Season 1: Episode 2 Transcript
Once A Dean
Lee Coffin:
Dateline. A campus near you. Read all about it. Press releases, articles, blogs, newsfeed, rankings, books, tweets, posts, podcasts. The head spins and swims with admissions updates. News, spin, lists, commentary, gossip. So much buzz, too much info. So many opinions. I'm here to help. When the beat is loud, I'll turn down the volume. I'm Lee Coffin, Dartmouth's Dean of Admissions. Welcome to the Admission Beat, the pod for news, conversation, and advice on all things college admissions.
Once a college admission officer, always a college admission officer, and I wanted to bring the band back together and bring a few of my colleagues who are now former deans and directors into this podversation, and to see what they're thinking now that they're no longer at a desk making decisions and signing letters, but still full of wisdom after many years of doing what we've all loved to do as part of our professional identities. So this week, admission afterlife, we will have a conversation with two former deans and a director about the admission landscape as they see it. But first let's visit the newsroom.
Welcome to the Admissions Beat newsroom. And this week we have a treat. I am joined as always by Charlotte Albright, my co-host and all things admission news, but more deliciously by three former admission leaders who are going to animate this episode with me. So hello to Jen Desjarlais, the former Dean of Admissions at Wellesley. Karen Stroud Felton, the former Dean of Admissions at GW. And Jeff Schiffman, the former Director of Admissions at Tulane. Hi to all three of you.
Jennifer Desjarlais:
Hey, Lee. Hey, Charlotte.
Karen Stroud Felton:
Good morning, hello.
Lee Coffin:
Charlotte, in this week's admissions headlines, what are you seeing?
Charlotte Albright:
Well, there is big news. It's not exactly new news, but it keeps getting bigger because it's fueling this perennial and heated debate about whether colleges may consider race when they make their admissions decisions. And there is a little recent history, I guess, that we should recall, which is that in 2016, the Supreme Court did give the University of Texas permission to continue their affirmative action policies. But that wasn't the end of the story because lawsuits keep bubbling up. And my understanding is it's the same group, Students for Fair Admissions, but these lawsuits are originating in different colleges now.
And this week, the news is that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill got sort of what I'd call, the yellow light, from U.S. District Court Judge Loretta Biggs, who ruled that race is not the defining feature in their decision making. And so these cases are not going away. And I'm wondering how you Lee, as a vice-provost for enrollment and a dean of admissions, and the rest of you who have been dealing with this in the past and are now sort of out of that seat, looking at the media from your own points of view…what are you seeing in all this litigation and what are you looking for as it continues?
Lee Coffin:
So I think the overarching themes are, how does a college define merit in the way we evaluate applications and invite students to join our communities? The idea that we practice holistic review so that each applicant is considered across multiple different dimensions. And in that context, race is one of those factors. One factor, among many, is the standard from the Supreme Court that we all honor. And so I think you're right, this win for Chapel Hill in Federal Court is, I would say it's more than a blinking yellow light, I think it's a reaffirmation to me of holistic admission principles and the importance of racial diversity on the undergraduate campuses we are building around the United States, but Jeff and Karen and Jen, you've each, like me, had to steer through this topic. What do you make of the ongoing conversation and the win for UNC?
Jeff Schiffman:
I think it's a huge win. I think the quote that the judge said about, "How is it that race can play such a part in a young person's life every day of their lived experiences, except up until the day that they apply to college?" And they spend so much of their life hearing that college is the key to success. College is the American dream, and you might be facing all these challenges at every point of your life up until then because of the color of your skin or your identity. And then all of a sudden we're saying, "Oh, wait, wait, wait. That doesn't matter at this point in the process, it just mattered all the way up until now." So I applaud this decision.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Karen Stroud Felton:
Yeah. I absolutely agree with Jeff and with Charlotte, it's not going away, this is not going away. As long as there are folks who feel like some group of people are getting something that they can't get or, or won't get, or is taken away from them, these conversations will continue. It's interestingly though, thinking about your comments, I don't necessarily think of race from the perspective of merit in the admissions process. I think about, particularly when you are talking about smaller liberal arts places, but all institutions of size and composition, we are hoping to build communities where there are divergent viewpoints, divergent viewpoints result from varying experiences. And so, when you're thinking about that, you can't divorce race from a conversation.
