Season 7: Episode 7 Transcript
Children Will Listen
Lee Coffin:
From Hanover, New Hampshire, I'm Lee Coffin, Dartmouth's vice president and dean of admissions and financial aid. And this is Admissions Beat.
Parents, we're talking to you today. When we do episode-by-episode, we often pause and give parents advice about how to support their children as child moves through the college admission process. And about a month or two ago, I was invited to Pine Crest School in Florida for their junior kickoff. And as the preamble to that, I was asked to give a keynote to the entire parent association about how to behave in the college admission process. And then I offered tips to parents during an evening program about how to help their child be successful. And I got really wonderful feedback on that. And so I thought, let's turn this into an episode. So when we come back we will say hello again to Marcia Hunt, the dean of college and academic advising at Pine Crest, my longtime colleague and friend. And she and I will go over what I said when I was in Florida and why it was good advice. We'll be right back.
(music)
Hello, Marcia.
Marcia Hunt:
Hi Lee, how are you?
Lee Coffin:
I'm well. It's always fun to have you on the pod. Welcome back.
Marcia Hunt:
Thank you so much.
Lee Coffin:
For listeners, Marcia is one of the elder statespeople of college admission, and by elder statespeople, I don't mean she's 106. I mean she has been a leader in my professional space for as long as I've been in my professional space. She's a past president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. She's a past board member of the College Board. She's a former chair of the Association of College Counselors and Independent Schools. And you basically look for a committee that deals with college admissions and access and Marcia has been there. So Marcia, when I bring you on the pod, you have so much wisdom from all of that work. And I was also thinking about your tenure at Pine Crest, which has been lengthy and you've literally had thousands of parents come through your office.
Marcia Hunt:
Yes, we do. And I now have children of alums with whom I am meeting. So my first class of graduates now have children who are freshmen and sophomore and juniors and seniors. And I tell the parents that I won't tell stories on them when they were in high school, provided they're cooperative parents in the college.
Lee Coffin:
Well, let me go back to that phrase. How would you describe someone as a cooperative parent? What's the overarching quality that makes them cooperative?
Marcia Hunt:
An overall quality is certainly to be a good listener to their children and to let their children drive the process. And I think you've said on one occasion or another that the parents are in the back seat and the student is the driver in it. And the parents that really support their kids and listen to what they're saying about the process are the easiest for the student and for our office to deal with.
Lee Coffin:
I hear so many of my colleagues who work in schools say that. So when you asked me to speak to this parent topic during your junior kickoff, I tried to channel everything I hear my school friends saying what I have said to my friends who are now parents in the college admission process about how to be productive and purposeful in support of the applicant. And what I always think about when I deal with parents is the intentions are always high. How do we help this person I love move through a process that seems complicated and unpredictable and land in a happy spot when it's over? That's the landscape. What I thought I would do today is go through the six tips I gave parents about roles, boundaries, expectations, and then after each one I thought maybe you and I could talk about why that tip makes sense.
Marcia Hunt:
Sounds great.
Lee Coffin:
Okay, so parents, so here is admissions parenting 101. So tip number one is what I'm calling "embrace your pronouns." So it's not uncommon in schools and businesses right now for people to identify the pronouns they use as part of their identity. And in this context, the proper pronoun is not "we." And you would be surprised how often a parent comes up to me at an event, at a school visit, on campus and says, "We are applying," or "We have written an essay," or "We are about to interview." And I always pause them and say, "The pronoun is she/he/they, not we." Marcia, why is it important to focus on the pronoun, the not we?
Marcia Hunt:
Well, because "we" implies again that the parent owns part of the process. And again, the parent is the supporter. I had a parent the other day saying, "We are taking the SAT in March and then we're going to try the ACT in April before we go to visit our list of schools." We try to correct them as kindly as we can, but it is not "we," it is the child. And it brings to mind that parents often feel like the fact that it's a "we," that they can share all of that private information about what's going on in their child's life at that time.
