your parents' alma mater, or you are living in the Midwest and you see some brochure from a school full of palm trees, and you're like, I want to go there because I want to go to a place that has palm trees.
It goes from that, it goes from this moment of exploration as you're stepping into the bigger world, to becoming a commodity like so many other things in our capitalistic society, about the best car, the best pair of jeans, the best phone, the best this, and I think that that is in part what has fed so much of the anxiety and the worry, and this sense of where I go to defines who I am as a student, or where my child goes defined how good I was at parenting.
Lee Coffin:
I think the commodification of higher ed and admissions is a function of that also drew the attention of the media. I named this podcast Admissions Beat as a nod to the way journalism covers college admissions. And it's a beat. There are reporters who have this as their assignment, and they're covering it because parents care, students care, your board of trustees, my board of trustees care, and there are current events that bubble around this. Well, you mentioned social a couple of minutes ago, this history of college admissions is also defined by lawsuits. So, 1978, you have a Bakke case for the Supreme Court, first time the court talked about affirmative action and race as part of an admission process. It came back to it in 2003, with two cases of the University of Michigan, came again in 2013 with Fisher from the University of Texas, it came again in 2023, with the SFFA case against Chapel Hill and Harvard.
And so, the Supreme Court is intersecting with this history of college admission and giving us guidelines that we didn't have before. Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent in the SFFA ruling, talked about holistic review as being something powerful and important. Karabel wrote about it 20 years earlier and said, "Oh, the roots of this are anti-Semitic." And then, you have a Supreme Court ruling where it's being upheld as valuable. So, the lesson of all of these history moments is, things evolve, and the work we do today is not always the same as what we're going to do two years from now. But I'm wondering, Maria, as you teach this course every year, how do the students respond?
Maria Morales-Kent:
So, they're actually... First of all, the minute we put up the 1980 statistics up against the current statistics they just, first of all, they're silenced for a little bit, and then we talk-
Lee Coffin:
Because they can't believe the numbers are what they are?
Maria Morales-Kent:
They are, yes, in silence. And then, one of the numbers that we point to, and this is another piece of the conversation that exists out there in our profession, one of the things we point to is the fact that even though the application numbers have gone up, and even though all of the other numbers are shifting, admissions rates are shifting, or yield is shifting, we always say to them, what number seems to stay the same? And they look and they're like the size of the freshman class. And so, schools have not really shifted into, in any way, necessarily, maybe a couple hundred here or there for some institutions, but the numbers really, in terms of the size of a school have remained the same. And so, they always talk about that, why won't they just get a little bigger so that it would make things a little bit easier?
Lee Coffin:
But just me answer that question, because I hear that a lot, and I've always worked at places that are on the smaller side, whether it's a university or a liberal arts college, and by definition that scale is our purpose. There's never going to be enough seats. Demand is always going to outpace the supply. But you're right, over time, most of us have not grown the size of our entering class, it's diversified in geography, it's diversified by identity, it's diversified by the types of merit we consider... I always giggle when I talk about first gen college, I was first gen college, I didn't know it. In 1981, that was not a category of inclusion, but I didn't know, there was no first gen club on campus. And it was only 15-ish years ago when first generation to college became a cohort, that colleges where I worked started to track.
In more recent years, a new twist on this demographic piece related to history as we're talking about, rural, and many of us are making commitments to rural communities to expand access. Last year I added a rural category into my database so that I knew, okay, if we're talking about rural, who's rural, how do I know when I'm admitting them? How many enrolled? It's another example of an evolution that responds to institutional priorities. But so it's interesting though, Maria, that your students are taken aback by the stats. Does it help them? You keep teaching it, so I'm guessing there's the lesson of it, the lesson of history is what?