I have the perspective that I have because I'm a Black woman. I'm a Black woman of a certain age. Right? And so all of those things contribute to how I think about the world, how I engage in the material that is disseminated in the classroom, how then everyone's perspective is broadened because of what I bring from my vantage point. And so, at our core, I think that's what colleges and universities are all about, right? To bring folks together, to expand knowledge. And to Jeff's point, and to the point that was addressed in the article, to try to extract that piece of someone's identity and their perspective is incredibly shortsighted and not valuable.
Jeff Schiffman:
And impossible, I think.
Karen Stroud Felton:
And impossible. Not to mention impossible.
Jennifer Desjarlais:
I see these as really important opportunities to engage our campuses in what it means to be educating young people in an environment where there is really great challenge to us all to think differently. And reflecting back to my own experience in the Dean's chair, one of the biggest challenges was to engage that conversation, what does this reflect and how we ought to be thinking about what Karen was speaking to? What does it mean to be an inclusive, to have an inclusive immunity? There's somehow this false dichotomy that by being inclusive, we're excluding others. And so just for me, it's often a question of what does this reflect and why does it matter, and how do we attend to that in the roles that we had to?
Lee Coffin:
I hear in the plaintiffs, in these cases, an argument that "I deserve to be admitted because I have statistical merit." And I think, I agree I don't see race as a definition of merit, but I think the challenges have been, we have better academic stats and therefore, we should be admitted. And that to me is sort of the false narrative of merit in this. Kind of picking up what Jen was just saying, I look at admissions and I think, as we fill each class we map the future. We're looking at communities that will both thrive in the four years they're with us, but then go forth and be leaders and live lives and vote and be in the world and raise families. And through the 2070s as careers and beyond now. And that to me is a multidimensional, multicultural, multilingual, multinational landscape today. I just don't think the reality of 2021 and beyond can be anything but inclusive. It has to be.
Karen Stroud Felton:
And so this whole notion of statistical merit is to me, as you say, I agree that, that's kind of the core of it, but to use the vernacular that I hear from students, C's get degrees, right? And so are we looking at building communities where everyone is going to bring the same profile, perform in the same way like that? That's just not even logical. And so the bottom line, as we all know, we are inviting to campuses, or we're inviting to campuses, students that have the potential to be academically successful, that looks different for every one of us on this panel. And so this whole notion that those statistical quantitative measures are the only things that contribute, or the only indicators of current and future success again, is shortsighted and just inaccurate.
Jennifer Desjarlais:
But who's perpetuating that though? I guess that's a question I ask. We've all had conversations about this because institutions have an opportunity. Leadership has an opportunity to again, take a good hard look at what constitutes merit and who's deciding that. And what is it reflecting? Is it reflecting the capacity of the student who is admitted or is it a reflection of a reporting point of pride for the institution? And that's a pretty critical point of tension. And I appreciate, Karen, your perspective on this. We could even argue that statistical merit has limited merit. What is the value of statistical merit and what is it contributing to, in our understanding, a student's capacity to learn or engage, contribute? And so it's interesting that the lens is on other elements and not on that at the moment.
Jeff Schiffman:
One of the most harrowing moments I had at my previous institution, was, the place where I work would continue to report how great our numbers were looking for students of color and how it had increased year upon year. And I was sitting with a student that I knew pretty well, and she had heard that statistic, she was a student of color, and she said, she'd never felt worse than when she came to orientation and moving day and looked around at a sea of white folks and said, "This is what they're bragging about." It's almost like it was even worse because we, as an institution, had shared how great it was, how these numbers are good, but for that lived experience, it compounded her challenges thinking, looking around and just being like, "Wow, this is what they brag about." Almost like, "What have I done?" It was a tough moment.