So parents will be at the supermarket and they'll be checking out and they'll see their neighbor and their neighbor will say, "Where is Lee applying?" And they'll say, "Well, we are applying to XYZ, WXK." And for that moment that parent feels that burst of pride at the fact that this child would be applying to these schools, but it's horribly embarrassing to the child, A, that this list is out that they were keeping private, and B, when the decisions come out and many of those do not work out. So the parent has to remember that it is a child who owns their list of prospective colleges, not we.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Well my second tip flows off of that. So we're recording this on the day after the Academy Awards and my reference here is: define the roles of the search within your family. So the parent can play the role of best director or maybe producer or best adapted screenplay. The student is in the lead actor category, best actor or best actress. Let the kid lead. Ask the question, what does this person in the lead role need me to do to support them?
Marcia Hunt:
So parents can be really helpful in helping students get organized and helping students plan college trips and college visits and helping students get organized for taking standardized testing and again, supporting them but not becoming part of it. For example, there's a great temptation when students are writing their essays for parents to try to insert their voice into the 17-year-old's essay. And there's nothing worse than a 45-year-old lawyer's voice in a 17-year-old's essay.
Lee Coffin:
And we can see it.
Marcia Hunt:
It's easy. There's language, "thereto, therefore" and what are some of the common words that you see that 45-year-olds use that 17-year-olds don't?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, many years ago I was reading the Washington D.C. Docket and a student submitted an essay about microlending in sub-Saharan Africa, which had nothing to do with anything the student was interested in. It was this really dense, almost term paper, about microlending in sub-Saharan Africa. And I flipped back in the files it was so long ago that it was paper, and I looked at the parent section and the mother worked for the World Bank with a focus on African development. I thought, well, there you go. The voice was clearly not a teenager and very much in that example someone at the World Bank.
But the broader topic here about defining roles with student as lead, I think there's an opportunity for every parent, guardian, supporter, to sit down early in the search and say to the prospective applicant, "How can I help?" Because I think what you see in the college counseling world, and what I certainly see in admissions is parents want to be helpful.
And for most of a 17, 18-year-old's life, the parent has been leading in some overt way. And this is that moment of transition when the student is now out front and the parents are in support. And so figuring out what's the best role for the parent and to students, if you're listening, think about what mom, dad, stepmom do well and then give them homework. So if you know someone's a great planner, you say, "These are the five schools I'd like to visit, plan the trip." Or, "I have a list from my college advisor. I don't have a lot of information yet. Can you go online, do a little investigatory work and write a blurb about each of the places and how they sync up with what I'm interested in studying?" Maybe the student knows he's a procrastinator and I use the he pronoun deliberately in this example. And the role that needs to be filled in this story is nag. The student says to the parent, "You have my permission to manage deadlines, make sure I'm on track instead of forcing yourself into the role of schedule manager." And that causes friction.
Where I think the bumps start is when a parent trying to be helpful starts to take on roles that the student hasn't really endorsed.
Marcia Hunt:
Yes, and I think one of the things that you mentioned was when the student talks to the parent about the college list, the parent can be really helpful but should try to be very non-judgmental. It's very easy to remember what these schools were like when you were applying to schools. For example, Northeastern, which is a really popular school right now, in 2010, they admitted 34% of their students who applied and there were 37,000 students who applied. This year in 2025, 105,000 students applied. So the admit rate from 2010 went from 34% to 5.2% last year. It's really important not to impose your prejudices because schools have dramatically changed.
One of our counselors talked to a student who was really interested in small liberal arts colleges and mentioned a school in Maine to this child and the student was very excited about it and went home on a Friday and then came back on Monday and said, "Mrs. Sullivan, my parents are so mad at you, whoever heard of "Bo-doe-an?" So Mrs. Sullivan corrected her that it was Bowdoin. And six months later, guess where that student went? That student enrolled in Bowdoin. People have to be really careful about letting their own impressions. And just one other point, when parents of students who are 16 or 17 were applying to schools, they may have gotten into a school that had a 50% admit rate then and it now has a 4% admit rate. And it's trying to really understand all the dramatic changes that there've been in 20 years.
Lee Coffin:
Well, you organically went to what was my third point, which is to parents who are probably in their forties or older, who were in high school in the nineties-ish. 2025 is not 1995. And what you hear Marcia describing with some really important examples, is the landscape shifted. And what you might remember as a high school student or a college applicant yourself, is not necessarily current because places have changed. Northeastern is a really vivid example of a place that's really reimagined itself over the last generation. And if you are just re-introducing yourself to the world of college admissions, you might've missed that.