Maria Morales-Kent:
Well, I think the lesson of history provides them perspective. It grounds them in their own understanding of the process that they're in now and how it evolved, it helps give them the tools to talk to Aunt Sue, or grandmother, who's encouraging them to apply to a really difficult school, where they're looking at their statistics and they're like, they don't match up, and to be able to say to her, when you applied back then, and you were in California, those East Coast schools really wanted kids from California, and now, according to what Ms. Kent's telling me about Penn, California's like the third largest state, I'm not getting any benefit. Because parents will always say that, oh, we're from California, that'll help. Well, it won't help anymore-
Lee Coffin:
Well, I know, I will say, because California is our largest state in the applicant pool, the accepted student group, and the class, so all three steps, and I would say as a reassurance to all our friends on the West Coast, you absolutely are a priority.
Maria Morales-Kent:
Good.
Lee Coffin:
As are kids from New Jersey. So, the geography today is not always distinctive, but we are looking to make sure everybody's represented in the class.
Maria Morales-Kent:
I love what you said about the rural students. For a number of years, I had the honor of working or being asked to serve on the National Merit Advisory Council, and I remember hearing that story and that history, and it's a little bit attached to your interest in rural students and what kind of access rural students have to a place like Dartmouth, and I think that there's definitely an interest on the part of so many selective schools to really make sure that they are looking to have those students included in their communities. And I remember hearing the story about the National Merit and how it emerged. The SAT had been around and the founder or founders of the National Merit, we were in the middle of the space race, and there was this sense of, out there, there must be these extraordinarily naturally talented kids, and we just need to find them.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Maria Morales-Kent:
And so, they developed the PSAT, and administered it nationally to every high school that was willing to administer it to their juniors, to identify those kids that potentially because they were, again, like you said, first gen, but maybe not under a designation, because they were rural students, because they were a naturally brilliant kid who maybe would never get the attention of any school, to sort of the hidden gems all over the country, that was the purpose. To give them that access to some of the best institutions in the country. And that's how the National Merit Program began.
So, your effort now on rural students, it's all very similar. And the work that I did for the University of Pennsylvania, when my boss sent me to recruit in San Antonio, Texas that first year was this desire to bring diversity to the institution. Because as they say, equity, and inclusion and access all come together, and when you can bring the brightest, most diverse minds to the table is when you can have some of the best learning take place. I love this recent interest in the rural communities because as I have recently learned by looking at some statistics, many, many rural communities are actually underfunded in ways that they're not even at the level of certain inner city communities, for example. Many rural students are actually supported even less, and the school opportunities are potentially significantly more limited.
Lee Coffin:
No, it's really interesting. And as we're talking, I'm reminded again of what I almost named the course I taught at Harvard Ed School. So, it was The Principles and Policy Issues of College Admissions, I almost named it The Sociology of College Admissions. And as we're talking, I think you can hear over the last 125 years, this sociological theme that bubbles through the way each college imagines the class it's trying to bring together, how do we do it? What tools do we use? And I think listeners, the takeaway for me today is the application that you're completing for admission to the college class of 2029 or 2030 is this evolution of all of these types of merit, all these institutional goals, all of these shifting sociological currents.
And a trivia point, just to close, we assume colleges always had applications. The very first modern application was at Columbia in 1919. So, it's been about 100 years that we've been doing it this way, and most of the colleges that are uber selective right now have been around a lot longer than 100 years. And so, I close with this reminder that this is modern history, this is not ancient history. This is a living organic topic. Maria, thanks for joining me on the podcast again, and sharing these thoughts about the history of our work.
Maria Morales-Kent:
Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Again, I've been doing this since 1984, and the thing that keeps me inspired all the time is that higher education and that experience is such a gift in every kid's life. On our part, I consider it a noble profession, whether we are on this side of the desk or on your side of the desk, in that, for all of us, it was life changing, and so we want to share that gift with others. And I think just the more we can help educate kids about it, hopefully we can ground their experience in just their own reflection about who they are and where they want to go and what they hope to achieve. So, thank you for including me.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, of course, always happy to have you/
And listeners, I hope you enjoyed this history lesson. We've got a few more episodes to go before we wrap season six in early December. For now, I'm Lee Coffin from Dartmouth College, thanks for listening, and if you like what you're hearing, please subscribe so that listeners find us as season seven comes into your feed in the new year. So, see you next week.