Charlotte Albright:
Well, this is Charlotte. And I am thinking through my sort of journalist's eyes. And I'm just hoping that everybody reads all these stories in the media. Very often they pick up the headlines, but they haven't read the whole story. And this story is particularly good on that point, Jeff, the judge herself wrote that the evidence shows that as a whole underrepresented minorities are at lower rates than their white and Asian American counterparts. That's in the judge's ruling. And then the reporter adds the statistics to go with that: Among the 5,630 students admitted to the university, 65% were white, 21% were Asian or Asian American, 12% were black, 10% that were Hispanic. There are statistics there. I hope that people will read the whole story, no matter what school it comes from, because if you don't, you're just fueling this debate with a lot of misinformation. And too much subjectivity, I think, is swirling around this. So on the other hand, of course, it's not going to go away because Students for Fair Admissions are going to appeal this. So whether or not the Supreme Court has had the last word, it's a new court.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. And I've been thinking a lot about these cases on their way to the Supreme Court and what happens if… I did a talk this spring to an association of diverse admission officers. And I said like, "This is coming. And we have to be thinking about not what if we win or lose, but what's the value we're trying to uphold?" So there's a policy that might get overturned, but the principle endures. Diversity is a signature of the United States. It's a signature of American higher ed and our aspirations to be more and more inclusive. So let's say one of these cases actually reverses the use of race as one factor among many. Does that mean we erase the goal of having a community drawn from lots of backgrounds and perspectives? And no. And, I think the opportunity and the challenge is, well, what is the next policy that advances this priority?
Jennifer Desjarlais:
Yeah. Again, I really appreciate that perspective because it's again, raises the question, how do we take this opportunity to engage the question on our campuses in a way that it actually moves the conversation beyond admission? This is not just about an admission policy as everybody's been attesting to here, but it is about who we are as institutions? Who has access to educational opportunities? Who persists? And when you go back out and you're engaging some of these other groups, I wonder if the question is how are you engaging your other constituents on your campus around this topic in a way that moves it beyond just a policy question, but rather, it keeps it in the spotlight shining on the principal.
Lee Coffin:
Okay, Charlotte, this headline continues and it's a powerful one. So thanks to Jeff and Karen and Jen for thinking about it with me. When we come back, we'll have a round table with these same three people. See you in a minute.
(Music)
Friends, we are back. And this topic that I invited you to bat around with me. I'm always intrigued by colleagues who were once admission leaders and they're now beyond the desk. And it's the quorum. And you're all well informed. You've been around the admission block many, many times. And, I'm curious about your insights about things you're witnessing or policies that have kind of bounced around. But I guess my first question to all of you is, in this post-admission world, you now each inhabit is, the media covers us quite carefully and I reflect on the 27 years I've been a Dean, at this point.
I go back to the mid-nineties and it was much less intense. In those early moments of being a Dean at Connecticut College, at that point, I don't think the admission beat was quite as lively. And I wasn't quizzed by reporters quite as intensely. Maybe that was the place, but I just, I think the landscape was a little less active on the media front. So from your three perspectives, what parts of the admission narrative in the news aggravated you, and/or which topic did the storyline misrepresent in a way that made you kind of growl at your screen or your newspaper?
Karen Stroud Felton:
I think your initial part of your question was which aspects kind of rubbed me the wrong way. And, I was fortunate to be affiliated with some really great universities with a fair degree of selectivity, probably not the most selective places, which actually was great for me personally and professionally. But the fact that the media continues to focus on the uber selective institutions actually really just gets my goat because it exacerbates the stress that young people feel in the process. They don't necessarily, or their families don't make the distinction between a five or a 7% acceptance rate or a 30% acceptance rate, which is where we were at GW when I left. And so it misconstrues the whole conversation about admissions, about selectivity and about access. And so there are families who read that and think about that and opt out because they don't see themselves, don't think that they can compete within that ocean. And so that's the piece that continues to just disappoint infuriate me. If I guess I'm going to be clear because I think it's harmful.
Lee Coffin:
I have often thought that one of the dominant media narratives parallels the way politics is covered, where there's a horse race kind of theme around polling, who's up, who's down, who's trailing. And sometimes you miss the content. It's like, well what are these candidates talking about by the way of their policy positions? And we frame political coverage around it's race. And I think admissions often gets covered in that same way, where more is always better. It's like more, fewer, larger and those decimal points in the selectivity can be a distraction. Jeff, did you see that in Tulane too? Because what what's interesting about being in the south is you're outside of the northeast frenzy, but you're still connected to it.
Jeff Schiffman:
One of the things I do appreciate about, certainly students from New Orleans or from Louisiana, it's just as awesome to go to Auburn as it is to go to an Ivy League school. If you're going to a big, well known state school, people in this city are like, "Oh, that's cool. Good for you. Have great time at Ole Miss." Like, "Oh, you pick Ole Miss over a really selected liberal arts school." No one's going to really side eye that much as they did. I grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, which could be one of the epicenters of this absolute pandemonium. And I will say that the day I left my previous institution, I very quickly unsubscribed from all of the list serves that I was on that sent me news about college admission.