I think the other part that Marcia's pointing us to in saying "'1995 isn't 2025," are things like volume and selectivity, the demographics, have all moved dramatically. I think about this all the time because I started as a dean in 1995 and as I've reflected on the last 30 years and how different the volume is and the admit rates that flow from the volume and the way people don't always understand that it wasn't that places were not admitting high quality people in 1996, it's just the end was much smaller. So 50% of the admit rate doesn't mean it was a weaker class. It just means you had 3000 applicants and took 1500 and now you're taking 1500 out of 30,000. And it's just the scale is different. And part of the role of the college counselor at all schools is to translate that for you. And not argue. I mean, Marcia, how much do people push back on this idea that they remember something that you're trying to disrupt?
Marcia Hunt:
A lot. It's difficult because we're supporting the child 100% in their college search process and supporting their dreams and aspirations. But we also need to be realistic with them and help them be a good consumer of what's happening with the numbers. I had a funny meeting with a parent a few weeks ago. I had mentioned my alma mater to the child as a possible school they might consider, and the father didn't know that I had gone to this school and came in in a huff and said, "How dare you suggest X school. If my child goes there, they're going to be destined for a life of mediocrity."
Lee Coffin:
Did you out yourself at that moment?
Marcia Hunt:
Well, what I did is I waited for him to work his eyes around my office and see several mentions of the fact that I went to that school and my diploma was hanging on the wall. So it was an uncomfortable moment for him and sort of a humorous moment for me. But I hope I haven't led a life of mediocrity. I don't think so.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Well, part of the tension in this is that we all remember things that may still be true, but a lot of the details of our work are really quite different today. And that's the advice I'm giving to my peers who are parents, is to be open to a shift in the way you see the landscape. And connected to that is tip four, try to resist the phrase "I've never heard of it," which has come up in a few of our episodes this season. As discovery is taking place in juniors are starting to explore and probably the more intentional advice I have on this one is explore, then assess. Don't assess before you explore. You need to your example of Bowdoin, you have to check it out, see what you think, see how it feels. Feeling is important. And then you could say, doesn't feel right, but try not to prejudge something.
Marcia Hunt:
Parents need to be careful when you're talking to your children's friends about schools because what is one person's dream is another person's likely school, and it's very difficult for kids to understand what it is that you're saying. So I think being, again, going back to being a good listener and really hearing what they're talking about.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, that's a really important point, Marcia. I think people forget that within a family you see one report card, it's the one that comes home with your child. And you might hear things about your friends' kids, but you're not actually seeing that evidence. And I've noticed some of my friends tend to be a bit more complimentary of the evidence than the evidence really deserves, but that idea that the info sharing can sometimes step on toes and you don't even realize you're doing it.
Marcia Hunt:
There's a lot of misinformation circulating on social media. I think people are seeing this among parent groups and just what's out there. And there's a lot of very inaccurate information,
Lee Coffin:
Marcia, it's almost like you've heard me do this presentation before because you just jumped to my next tip, which is to the degree possible, unplug from social media. And now here I am, host of a podcast that's social media. Don't unplug from everything, but go into this space with the awareness that everything you hear, see, talk about may not have the right context around it. And I know Marcia, your job in a school is often to redirect things people have heard. Say a little bit about that. Like the need to be cautious.
Marcia Hunt:
People, you have to not listen to the noise. There's again, a lot of misinformation circulating out in public. There are a lot of people in the business of charging students for advice, sometimes good, sometimes not. But you have to remember that it's $3 billion, unregulated for the most part, business. And you will get a lot of information that may or may not be accurate that's based on hearsay. Every year we will have our parents come up to us saying, "Oh, I heard Dartmouth doesn't like us anymore." Or, "I heard you had a fight with such and such a school." And you're like, where did that come from? This is not the way that this whole world works. But parents have Facebook groups where they're sharing information that can or cannot be accurate. So you just have to be really careful about that.
