Season 7: Episode 5 Transcript
Reading an Application: The Work of the Work
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.
Almost 25 years ago, a New York Times education reporter, Jacques Steinberg, aka recurring co-host and friend of the pod, spent nearly a year as a fly on the wall inside the admissions office at Wesleyan University. And his inside perspective, where he was essentially embedded in that office, led to his book The Gatekeepers, which was published in 2002 by Viking Penguin. I was a new dean at Tufts at that point and I remember reading it and thinking, "This guy got it." I didn't know Jacques, I would read him in the New York Times. But I remember that felt true in a way that many articles, stories, perspectives on college admissions missed some nuance.
Two years ago, Admission Beat's up and running, and Jacques returned to the inside perspective when he joined the Dartmouth admission committee for a day of deliberations, and our resulting podcast "Inside the Admission Committee," continues to be one of our most downloaded and popular episodes in the history of this podcast. Clearly, The Gatekeepers and "Inside Admission Committee" touched a point of curiosity.
So here we go again, Jack came back. Earlier this week, he returned to the fly on the wall perch as Dartmouth's admission committee reviewed a docket from California, as we were selecting members of the class of 2029. Today, Jack will quiz me about what he saw, and heard, and witnessed, and how it was similar, different from what he heard a couple years ago, and what parallels are still true from 25 years ago. When we come back, we'll say hello again to Jacques Steinberg, and give you an inside peek at the gatekeepers in action.
(music)
Hello, Jacques.
Jacques Steinberg:
Hello, Lee.
Lee Coffin:
Welcome back.
Jacques Steinberg:
It's great to be back.
Lee Coffin:
After you spent the day with us on Tuesday, you texted me and you said, "Watching you all do what you do never gets old to me, even now, more than 25 years since I first sat in on a holistic admission committee." Why does it still give you that tingle?
Jacques Steinberg:
Well, if you turn the clock back even a few decades, I was an applicant here at Dartmouth for the class of 1988. It's not like this process tells you why you got in or why you didn't. I never lost that curiosity of the 18-year-old me wondering, "How do they do it?" That curiosity underpinned my desire to sit inside the Wesleyan admissions process all those years ago, and then to come back now for a second time and observe you all at Dartmouth.
In doing that, students, parents, and counselors, I'm doing so hopefully as your eyes and ears. I'm looking for the things that I think you would want to see, and listening for the things you would want to hear, with an eye on answering your questions, how they do it. Specifically thinking of you, high school juniors, as you set about the path to filling out your own applications, were there things that I saw and heard, which I'm going to start to tease out of Lee in a moment, that could be helpful to you?
Lee Coffin:
I think it's a really important conversation we're about to have. I realized as I was getting ready for today that the last three episodes, including this one, are almost a three-pack. We talked about merit, what counts. We talked about how people read with those elements of merit. In this conversation, you witnessed how the reading and the conversations about merit turn into the way we shape a class. Listeners, three episodes in a row give you, I hope, a really helpful perspective on the way a selective college thinks about the application, invites you to tell your story, how we read it, how we react to it. What I'm sure Jack is going to talk about with me is the choices we have to make as we put together a class from a cohort of really qualified people.
I would tag onto Jack's comment and say, for me, this part of our work is the most invisible. In the preamble to The Gatekeepers, you talk about the mystery of the selection process. Students send in their file, we read it, we make a decision, but no one really sees that in-between. I watched Conclave the other day and I was thinking, "This is kind of like admission committee." Where the Cardinal is going to the Sistine Chapel, the door closes, you wait for the smoke, there's a pope at the end of it. But you don't really know what happened when the door shut. You came into the room where it happens. In that Hamilton nod, you got to see us rolling up our sleeves and doing the work.
Jacques Steinberg:
You make reference, Lee, to the prior two episodes. Listeners have heard from Logan Powell, the dean of admission at Brown. They've heard from several Dartmouth colleagues about how they read. I am not a practitioner. I have never voted on a single candidate for admission to a university. What I am is a trained observer. Let's talk about what I saw and heard when you all welcomed me into the room for a day.
