Balancing the Tradeoffs in Admissions

This episode of Future YOU is brought to you by Nelnet Campus Commerce, Delivering payment technology for a smarter campus, and by Entangled Solutions. This is Future youe with Jeff Selingo and Michael Horn.

Welcome to Future you. I'm Jeff Salingo. Today's episode is originating from the Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Arizona State University here in Phoenix. My usual partner in crime, Michael Horn, is not with me on this episode, so I've asked a former colleague of mine, Karen Fisher from the Chronicle of Higher Education, to join me as today's guest host. Welcome, Karen.

Well, thanks for having me.

Great. And our guest today is Angel Perez, who is vice president for enrollment and student success at Trinity College in Connecticut, where he's been for about five years. He's a staunch advocate for test optional policies, liberal arts, first generation students, internationalization, and he's frequently called upon as a speaker on these issues across the globe. And those are some of the issues that we're going to be talking with him today on this episode. So it's great to have you here with us, Angel.

Thanks for having me.

Great. A question that we ask all of our guests on the podcast is how did you get started in higher education? I think most people, especially in admissions, seem to fall into it. So how did you get started in higher ed?

Yes, I think I certainly was one of those people that fell into it. No one grows up saying I want to be a dean of admission or really knows what that means. But I was one of those students that loved my college experience and was involved all kinds of activities and leadership. And it was actually a mentor, a dean of students on the campus that I was on, Skidmore College, who tapped me on the shoulder and said, you would be really good at this. And then a job opening opened up at my alma mater. I thought I would do it for a year. And 22 years later, here I am.

Wow. So you are kind of a star now in the admissions world, partly because for our listeners who have read Paul Tuft's new book, the Years that Matter Most, which was also excerpted in the New York Times last fall, you play a starring role in one of those chapters in the excerpt that was in the New York Times. How did that come about and what impact has it had on you and Trinity in general?

Yeah. So Paul reached out to me a couple of years ago when he was writing the book and really had this question about upward social mobility. And he had read a little bit about the work that I was doing at Trinity. He'd also read some articles. I write a lot about these issues as well and was interested in speaking with me. And I was one of the people that said yes.

And what impact has it had, if any?

Well, I would say it's made my life a lot busier, for sure, in a good way. But I would actually say in many respects it has been very well received in the Trinity community. Obviously there are some people that wish we hadn't told the story, but in general it's had a really strong impact. I think we're probably going to do pretty well on fundraising. One of the things that I think it did the most is it really unveiled the complexity of diversifying a campus and really increasing low income students on the campus.

And when you say the story, I think for those listeners who haven't read the book, I think it's the impossible choice, sometimes impossible choices you're making between kind of making a budget and making a class and at the same time creating a diverse class of students who need access to higher education. That's kind of the balance you face

in the book, right? I call it the trade offs that we have to make.

Well, that's really kind of a great segue. As you said that you really made diversification of your college class kind of a goal. And so am I right? About 14% of your student body is eligible now. But that's been sort of a slow go and it's been really slow moving. And so I wonder if you might talk a little bit about what makes it so difficult to kind of move the needle on that number.

Sure. I mean, I think a big piece, the biggest piece is really funding, right? I mean, institutions of higher education have a public mission, but they also need to engage in business practices to make sure that they are successful. And so I would say a big piece that makes it difficult to increase your Pell enrollment is really low income students. But one of the things, if I may, that I really sort of take challenge with on the Pell notion side is that there are a lot of students, for example, that institutions choose to admit, particularly at private institutions where we use a lot of our own funding, who are literally right outside of that. Also a lot of particularly private institutions who decide internationalization is going to be a priority. We have a lot of international students who are on full financial aid, for example. I just don't think it necessarily represents the diversity and the socioeconomic diversity.

So in other words, it may not be a good measure all the time.

I don't think it's the best measure. Exactly.

Do you think, is there something else that we should be using? Because obviously it's become a proxy in many places for socioeconomic diversity in particular.

Yeah, I mean, I think if we're going to talk about socioeconomic diversity, I mean, I think it would be more reporting on behalf of institutions of higher education, which I'm not necessarily advocating for. We do a lot of reporting already, but, you know, really getting a sense of what are the income levels of families that are currently enrolled at these institutions. You know, the one example I use is, you know, we might have Pell eligible students whose parents make $50,000, but if you make $60,000 and have three children in New York City, are you not also considered a low income family? And those families are actually not counted in the data?

Let me ask, I know a few years ago at Trinity you went test optional as a way to better identify some of those low income students. And I'm curious, now that you've had a couple of years of that, what's been the impact of it?