Because I had had enough, I was exhausted. I was exhausted about reading about the scandals and the mania and all these different things. And one article left me really shook, as the kids would say, and it was and I article that was accurate. It was talking about how college admission used to be a really healthy balance of the art and the science. The art being finding great kids and standing up with the kids you believed in and getting them to love this institution. And the sciences, the data, the numbers, the percentage of students of color and how many institutions have gotten much more heavy on the science. And that's really what resonated with me because that was when I was like, "Yeah, this is true."
Jennifer Desjarlais:
I think the tension between, for me, it was always the tension between what's the story that needs to be told and what's the story that the media want to tell or that the issue is that they want to focus on for the reasons that you've all mentioned. And I do actually recall, very vividly having a conversation with a reporter from a prominent Northeastern newspaper during the time when there was a lot of coverage on institutions, eliminating loans, increasing recruitment funding to attempt to kind of increasing the number of low socioeconomic students from low income and low SES backgrounds, first-generation college students.
And I had been, or was, and then had been at a couple of institutions, it was wealthy at the time, and I'd been at Smith before that, that had tremendous success because it was so baked into who these women's colleges are in terms of access and opportunity and turning resources, attending to that and putting resources into mission-oriented places. And that was not the story that the reporter was interested in telling. And I remember asking, why is it so hard to get this information out? And essentially the response was because that's not news.
Lee Coffin:
What about the impact of social media on the work you all did? So…Jen's laughing. So Jen and I were Deans before social media was a thing. Karen was a Dean when it kind of erupted and took hold and Jeff is a creature of it, an influencer of choice. And, so I'm wondering like how has that enhanced our storytelling access? How has it complicated this landscape? Because there's a lot of different outlets with all sorts of infos swirling around like what's the... It was quieter before, but it's also more interesting today. Jeff, you go first because you are the youngest of this group and the one I think was most digitally native. And what was the role you saw it playing?
Jeff Schiffman:
Yeah, Facebook.com came out when I was a sophomore or junior at Tulane, and Tulane was one of the testers school. So you'd log into the Facebook and click the link for the Tulane page out of like 12 schools. So kind of always been a part of my experience as an adult. It's interesting at Tulane, we could send out 15 emails a month with a 1% open rate or a 2% quick rate, but one video on TikTok and we get a million views, and I could say this literally because we had a viral moment where I was in this perfect timing for a TikTok viral video and it got over a million views and I still walk around campus and people are like, "You're that guy on TikTok." So, it made us powerful, there's no doubt about it.
And if you're cool on TikTok, you're able to really appeal to a certain type of student that wants that in their college experience. What I always told my staff is that TikTok is for the students that we're recruiting. Instagram is for maybe some of our current students and our young alumni or a millennial alumni. And Facebook is for parents. Nothing I post on Facebook is for students, it's all for their parents. Even if I disguise it as something like, "Hey kids, this is for you." It's just for parents to read it so they can feel like they're getting the insider scoop. I don't know. I don't know where this thing is going. Lee, you call me an influencer, but two years ago I got rid of Facebook and I have never felt more free. I have never felt more liberated. I've never felt better than no longer having Facebook.
Lee Coffin:
I think it's amazing. You truly are a digital native, you've gone the full journey.
Jeff Schiffman:
Full journey.
Lee Coffin:
But it's interesting, Jeff, I had never thought about the TikTok, Instagram, Facebook triad in quite the way.
Karen Stroud Felton:
I love that.
Lee Coffin:
I do too, it makes sense. I say I am a refugee from the 20th century. I learned to consume information in a very different media environment. And while, I mean here we are on a podcast, I understand these new ways of communicating, I'm not embarrassed to say, I don't know what TikTok is. I've never been on it or looked at it, but I know it's there.
Jennifer Desjarlais:
It might be kind of our worst nightmare to be viral on TikTok, Lee.
Karen Stroud Felton:
Yeah. I was kind of thinking that the danger is chasing every new platform that presents itself and assuming that it is a credible one and it is an appropriate place for you to be, I do think the challenge is always to identify the opportunities that extend the message to newer audiences while still holding strong to kind of core tenants, core foundations of the work that we do. And that conversation is an ever-evolving one. I think about the conversations we had about, do we still produce the viewbook? And all of those kinds of things that we all talked about at one point. And so, yeah. How do you evolve, but still stay true to your core?