Lee Coffin:
Sure.
Jacques Steinberg:
A bit more scene-setting. We're in a glass-walled conference room, as you said, on the third floor at the admissions office at Dartmouth. For purposes of this discussion, listeners, Dartmouth is a proxy of four-dozen or so highly selective institutions that practice what Lee referenced earlier, holistic admissions, looking at the entire person. While there are variations in that process at each of those 48 or so, what we're going to talk about today really should help you understand if you're applying to some of those schools, including those in the Ivy League and others that turn away far more than they accept.
Lee, you mentioned that day you and colleagues were working on applications from California. In the course of that day, you talked about and made decisions on almost 200 students from California high schools. We traveled, in the course of that day from that room, from the northern edge of California on the Oregon border, all the way to the Mexican border. We were in urban areas, highly concentrated, LA, San Francisco. We were also in rural areas. We were in private high schools and public high schools. It was fun for me, as you engaged in this difficult task, as you would say things to each other like, "Welcome to Anaheim. Let's move on to Menlo Park." You would also greet students by name, almost as if they were in the room with you. "Hello, Charlotte. Let's get to know Charlotte."
I think listeners, particularly the high school juniors who are about to embark on this process, the idea that they take the time that they do, the idea that they surface the details they do, that the time that you put in on that application, it's borne out, frankly, by what I saw in that room, Lee. As you all talked about sometimes the most minute details buried deep in an application, each student had the floor to make their case for admission.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. What we've been talking about the last couple of weeks is the idea that merit can take many forms. It lives in multiple parts of the application concurrently, or sometimes distinctively. When we read a file, our job is to document what we see, where we see it, and then assess it. We've got thousands and thousands of applicants who we met and we've read, and the docket in the committee room is the end of that funnel. We've made decisions since January to advance or not. When you talk about 200 files that we reviewed, that's a tiny subset of the overall California docket alone. But these are the ones where someone read the file, it was reread, and we recommended that person for acceptance.
One of the poignant parts of my work here, more people are recommended for admission than we can admit. We see the merit, we see the opportunity, and part of the committee process is to think in a really precise way, "How do we build a class out of this pool that has made it to this step?"
Jacques Steinberg:
I saw you and almost 10 other admissions officers seated around a conference room table. Several other colleagues joined you from other places via Zoom. Those folks were ranged in age from their 20s to their 60s. Different backgrounds themselves, in terms of first in their families to go to college, maybe not. I share all this because students, I want you to know that, in all likelihood, there is at least one person in a room like that who gets you. Who appreciates all you've done, who appreciates what you would bring to an institution like this, and is in a position quite literally to advocate to their colleagues your case. Yet another return on the investment of all that time you put in the application.
Lee, at this point in the process, you mentioned at least two admissions officers have reviewed the file. They've documented what they've seen. Their summaries were on a big screen in the room as you all met. Sometimes you would show us a snippet of an essay, of a recommendation. You're looking at things like transcript, essays, all the raw materials, teacher recommendations.
Can you talk a little bit about the lenses you all used to have the discussion about next steps for that applicant? Specifically things like their academic achievement, their lived experience, things like their classroom presence. What were the metrics?
Lee Coffin:
The foundational metric is their academic achievement. Maybe it was surprising as you listened, we didn't spend a lot of time talking about that because at this step, they had all passed that screen. We had already certified this cohort as qualified.
There were distinctions. You might look at someone and say, "She's talking about political science and pre-law," and we leaned into the transcript and focused on the social sciences that were part of that transcript. Or it was a pre-engineering person and we looked at mathematics and more of the quantitative science courses and said, "Yes, the prerequisites are there. This person has that capacity to thrive in this curriculum." It's not just who can do the work. We're talking about a curriculum that moves quickly, powerfully, creatively. We want each student who enrolls to come into that academic space and be successful.