Yeah, so we have had incredible success with test optional. And there is some correlation, but not all of it directly related to test optional. The past several years we've had the highest number of first generation students who have enrolled, applied and enrolled to the college. The highest number of low income students as well. But I will say that we were doing a lot of other things on the recruitment front, on the cultivation side as well, to make sure that these students one knew that we were there, that we were an option. And one of those was also investing in financial aid. That was one of the areas that the board of trustees decided we needed to go pretty deep on. So we've been excited about the successes of the satisfaction optional piece, but we don't equate all of our success to it.

So then what's next? I mean, what are kind of some of the priorities that you've got in terms of further diversifying socioeconomically? The class.

Yeah. So I will say, you know, we feel really good about the work we've done with low income students. I have become increasingly really concerned about middle income students. I just read Caitlin Zoom's book Indebted. She's a professor at NYU and really have shared that with members of my board and leadership because there are a lot of sacrifices that middle income families are making. The financial aid formula is not kind to middle income families. And what we're seeing at colleges and universities is we now have a barbell effect. Right. And so we have a lot of high income students. We have a lot of low income students, not a lot in the middle, which is actually not good for social life on a college campus. Engagement. And so if we want to truly be diverse, we also need to include middle income families in our strategies.

But those strategies would require, whether it's low income families or middle income families, a lot more money.

Correct.

I mean, a lot of this just comes down to pure dollars and cents, right?

A lot more money. I mean, the pressure colleges are feeling to push the cost down to the consumer as our expenses grow, but also as we get less funding from federal sources, state sources, one of the things we need to do is think about how do we alleviate the pressure from those families. And that's going to have to come from the actual institution.

Karen mentioned kind of going test optional. You've also revamped the admissions process at Trinity to better identify promising students beyond kind of test scores. Could you talk a little bit about kind of how you did that and what you're measuring and the impact of that?

Sure. So one of the things that we started doing about five years ago is really using different characteristics that research shows are areas that lead to success in college. So things like grit and perseverance and curiosity and creativity, so on and so forth. And so actually we give students credit in our admissions process for those particular characteristics. It is not a scientific process. We don't have a grit scale, for example. But it is really powerful when you create intention and your admissions officers are actually looking to give credit for students for those actual characteristics. We're actually after five years now starting to do some research on what the results have been. We have some preliminary data. I mean, our retention rate is the highest since it's been or the highest since the year 2012. Also, our faculty are telling us that they are absolutely delighted with the character of the students that are coming in. But we're trying to see if there are particular correlations we can make with what students have done when they came to Trinity and those characteristics that we assign to them.

I mean, I've done a lot of reporting about sort of diversifying the campus. And it strikes me that being the admissions officer, you obviously you shape this student body and you shape the incoming class, but you are one person in one office. And so I wonder, to make this a priority at Trinity, how have you reached out or how have you been working in collaboration with other colleagues in other parts of campus to attack these goals more broadly?

Yes, you're right. Actually, one of the things that I'm quoted all the time saying on campus is it takes a village, and everyone takes that very seriously. So whether it's working in collaboration with the coaches, and since a third of our students are actually athletes, they also need to be very well informed about what some of our goals are and feel like they are part of the goals and the mission, but also really working with the faculty. I work through the faculty governance structures to ensure that they feel like they are participating in helping us to diversify. And the most important thing is that the mission starts at the top. Right? And so it is very difficult to move an organization towards greater diversification if the trustees and the president are not on board. And so I see my role is really trying to bring people together towards a particular movement and then holding those different constituencies accountable.

Angel, one last question. We've spent a lot of time in previous Future you episodes talking about kind of the demographic changes of the country, but also of high school graduating classes kind of shrinking, particularly in the Northeast. We've had a lot of guests from colleges that are really trying to figure different strategies out in terms of enrollment. And something guests always tell us is like, well, this is not a worry of a certain class of institutions in the Northeast, and particularly more selective institutions. You're not Harvard, but you're also not some of the colleges that we've had on this show. You kind of sit in the upper middle, I guess, or even upper class of institutions. But is it something that you worry about? And how are you? What's your strategy to try to figure out this demographic cliff that we know is coming with high school graduates over the next 10 years?

Yes, absolutely. I worry about it, and I think most people in our peer group worry about it. It is the topic of every enrollment management meeting that I go to, and in New England as well. And I think a big part of it is really thinking differently. I mean, again, I see my job not just as bringing in a class, but thinking about, what does the year 2026 look like? And really moving the entire institution towards thinking a little bit about the issues of enrollment and saying we probably don't want to put all of our eggs in the traditional enrollment basket. What are we doing in terms of graduate programs, online innovation, partnerships with corporations? I mean, the enrollment management position has changed, not just from doing the work, but also advocating around the issues. So yes, I am steeply or steeped in that work every day.