Lee Coffin:
And what Karen, when you just said that I smiled when you used the word viewbook because I said that in a recent communications meeting and my younger staff said, "What's a viewbook?" And that used to be the flagship piece…
Karen Stroud Felton:
It was it. Yeah.
Jeff Schiffman:
The viewbook is now bad for the environment. I'm not putting out a 100,015 page things with a plastic bag and sending it through shipping and receiving like, "Get with the program. Lee."
Lee Coffin:
No, I wasn't proposing a viewbook, but just remembering it as a publication of note and when I was an associate director, I used to work on that and now it's like-
Karen Stroud Felton:
Yeah. And we relied on it, at [crosstalk 00:28:06] of my career almost exclusively if there was something that impacted the delay on the production of the viewbook. Oh my gosh.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Jennifer Desjarlais:
Or a misprint that you had to recall.
Lee Coffin:
Terrible. And the thing that was interesting to me about the viewbook is it faded in relevance. You would do a viewbook once a year or maybe every other year. So it was this static document that you put together, and then it sat on your reception area shelf and you mail it out to Jeff's point, but it wasn't refreshed. There was no mechanism for weekly, monthly, even sometimes seasonally saying, "Hey, here's some new topics." And you think about websites now where they're refreshed multiple times every day.
And it's just, viewbooks just went the way of the dinosaur, but I'm remembering going to an admission Dean's retreat in the mid-2000s, and Jen would've been there as the Wellesley Dean when I was at Tufts, and our colleague from Vassar used to ask every year, "Is anybody on the Facebook? Anyone?" It's like that Ferris Bueller moment where [crosstalk 00:29:15] Bueller, Bueller. And David would say, "Is anybody on the Facebook?" And I always think when you put the in front of Facebook, it's a sign, it's like a different kind of awareness of what it is, but there was this suspicion in that moment of Facebook as a credible landing spot for all of us. So anyway, it's interesting. So for our friends listening, who might be aspiring to a director seat or Dean seat, what skill set should a new Dean develop as she imagines a role in this work?
Jennifer Desjarlais:
I think the management piece is huge, taking on opportunities to work with and across teams and understand different elements of admission. I think that the data piece and capacity to analyze and again, interpret and integrate data is critical and how it informs the narrative of the institution, but also how the narrative of the institution helps you ask the right questions of the data. So I think that level because analytical skills are really critical.
Karen Stroud Felton:
I would absolutely agree with that point. My master's work, my graduate work is in higher ed administration, which is very practitioner-oriented, but if I had to do it again, I'd get an MBA because I think that would have strengthened some skills in just the areas that Jen articulated that would have positioned me, and I think our team for an additional level of success. So those kinds of things I think are absolutely crucial. And I think it's very different from what kind of what drew me to admissions years ago, which was the people role and helping students. And I think that's still there. I think that's still crucial, but I think the management skills and understanding budgets and finance and all of those things are so much more important now. There's also great importance in finding some opportunity to continue to be connected to the students.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, that clarity of purpose is always really important. And the thing that I, to the three of you who have moved into the admission afterlife, and left me behind when I think about the role I play now at Dartmouth, but the three other roles I've had it is very rewarding to be in, it's one of those rare moments in the higher ed space where you feel like, "Okay, I am helping this place move forward and using influence to make an impact on people's lives." So that's kind of corny, but it's how I always see it. Jen, Karen, Jeff, always wonderful to see you. Thank you for joining.
Charlotte Albright:
Thank you.
Jennifer Desjarlais:
Thank you, Lee. Thanks, Charlotte.
Karen Stroud Felton:
This is wonderful.
Jeff Schiffman:
Great to see you.
Jennifer Desjarlais:
And we'll see you soon.
Jeff Schiffman:
Thanks, you all.
Lee Coffin:
Now, the challenge of bringing admission people together, whether we are on Zoom or at a school, when we could in a more social environment, we can talk. So I think this episode covered a lot of ground and this week we're going to skip inbox because I think a lot of the questions I might have raised were covered in the round table. So we will come back to that next week. For now, I'm Lee Coffin with Charlotte Albright from Dartmouth College. See you soon.