That's step one, so they all had achieved, unless there was some unexpected hiccup in the mid-year grades. We ask for midyear transcripts from the high school. Sometimes the grades didn't hold and that was noteworthy. Most of the time, the trend continues. That was step one.
Step two, and I think the more nuanced part of the committee discussion, is really the voice of the student. What's the narrative that a person has shared with us through the application that helps us imagine her on this campus, in a classroom? Does a point of view shape the way we imagine a curriculum being explored? Or is there something in the student's story where it's like, "She does what we do," fill in the blank. Academically, extra-curricularly. We would love to have that talent in the orchestra. We had an all-state trombonist. We talked about trombone and jazz. Others, we're more sustainably oriented and we have conversations about what they might do on our organic farm.
You're looking for these clues throughout the file. The big test is, is this a fit? Is this a match between the applicant and the college? Either the college as it exists, or the college that we imagine as we move forward. Those are subjective things I'm talking about, but it's how we're trained to read and thinking about how all the parts come together and reveal the file.
Jacques Steinberg:
If listeners can imagine you all seated around this boardroom-style table, you're at the head of the table. At one point, you likened yourself to somewhat like a chief justice on the court, in that you were facilitating dialogue among, let's stretch the analogy, a series of attorneys who were pleading cases. Why is it important for there to be this discussion? I mentioned that there are lots of points of view, life experiences, life stations at that table. You encouraged them to ping off each other with takeaways.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. I think for listeners, it's important to note every institution will set this process up in a very individualized way. Where I've worked, the dean has always chaired the committee. Other places, may be less structured in that way. But I think it's common for the dean or a senior admission officer to be in the lead seat.
For me, I don't have a territory myself. In that chief justice space, I'm trying to be an at-large representative of the pool as a whole, and to listen to each case that I often have not read myself. I have pre-evaluated them. They make it into this committee docket because one of us has put them in this final round. But my job is to poke. If I see the discussion going in a direction that feels like we're missing something I'll say, "Let's back up and look at the context of this person and where he lives." Or, "This school is really different from the last two we just visited. We have to recalibrate assumptions about resources, about curriculum. Every high school doesn't teach in the same way. What's the norm here?" That's especially true with testing, as you move from school to school. We would poke into the school profile to see what's a typical score range out of this high school.
There were a couple times I remember looking at you and saying, "Look at how high this person is above the mean at the high school." Sometimes that score was a few points below our range, but remarkable from the where. The beauty of committee is to let these different admission officers play off each other. I would say about half of them were graduates of Dartmouth College, so they're bringing their own local lens to it about the curriculum they experienced. Then there are those of us who are not alums and we're able to bring an outside perspective to assessment of place and assessment of fit.
Jacques Steinberg:
I can imagine listeners, if you have not yet embarked on this process or if you've got an application currently being considered at this institution or others like it, if you're feeling somewhat unnerved by this conversation, the idea that you literally can't control the conversation that's going on in that room that Lee is describing and that I bore witness to, that lack of control can feel uncomfortable. And yet, devil's advocate, Lee, they have an enormous amount of control in terms of the story that they and their references, for lack of a better word, choose to tell about themselves. I'd like to think it's reassuring that you all dive deep into those stories and tell them to each other.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Just to that idea that someone might be unnerved, I would quickly say, rest assured that holistic review means we have read you through the sum of the parts. To Jack's last point, sometimes you include everything you need us to know, and sometimes there's a gap. I think for juniors who are still months away from having to do this, be clear to yourself about who you're trying to introduce. Sometimes the file that gets declined is not declined because it was unqualified. There were some gaps in the storytelling, or we couldn't see the person we were trying to meet.
I use Rumpelstiltskin as a metaphor and say, "Sometimes we can spin the straw into gold, but we have to have some straw." You have to give us some kernels of evidence to be able to create the narrative that invites the room to say yes.