Lee Coffin:
Well, and I find on the information that's misinterpreted, it's often data. So there's so many numbers out there that are easy for people to find on a school website or sometimes I'll see a story in the media where a reporter said, "Oh, A + B = C." I'm like, "No, it doesn't." But it's there and parents can sometimes get distracted. I had a conversation over the weekend with someone was worrying about selectivity and the idea that so many places have such narrow admit rates. And I said, "But what you don't see in that number is did every single applicant have an equal chance at that 5% or did people with a really robust profile and a great holistic story, was their admit rate 40% and a larger N who were outside of the sweet spot in that pool had a 0% chance. It averages out to five. You can't see that because you don't know how the pool sorts itself, but your odds of admission are probably not five out of a hundred if you are at or above the school's profile, if you've done an effective job of introducing yourself." So a number that seems so transparent, how many did you admit? It has many layers of nuance there.
Marcia Hunt:
And we see that in information like the number of applications that a college receives, but they don't necessarily tell you the number of students who were admitted or the percentage of applicants who did not submit test scores is a lot different than the percentage of admitted students who did not submit test scores. So a lot of it is knowing what to ask in college information sessions, in college visits.
Lee Coffin:
So parents, the tip within the tip is to just be a very deliberate consumer of data. Don't just see a number and say, I know what that means. And if you're not sure, ask your guidance counselor to interpret the data and help you use it if it's useful. I think that's the other thing. Sometimes people get distracted by some of the numbers in my work and say, "But you can't control that." So when you ask me about yield, which is the percentage of admitted students who enroll, that's my headache. I have to figure out how many to admit to create the right size class on May 1st and in turn look at my CFO and say, "Yep, we are fully enrolled. The budget works." That's an inside baseball topic. To an applicant, yield really shouldn't even be a question people ask, but the stats that are out there could be interesting, but they may not be germane to your candidacy.
Okay, speaking about numbers that might be germane to your candidacy. So tip number, I've lost track of what number this is, I think it's six, to parents. Be clear about dollars and cents now. Start to have a conversation with your applicant. What can you afford as a family? What are you willing to pay and what you can afford and what you're willing to pay are not the same things. You may have the capacity to pay tuition room and board, but choose not to. Fine. But have that conversation upfront. And the way you do it is you go online, all of us in higher ed have a net price calculator on our websites. It's required by federal law. You plug in your data and that college will give you a projection, not a guarantee, of what's the contribution you'll need to make to pay for this.
I don't think my sister would mind my sharing that I sat down with her recently, she's a teacher, a single mom, and she's a high school junior. And I said, let's do the net price calculator. And she's not applying to Dartmouth, but we used our calculator as an example and she looked and she said, "It costs $90,000 a year. I can't afford that." And I said, "Type in your information, see what happens." And it came back, she was probably going to need to spend about $6,000 a year based on her income and assets. And she looked at me and she said, "That's amazing." And I said, "That's information that now empowers you to explore."
If it came back and said you're going to need to spend $60,000, you might've said, "That's amazing and not possible." And then your search could look for different options, state universities, merit programs. But knowing that today versus a year from now, really important so that you don't find yourself in a situation where a student falls in love at a campus, applies, gets in, the aid award comes back with a number that's not doable, however you want to describe "Not doable."
And then you have an emotional conversation instead of a pragmatic conversation. But Marcia, that advice, I think when I give it, it always surprises families that I'm saying start with that, don't finish with that.
Marcia Hunt:
I think that's so true, Lee. There's nothing worse than a student learning from his or her parent, their parent, in April, that they can't afford the University of Michigan when they never had that conversation before. And again, I think you brought up, well, the importance of going through all of the steps, but again, often what a family thinks they need is not at all what the college thinks that you should have. I think the definition of need, I heard this story, this is how old I am, that a long time ago that Bear Bryant—
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, from Alabama. Yeah.
Marcia Hunt:
He told somebody that they were need-based in their financial aid because he needed a quarterback and he needed a running back and he needed a safety. So that was his definition of need-based. But your idea of need-based, parent's idea of need-based and a college's idea of what your need is, can be very, very different.
Lee Coffin:
What do you see among your students and their parents? I mean as they're having this financial conversation which is parallel to the admission conversation, it can be uncomfortable.