Perfect. Thank you very much, angel, for being on Future youe. We really appreciate your time and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to Future youe. I'm Jeff Salingo and I'm joined today by Karen Fisher, who's a former colleague of mine at the Chronicle of Higher Education. It's great to have the band back together here a little bit.

Yeah, the person who hired me.

So Karen, you just wrote this great piece for the Chronicle on basically called the Broken Ladder. What was the main takeaway of the piece for you? And you wrote a piece that I was involved with back at the Chronicle back in the day. I can't even remember when it was like 10, 12, 14 years ago, called the Growing Divide. Again, we talked about the haves and have nots of higher education. How does it differ from that project? How has things changed or more likely stayed the same?

Yeah, unfortunately it's more of the latter, I would say. I think one of the things that has changed is we just have a much more holistic sort of sense of the problem. Back when we were doing this project more than a decade ago, I think a lot of it was sort of intuition, us putting together our own data sets. And now there's been a lot more sort of research into it, looking at different pieces of this problem. And I think it's made the conversation around diversity and the socioeconomic divisions a lot richer because I think we now understand a lot more what the stakes are. So I think a lot of the conversation when we were looking at that was around measures like, for example, the earnings that come with getting a college degree. And that's certainly important, but it's just one measure of why, why going to college and why earning a degree matters. Now we know, for example, that it really has this much broader impact on all these different aspects of a person's life. And I think that it's brought a lot more people into the conversation when

you're framing it differently angel talked a little bit about kind of. He's obviously in charge of enrollment, admissions and student success. But there's all these other parts of the university that are at play around diversity and inclusion, not only on the recruitment side, but obviously on the student success side and graduation and so forth. So what did you see in your reporting about how the different silos that we often talk about in higher education work or don't work together? In other words, in the institutions that you saw were succeeding, was it because they had a more holistic approach to this, or was it really driven by enrollment and admissions?

It's kind of a yes and answer. I think in some cases it was very holistic, that people were. The admissions folks were talking with the people who were engaged in academic pathways and retention. And even more broadly than that, things that happen outside of the classrooms that are kind of these value sort of added experiences that we know kind of help students kind of move along the path. I mean, I do think that's been a shift. I think a decade or so ago a lot of the responsibility would have been on the angels of the world because we thought about this as simply an access problem. And I think now there's a lot more recognition that the pipeline is, if not broken, it's certainly strained in a lot of different places. And so to only attack this is an emissions problem can only take you so far. Yes, it can diversify your class, but can it ensure that those people sort of continue on, are successful, and then graduate?

I want to ask about the thread a little bit in your story and a little bit in stories around kind of this on the socioeconomic divide in higher education, because a lot of them talk about this idea of higher education as a pathway out of poverty and into the middle class and upper class. Elite colleges tend to get dinged on their lack of social mobility a lot. But I'm not quite sure they were ever a true pathway for social mobility. Has it really changed at all or is it just that they've always educated the top X percent of America and they continue to, and now we're just kind of paying attention to it more, or do you think things have really changed in terms of higher education as this pathway into social mobility?

I mean, I do think that a couple of things have happened. I think that the critique of elite institutions is by and large a fair one. One of the things that back in that original piece we did, we looked at public flagships and we looked at elite private institutions and. And by and large they were not a decade ago doing a good job in terms of socioeconomic diversity. That said, some of them were, I mean, I went to an institution, Smith College, that has long put a big emphasis on that and has had a much more socioeconomic diverse class than some of its peer institutions. That said, I think a couple of things have happened over particularly the last two or three decades. Three decades. I mean, I think who is going to college has changed. And so I think when we talk about diversity, we have to think about diversity within higher education itself as well and what kinds of institutions students get to go to based on their backgrounds. And I think there's a lot of divisions there. But I also think the reasons that we need to go to college have changed and the imperative for it has changed. And so, yes, we know that higher education, this certainly has been something that's been embedded in sort of the American consciousness since post World War II, the Great Society stuff. LBJ, this is not a new conversation, a new dialogue we've been having. But if you can't get on the pathway, or my metaphor was a ladder, but choose your metaphor. If you're not on that ladder, there's just a lot more risk in that, in sort of your future outcomes than there was. And so I think the stakes maybe are some of what has changed in

terms of your reporting. What did you find on how we can fix this?

Oh, gosh, how long do we have for this podcast? I mean, I think that the good news is there are a lot of people who recognize this problem and who have different solutions to it, be they policy minded solutions. We were talking about the Pell Grant earlier and one of the things that's really shocking is if you see just how much the Pell Grant's purchasing power has deteriorated. I mean, back when it was started, it could cover most of the costs of college. And maybe you'd borrow a little, maybe you'd have a part time job, but you would be able to pay to go to college. Now it covers about a third of the average costs of college. And so I think there's wide acknowledgement on the policy side that things like Pell Grant or federal financial aid policy have to change. But I think that it can't be. I mean, much as angel said, it's not going to be enough for him as the guy who's in charge of the admissions office, to make change. Just changing policy is not going to be enough. I think we have to have institutional change. It has to be both on the access side and the success side. And it's not simply a higher education problem either. I mean, we can't just simply have a conversation about socioeconomic diversity without thinking about the system of education more broadly and reaching back into the K12 system.