Jacques Steinberg:
Dartmouth currently is one of a handful of highly selective colleges in this country that now requires the SAT or ACT standardized testing again. Can you talk about what role that testing plays specifically in your academic assessment, and in the assessment overall? How important and definitive is it in the decision?
Lee Coffin:
I don't think it's definitive. It's important as we open a file through the initial review and say, "What's available in this high school by way of curriculum? What has a student pursued by way of rigor?" In this admission process, we're looking for the most rigor available. That's not true everywhere, but it's a defining element of our definition of academic merit. We're looking at 11th grade, 12th grade especially, what courses were chosen. How did they sync with someone's academic interests? What are the grades that came in in 11th grade and in progress in 12th? How does that turn into a cumulative grade point average? Over time, is it moving up, is it steady? Hopefully it's not declining.
Then the test scores are companions to that. They are not the front piece of information. We'll look at either the SAT or the ACT interchangeably as another data point for academic quality and potential. There's no score that says you're in, you're out. If the norm in your high school is an 1100 and you're a 1350, that's a great score in the context of your high school. If you're at a school where the mean is a 1450 and you have a 1450, that was just a proof point that was confirmed by the norm at your school.
I think people presume that the SAT is the first factor. It's not, never has been. There are lots of students who have very high scores where the rest of the file is a bit hollow. There are students who have lower scores, however you want to define that, who have a very robust set of elements that we gravitate towards and says, "This is someone we want in this class."
When Logan Powell and I were talking about merit, we were batting around creativity and curiosity. You can't measure that with a number, certainly not showing up in the SAT. But it's in the file and when you see it, you note it, and you bring the evidence of it back and we respond to it. All of these things work in combination. I have found testing to be helpful in helping us to a preliminary assessment of files. You didn't hear very much chatter about the scores on Tuesday. Everyone who had made that docket had scores in context that said they're qualified for this place.
Can you remember when we were saying, "Oh, here's a 1410? Oh, this is a 1510. No, it's only a 1310."
Jacques Steinberg:
No.
Lee Coffin:
No.
Jacques Steinberg:
I spent the better part of eight hours with you all and it was rarely discussed. You all seemed to forget I was in the room. I was not at the table. I, as I am wont to do, hung back so that you would forget I was there. It didn't feel like that was unique, that you didn't talk about testing just because I was in the room. It just didn't seem to be part of the dialogue at that point. Although, scores would sometimes be flashed on the screen as part of those summaries that your colleagues had prepared.
Lee Coffin:
They're there. They're a required element. Every file had scores. When we started the review, however many weeks ago in each file, we looked at the scores, we factored them into the decision to advance. But by the time they make it to the committee docket, they have receded in relevance as a decision point.
Jacques Steinberg:
We talked about the raw materials of this discussion. Transcripts, essays, recommendations, extracurriculars. I want to go a beat further on the point of context that you just raised. Context often came up. We were very place-specific, you all as colleagues, where the student was coming from in terms of the community, in terms of whether the high school was public or private. Can you talk about other elements of context?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. We're looking at locale. Is it suburban, rural, urban? Is it a high school that sends most students to college, into a four-year college? Or is it a place where that is unusual? In California, there's a strong community college presence, so that got factored in, too. The percent of four-year college might have been less than 80, but there was a high number going to community college on their way to a four-year college.
You're looking at the high school itself. There were some under-resourced schools in rural communities where the idea that you would go to a four-year college, or you would go to a college on the East Coast, was very unusual and this student was breaking that norm. We noticed that. Or you were in a very resourced suburban public high school where everybody's going to college, and you see where they're going, so the grade distribution in a place like that, As go well-beyond the top 10% of the class if they even tell you that.