Marcia Hunt:
Yeah, it can be very uncomfortable. I think for families, they often haven't shared much of their financial information with their children up until that point. But as you said, it's very important that this be done very early on in the process, in the junior year when they really start discussing colleges, for sure. And I think more and more families in states like Florida and Georgia are really considering whether or not they're going to keep their child in-state. For those families that don't qualify for aid, it's a huge, they might be paying $128,000 a year and they could be going to school in-state in Florida at really no tuition if they qualify for Bright Futures.
Lee Coffin:
Well, so again ... This is why I know you're such a ..., You're a step ahead of me, because I was going to ask you to offer some advice to parents on state options because you're in Florida, the University of Florida, Florida State, lots of different options. Georgia, Carolinas. I mean you go across the south, especially in the west, Big 10, Pac-10, affordable, perceptions of affordable anyway. How should someone factor in a state option when their, maybe, initial focus is on a private place like where I work?
Marcia Hunt:
If a student was looking at a place like where you work, they should investigate the honors programs at a lot of these public universities, or some of the great scholarships like the Morehead Scholarship at UNC or the Robertson Scholarship between UNC and Duke. They're very difficult to get, but they're also really good options that are offering state-of-the-art opportunities for students. We encourage all of our students, Florida Bright Futures, you have to apply when you're in high school. We encourage all of our students, regardless of where they're applying to apply in high school in case something brings them back like COVID did for example, they're eligible for that money.
Lee Coffin:
And do the honors colleges have an admission process separate from the university as a whole?
Marcia Hunt:
That is one of those, "it depends."
Lee Coffin:
It depends, yeah.
Marcia Hunt:
The University of Florida and Florida State, for example, have different policies, have different application processes.
Lee Coffin:
I've said I was going to offer six or seven tips. Now I just have a question that has come up, so I'm just going to ask it. So what advice do we have for parents who have multiple kids where maybe this is the second time or the third time they've done a college search and child two or three is not the same as child one? And how does the search shift as you move across your family?
Marcia Hunt:
I think most of our families with many students, with many children, become much more relaxed each year for the most part.
Lee Coffin:
For the most part.
Marcia Hunt:
I think they acquire a better understanding of it. They see that kids land on their feet and most everybody is pretty happy with where they land up even if it wasn't their first choice. So I find those parents are becoming easier and easier to work with.
Lee Coffin:
So my guess is a lot of the listeners of Admissions Beat are first-time parents, where this is a how-to guide for the newbies to the college admission landscape. And I see this myself when I do high school visits or even on campus, we do an admission program for alumni during homecoming reunion. And most of the alums who come, it's their oldest child and this whole thing seems really mysterious. And every once in a while a parent raises their hand and says, "This is number five. Here's the car keys. I don't need to be worried because it does play out." But there's some angsty anticipation I think as the oldest goes through it. So there's the angsty part of doing it for the first time.
But I think about my family where I was the oldest of five, and the personality traits between numbers one, two, three, four and five were quite different even though we all grew up with the same parents in the same house on the same street. I have a younger sibling who always got really frustrated when the teacher would say, "You're nothing like your brother." We weren't, we still aren't. But I think for a parent going through a search for the second time or the third time, being mindful of those sibling differences is an important point to make and to not apply the same set of expectations on the second or third person as the first one was able to deliver.
Marcia Hunt:
Every search is different. And I think it's very important for parents to not presume that the process is going to be the same and to skip different pieces of the application because they've already been through it once. So if there's a program that is offered at your child's school for one child, you need to go to, whether it's exact same program or not, you need to go to that program the next year for the next child and for the next child and for the next child. Otherwise they don't feel like you're valuing the process.
The other thing is if you're visiting colleges with one child, the next child, it could be extremely different. And what was a really good college trip for one child might be an aspirational trip for the next child. Only seeing aspirational colleges is just setting you, the whole family up for failure.
Lee Coffin:
Say more about that. Our listeners are in the discovery phase and week-by-week we've been guiding them towards getting started, assessing, exploring. And I think you just put your finger on something powerful, which is there's a temptation to only look at the shiniest thing on the parking lot.