I mean, I think the same thing in terms of the reporting that I've done for my new book over the last year, in terms of affordability is a big issue at all socioeconomic backgrounds of students. Angel brought up middle income students, which I met a lot of in the reporting. But we're also now starting to see people who can afford college are starting to question whether they want to not any college, but a particular college. And most colleges, especially private privates and others that are not sitting on large endowments, are trying to balance kind of having enough students who can pay essentially full freight in order to support those students who can. And if you have fewer of those students at the top end, angel was talking about the barbell. You might have just kind of an uneven barbell where you have all the weight on one side, which tends to be at the lower end. And then how can the institution essentially stay in business? At the same time, I also think that institutions need to change how they think about talent, how they assess talent, and how they locate talent. One of the characters in my book from Pennsylvania went to a high school where his counselor told me he's more likely to have a military recruiter here than a college recruiter, which is why a very small percentage of that high school goes to college. And we know, especially among highly selective colleges, they have feeder schools, and they continue to go back to those schools every year because they give them a bunch of great applications and quote, unquote, great applications in their mind. Until we start to really rethink the recruitment of students. The talent is out there, and finding them, I don't think is as hard as some colleges say it is. And so I think that's going to be a change. It has to be a change at the institutional level.

And I mean, do you think. I mean, the demographics of this country is shifting and I think forced colleges. Yeah, I mean, do you think that's what it's going to take? Sort of we need to get these new students in to keep the doors open, or do you think that there's a broader conversation?

Yeah, I mean, I think some of this is going to be forced by demographics. Right. I sit on a board of a college in the Northeast. There's a number of colleges in the Northeast that are really enrollment challenged. And I think they're going to start to look elsewhere for students, what worries me is whether they will have the support systems in place to ensure student success. If you take a student who didn't grow up in a family that talks about college at the kitchen table and you make them travel hundreds or thousands of miles away to go to college and then don't put the support systems in in to help them succeed, I'm not quite sure we're giving them the benefit of, we're not giving them the benefit of higher education. The likelihood of them not re enrolling or not graduating is going to be high. So what I worry about is that colleges that tend to be enrollment challenged are also financially challenged. And will they be able to put the student success measures in place for students of all kinds and all backgrounds in order to do that? It does worry me. Any other thoughts from reporting before we wrap up the show?

I mean, I would just say I do think that it has been a helpful change. I mean, I do think data, we measure what matters and what measures is what matters to us. And so I think the fact that there is much more robust data around is kind of helping people like angel make the case on his campus. And so I see people being able to sort of identify certain of these problems. And so on one hand I look at the data and some of this can look so intractable. You can see that these for this sort of incremental change that happens among low income students. I mean the gulf is not really changing at all in terms of either access or attainment. Yet the fact that we do measure it does in a perverse way, despite the gloominess of some of the outcomes, does give me some sort of hope and I think some optimism that there is this much more robust conversation happening. And so can I say, and I don't think any of us can say this is the one magic bullet, but I think having this conversation about the many sort of options and interventions can help kind of perhaps move the needle.

So that's a good point. And just one quick, very final point here in question. Did that make reporting this piece somewhat easier than the last time? Because I remember the first time we started talking about this last decade and we started asking people about their pel numbers. There was a lot of pushback to that piece from institutions. Was it easier this time?

Yes and no. So I did not have to fight with people about telling me their pell numbers or would dispute what was being counted, being counted in, you know, federal databases and things like that. So yeah, there's a much wealthier sort of, there's just a wealth of data. But there's actually there's a wealth of data. And so sifting through because what do you what is socioeconomic mobility? Right? What do we measure? How do we measure it? And so, you know, I could look at everything from, you know, geography and sort of what the changes are based on, where you grow up to institutional changes and what are peer to peer institutions like and who's moving the needle to the long term economic benefits in terms of salary. And so in fact, it was sort of how do we sift through and how do we make sense of it and how do you not drown in the data?

So at least we have more of it now. So in some ways it's good. So. Well, Karen, thank you very much for joining me on Future youe. And that does it for this episode. Also, thanks to to Angel Perez for joining us and especially thank you for listening. We love hearing from you. So please drop Michael and me a line with ideas, comments, questions or even complaints and we'll see you next time on Future youe. Hey folks, Michael Horn here. Hope you enjoyed the latest episode of Future youe.

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