We're giving each student the benefit of that environmental checkpoint. I don't think people really understand that. What you saw, because we went alphabetically, we were hopping all over the place. It's California, so once we got to the Sans, there were a lot of San-this, San-that, but each one of them was a really different type of San. San Francisco, and Santa Monica, and San Bernardino, and Santa Barbara. They're not the same town. We would pause each time. You saw this, too. We would call up the high school and we'd start there. And say, "How many people applied from this place? What's our history here? How does this student stand on that docket? Are there multiple people advancing to this round or is this the only one?" If it was the only one we say, "Okay. If we want a representative from this school in this class, here's our only chance."
Jacques Steinberg:
Yeah. I think for listeners, I hope even though the percentages of admission are low at this point, they're in the single-digits at a school like Dartmouth, and that is what it is. I hope it is somewhat reassuring to hear the level of detail and knowledge of place. I'm often asked, "Oh, they weight the GPA at my high school. How will the college know? They don't weight the GPA at my high school. How will they know? They don't offer many AP scores at my high school. How will they know?" At least based on the eight hours I spent with you all, Lee, you know. In many cases, there was somebody in that room with us who had visited that high school and visited multiple times. If they hadn't visited, they reviewed the school profile, in which the school tells all that information.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. It's our job to be a territory manager. When I was in committee this morning, we were doing Virginia. The admission officer who manages Virginia had a map and he kept holding it up. He'd say, "This is where we are. This is not the suburbs of DC. We are down in Tidewater." People said, "Oh." Or, "Now we're on the West Virginia border." That was really helpful as we moved around a state called Virginia, but has really different parts to it.
That's true everywhere. When you go to Connecticut, it's a little state, but there are five distinct geo-markets. That's the word the college board uses. It's a geographic unit, someone manages that unit, and we bring the dockets up by those units. We are trying to make sure in big states like California that all the acceptances don't come out of one place.
Jacques Steinberg:
You mentioned and we mentioned that you went alphabetically by high school. Again, if I were a listener, I might think, "Oh my God, are they pitting me against other students at my school, almost in a Hunger Games situation?" I didn't hear that at all. But would you speak to the question of is there only room for one at a high school, do you come in with that preconceived notion?
Lee Coffin:
The answer is no. Each high school has what is called a docket. You might be the only person on the docket, there might be 40 people on the docket. Somebody has read all of them, whether it's one or 40, or more. So that you have the continuity of context. They've been read together, they're in the same senior class with the same curricular options.
Often, the same teachers from 11th grade writing the recommendations. With great thanks, junior year English math, social studies teacher, you see Mrs. Jones pop up a lot as you move through a school. That's helpful too, because my own sister has taught 11th grade English and she says, "I write a lot of letters, but the words I use to describe five kids who all got an A are different." We see that. We are aware of that language a teacher might use to say how this student performed in a classroom, even though everybody got the same grade.
The local piece is the starting point. You heard me say many times on Tuesday, "If there are five people from one high school who all emerge holistically as good fits for Dartmouth and we see a reason to include them in the admit group, we can do that." There are going to be other schools where nobody made it. That wasn't a conscious decision to say we're denying all 10, or we're taking five of 30. It's one by one, they added up to a cohort of acceptance.
Jacques Steinberg:
Students, as you listen to this, and parents too, there's going to be a temptation if you're juniors come fall, you may well have a sense of who in your high school class has applied where and you're going to be tempted to handicap that process. "Oh, that helps my chances that so-and-so has applied, I bet I would do better." Or, "That seems to hurt my chances, I bet so-and-so would do better." My counsel to you is, however understandable that inclination is to try to game this process, you couldn't possibly know ultimately what's going to happen in the alchemy of the room like I was in. I hope that you can let go the natural desire to try to control and handicap this, and just tell your story as fully and as in nuanced a way as possible. Leave it to the folks in that room to do what they do. Is that fair, Lee?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. I think you can only control what you control. I have lots of relatives who worry about things that might happen. I said, "But you can't control that." Get zen and just focus on the application you are completing. What are you including? What are you highlighting? Who are you asking to speak on your behalf? The sum of that story that you have written is your story.