Marcia Hunt:
You're right. So you look at the shiniest thing on the parking lot and then you haven't looked at the schools that are really good matches and good fits for the child, that when they're coming down at this time of the year to making their decisions, they maybe haven't seen any of the schools they've gotten have gotten into, and have only seen those schools with the very low admit rates. That planning that initial college trip is really important to take that into mind and talking to your school guidance counselor, whoever might be giving you some advice. My daughter has children, they're at a fairly large public high school, but there is a designated person who's very ... For the whole class, but she's accessible to these kids to talk to them about that. And it is extremely helpful. But planning that trip is just key.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, well, it sets expectations. Well, it gets to my last tip is really a very poignant observation that hit me over the head maybe five or six years ago. I was visiting a school in Nashville and we were talking to 10th graders about the college search that was still a bit in their future, but there was a palpable anxiety in the room even among these sophomores. And I was paired with the dean from Davidson College and Chris and I looked at each other and I said, "Something's up here." So I looked at the kids and I said, "Can you share with us where is this tension coming from?" And there was a quiet moment. And then a boy raised his hand and he said, "It's coming from our parents." And they all nodded and I said, "What's coming from your parents?" He said, "None of us want to disappoint them. And we hear them talking about college and the outcomes they expect even as 10th graders. And we talk among ourselves about like, wow, if we screw this up, we're letting down Mom and Dad. They've got a lot invested in this outcome."
We've already said the search is your child's not yours. I've had parents say, "Yeah, but we're paying for it." I know. But the point I'm raising is you may not ever hear this from your kid directly, but they're feeding off what you're saying. They want to make you happy, they want to impress you. They want to bring home the blue ribbon, and they're worried that they won't.
Marcia Hunt:
Yes. And I think generally a lot of members of this generation, they're very close to their families. They really want to please their parents, and those around them. And I do think the atmosphere that parents can establish around this in terms of these kids are under so much stress, that increased stress at home is just making these kids so anxious about this process.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, I was really taken aback by that boy's poignant honesty. And it was just one of those hidden truths that some of what these kids are carrying from 10th grade into 11th grade and certainly in the 12th, is this unspoken pressure they're putting on themselves to live up to a parent's vision of what success in college will look like. And so parents just know it, maybe ask it. And it reminded me in January when I was at Marcia's School of a Broadway song. I'm a big fan of Stephen Sondheim. I love the musical, Into the Woods. And Bernadette Peters in the original Broadway recording sings "Children Will Listen." And I want to close with a few lines from that really beautiful song just as a way of putting an exclamation point about what Marcia and I are sharing.
I won't sing it, but the part of the song is:
"Careful the things you say
Children will listen.
Careful the things you do
Children will see.
And learn.
Children may not obey,
But children will listen.
Children will look to you
For which way to turn
To learn what to be.
So careful before you say, listen to me
Because children will listen.
Marcia, when I shared that at Pine Crest, there was a mom in the second row kind of singing the song along with me as I was saying it. And the mother behind her was wiping away a tear.
Marcia Hunt:
There were a lot of tears.
Lee Coffin:
A lot of tears. It was a really beautiful song. And when I listen to it now, I can't not hear parenting 101 in there. That song from Into the Woods, which has nothing to do with college admission, I think, is really a poignant truth around what happens in a lot of homes around the world.
Marcia Hunt:
I agree. And Lee, just thank you so much for your ever so thoughtful approach always to the world of admission. And I think when students sometimes wonder if they're a number in this admission process, all they have to do is meet someone like you and know that you really care about these students and their families.
Lee Coffin:
Well, thank you, Marcia, and right back at you. Because I, for all the years I've known you, that's been your unyielding signature as well. So parents, I hope our conversation has helped you think about some of the ups-and-downs, ins-and-outs, rabbit holes, and also opportunities. I mean, the thing I guess I want to end on is this process that's beginning is not something that you need to approach with dread or suspicion, but you do need to be open to the information you're getting, where the story goes. And I love the line, "Children may not obey." They often don't, and that's okay. Let them disobey in this one and follow their own heart. I think that's probably another Broadway song. But Marcia Hunt, thanks as always for coming on Admissions Beat and listeners, I will be back next week with another episode of Admissions Beat. Thanks for listening.