As a preview, next week we're going to have a conversation about the decisions that come out of this work and how to make sense of an acceptance or wait list, a decline. That's next week. But you can't spend your application process trying to make that happen beyond including in your file as much of you as you can put in there, and being clear about why you're applying to the places on your list, what you see in us that you see in yourself. What do you like doing? What kind of a person are you? What kind of a member of a team or a community are you? What's your presence in a classroom? Those are the elements that we tease out.
You saw a round of decision making where everyone on the docket you saw had been recommended for admission by the reader. Sometimes a strong admit and sometimes maybe a softer recommendation, but every one of them had an admit typed into that field because the denies have already been routed out. We denied people on Tuesday. That was not the recommendation of the reader, but it was the reality of the admission process we're in where we couldn't take everybody. That's what's hidden here too, is sometimes the letter comes at the end of the month and it's an, "I'm sorry." But the "I'm sorry" doesn't mean the file was weak.
Jacques Steinberg:
I hope it's reassuring listeners, particularly the high school juniors, as I said earlier. What you say will get looked at, will get read, will get talked about, will get weighed and pitted against priorities. It was not unusual in the room on Tuesday during those eight hours to see quite literally Lee, you and some of your colleagues, were at times emotionally moved by what was said in those files. Sometimes incredibly personal things, not just about accomplishment and achievement, but about life and when life happens.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. We were moving through Los Angeles and we met students whose home burned down in January. That happened after they had applied, but some additional information appeared or the interview happened, and we learned that their home was lost or their school was lost. We're people.
Jacques Steinberg:
Yeah.
Lee Coffin:
Of course, we're going to pause and reflect on that. It's part of why I've always liked this job. I'm not an accountant. No offense to the accountants. I'm not just running numbers. I'm reading a story that includes numbers. I'm helping shape a class, and a class is a community of individuals. I'm lucky to be an admission officer at a place with a really big, quite top-heavy pool. Whether you're a senior or a junior, or a parent of one, it's not a secret that a place like Dartmouth is very selective. That's what you're hearing. This is how that happens.
I've said in other episodes, one of my most poignant tasks is to manage scarcity. And to realize in that really pragmatic lane, I have more compelling candidates than we can ever include. If I did, for argument's sake, let's say everybody's admitted, Dartmouth wouldn't be Dartmouth. We have 1175 seats, not 2500 seats. I have to manage the outcomes towards the community we are. That means choices are made.
My colleague Joy St. John, who is now the director at Harvard, former dean at Wellesley, I've heard her on panels say, "A choice is unavoidable." To your question, you can't control that. But choices are made, not rejections, not determinations that someone is less than.
Jacques Steinberg:
A few final questions as we bring this conversation to a close. Back to taking us back in the room. There was a bell on the table.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Jacques Steinberg:
It looked like the bell you would find as you check into an old-timey hotel. Where you ring the bell so that the clerk would come forward. While I was there, the bell was rung a handful of times by various colleagues, sometimes leaning over the table to get to the bell. What were you all signaling to each other when you rang the bell?
Lee Coffin:
It's time to stop talking. You can usually see the moment building when people look up from their laptops and start, "Of course." That's also a fun moment where you realize the pieces of that file just ignited into a yes. The bell is just a fun way of saying, "Ding, ding! This is an easy decision at this point." When you hear the bell, everyone stops talking. It's like, "Oh, yeah. That's right."
Jacques Steinberg:
Yeah. Last question. You talked about my 25 years of occasionally serving as a fly on the wall in settings like that. You've been doing this work, by my math, for 36 years. I would say to you, as an observer for a good chunk of that, that for all the changes we hear about in the college admissions process, that this process actually hasn't changed that much over that period in terms of the things that you and colleagues value.
Lee Coffin:
That's right. I keep a daily journal. My note on Tuesday was, "I chaired California committee and it was my best dean self." I went home that day and felt happy about what I had just done for those eight hours. It was hard, it was tiring. I slept really well that night. But I was happy and I say it was my best dean self because it was purposeful. I felt like we made good decisions. My team was really thoughtful. We disagreed in a collaborative way. You didn't see anyone arguing.
Jacques Steinberg:
I did not.
Lee Coffin:
They had permission to, but no one did. That doesn't mean people weren't passionate about the students they were representing. They did their best to make a case. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and you move on to the next one. But over the years I've been a dean, this is number 30, that hasn't changed. What's changed is the volume. We have more candidacies that we are sorting than we did in the '90s when I started. When I read The Gatekeepers, I had a fraction of the pool we have today. That's just heightened all of the elements of merit, it hasn't erased them.
I think what you saw from your seat in the corner was the proof point of what I always say. We meet you one by one, we read you holistically. Each student has a chance to tell a story. We read that story in context. Some people come from places where the storytelling is easier to do or taught in a way that it's not somewhere else. We think about that so that, to the degree we can be fair as we're being subjective, we are.
On the question of fairness, I've had people say to me, "Well, college admission isn't fair, it's random." I say, "It's not random." It's as fair as we can make it in a process that must be qualitative as well as quantitative. The phrase I've come to use is informed subjectivity. We're not just reading it and saying, "I feel ..." It's we're using information in a file to make a judgement call on merit and on someone's fit for this particular place where I work. I don't work anywhere else. I'm making a decision for Dartmouth College. Every student that gets a signature saying, "Welcome," has to rise to that standard, and many, many, many do.
That's what I love about it. March is the hardest month of the year. You joined us right in the middle of March, we're nowhere near done. When we air this on March 18th, we're not done. Although, I see the end. I see the class taking shape. The letters are starting to be run, the admit packets are getting put together. We're planning the open house in April. But we're not there yet.
Jacques Steinberg:
No. You are human beings-
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Jacques Steinberg:
... at the end, making the best decision you can given what's in front of you at that moment. And also, what's available in the class.
Lee Coffin:
What surprised you the most? Two years ago, you joined us and now you came back. What made you smile? Because you were smiling a lot, when I would look over my shoulder.
Jacques Steinberg:
As I said earlier, but is worth repeating in response to this question, the degree to which you all had done your homework. I've spent my career as a journalist, as a writer and reporter, as somebody looking for details that make someone come alive for someone who hasn't had the benefit of meeting that person. That's what you all did. I would smile when a student would take the time to tell you something that really made them a person, and where you could actually almost see and feel having them there. And that you all got that message, surfaced it, talked about it. It became part of the discussion. That took a lot of time to sift that, but also that you allowed yourselves the time and the space to have that conversation.
Lee Coffin:
We did. I can tell you that, as we continue through committee, we are admitting more people from committee than we have room in the class. Even this final step is going to require a little bit more shaping. That's true every year, where we like more candidates than we can accommodate.
Jacques Steinberg:
I guess in the end, I smiled because you gave each of them the floor to make their case.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Jacques Steinberg:
If I had that tabletop bell, I would ring it at this point-
Lee Coffin:
Ding!
Jacques Steinberg:
... to tell myself that it's time for me to stop talking and to throw to you, Lee, for a final word.
Lee Coffin:
Well, now, Jack, it's always fun to have you there as a witness to the conversation. Both because I know it tickles you in a way that is charming to witness, but it also helps me bring it to the podcast in my promise to help be more transparent. To generate more confidence from applicants and parents that, "Okay, this might be a really selective space, but I can trust it." I hope that came through the conversation.
Thanks, Jack, for joining us again. Listeners, next week, as previewed, I'll be joined by Chris Gruber, the dean of admissions at Davidson College in North Carolina, and Kate Boyle Ramsdell, director of college counseling at Noble and Greenough School in Massachusetts. The three of us will talk about the decisions that students receive during regular decision, and then make sense of the news, and what happens in April. For now, this is Lee Coffin from Dartmouth College. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.