Redefining the ‘Dream School’

So Jeff and I love this podcast because we get to interview really interesting guests and alongside all of you learn about the trends, innovations and important work that's going to create the future of learning tomorrow in higher education and for each of you. But we also love it because when the other one writes a book or puts out a really interesting piece of research, we get to put that person on the hot seat and ask them all the questions we have for them. So I am pumped for this episode because I get to grill Jeff about his newest book that publishes today, September 9, titled Dream Finding the College that's Right for your. That's ahead on this episode of Future youe.

This episode of Future youe is sponsored by Ascendium, a mission driven nonprofit committed to improving learning and training systems to better serve learners from low income backgrounds. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org subscribe to future youe wherever you get your podcasts and if you enjoy the show, share it with your friends so others can discover the conversations we're having about higher education.

I'm Jeff Salingo.

And I'm Michael Horn. Jeff, you always like to say that if you can't use your own podcast to talk about your own work, what the heck good is a podcast? So are you excited today for me to grill you? Nervous? Something else?

Well, Michael, I'm always a little nervous because I never know where you're going to take the questions. But it's also good practice, I guess, for those tough interviews that maybe I'll have about about the book. So let's get started.

Let's do it. And we'll talk more about your interviews at the very end of the show because you've already had some interesting ones. But in seriousness, congratulations up front. I suspect you have another national bestseller on your hands.

My only hope.

Well, I, I, I'm, I'm feeling good for you. I, I read Dream School over the summer, had a couple peaks at some of the chapters earlier on and it's a delightful read so I'm excited to dig into it with you. But before I go through a lot of my questions, I think I have the obligatory one that I I should let you give a lightning round answer to you, which is this topic.

So this in many ways is a follow up. It's a companion book to who gets in and why you're inside College Admissions. As I went out on the road talking about that book, I heard so often from parents about the selective admissions game. You know, we don't want to Play it. We will play it, but, you know, we know our chances are not great. Or if we play it and get in, can we afford it? Do we want to afford it? And then they had questions that I think most people have. To them, the rest of American higher education is just a massive institution. Institutions, and how do you make sense of them? And it's why I think the rankings do so well, because it signals us, it points us in a certain direction, it shines a light on certain institutions, and it's why we keep talking about the same 25 institutions all the time. I wanted a book to make sense of the rest of higher education, where the vast majority of students go. In many ways, it's a book that I would have loved to have, you know, 35 years ago when I was going to college.

Yeah, well, so let's jump to the end of the book, which I suspect it's at the end for a reason and not the front, because you didn't want to create just yet another list of schools that everyone focuses on and jockeys for. But you do have a list with some very interesting schools on it. The new Dream School list. It's in the appendix. But what perhaps for me was most interesting about it and why I thought we might start there, is the criteria for the new Dream School list. And that that criteria sort of mirrors many of the preceding chapters in the book that you've walked through with some real quantitative force behind the points that you use to then create this very interesting list. So maybe if you could just talk through the criteria itself, perhaps, and how you selected the measures, because it actually provides, like a nice roadmap or overview, I think of the book itself, Jeff.

I mean, everybody loves names, right? Everybody. Every time I go talk about higher ed, people say, tell me colleges, name some names. Right? They want that shortcut. So I kind of was moved into the doing the list for that reason because I knew people would ask me anyway. I will be honest with you, Michael. This list has caused me a lot of heartache because, you know, it's not. It's not that these are 70. As I say in the book, this is a starting point. This is not a rankings. But I know people will make that assumption. I'm already, you know, the early copies of the book were out, and I've already had some people say, well, why aren't we. Why am I not on it? Right? So it's, It's. It's going to cause me that heartache. But in many ways, I did want to give people Examples. And so here's what we did. We looked at, you know, 75. There's no magic number around that. But. And again, it's not a rankings. We, the first filter was acceptance rate. We did not. The problem with most rankings out there or lists is that they have the same top colleges on them all the time. And by the way, they're all impossible to get into. I did this rough calculation the other night across Forbes and US News and LinkedIn and the Wall Street Journal. If you kind of combine all those top 10 schools, the average acceptance rate's like 7%. So it's all great. These rankings are great. But if you can't get into the places, how helpful.

Where do you go from there?

So, right. So we, our filter was how to have an acceptance rate of at least 20, 25%. These are a move moving target every year, but essentially 20, 25%. And actually most of them are not even close to that. Their 30s and the 30s, 40s, some in the 60s and, and 70s. So there are some schools on there that people will say, really, Jeff, you put that school on there. But there's other reasons why it's on there that I'll get to in a second. The other filter was at least 1,000 undergraduates. And you know why that is? A lot of small colleges in financial trouble. I didn't want to put any of those colleges on the list. I'm not saying that every college under a thousand students is in financial trouble, but we know that's a cutoff for a lot of schools in terms of just having a sustainable financial model. Then what did we look at? Okay, so once we went through those filters, we looked at price to earnings ratio. Like, how much is it going to cost you to go here for four years? Michael Itzkowitz, who started the, who was the first director of the, of the Obama scorecard, helped me out with that. And we looked at price to earnings ratio. We also worked with Bain Co. On a list of what I call institutions that punch above their weight. We know that outcomes are highly dependent on who comes in the door. So we looked at institutions that do better on graduation rates and do better on earnings based on the student body that they have. I worked with our mutual friend Matt Singelman at the Burning Glass Institute because we also want look at what are the outcomes that we're looking at besides earnings? Because we know, for example, that colleges that have lots of STEM grads and lots of business majors end up doing well. And so I didn't want to have Essentially, you know, the Bentleys of the world and the Babsons of the world leading this or the Colorado School of the Minds, things like that, have heavy STEM majors or heavy business majors leading this effort. I also worked with the folks at the National Survey of Student Engagement and matching the list up to schools that are on there list. They would not release their results to me, but we were matching up around geographic diversity or around outcomes around student engagement. I mentioned geographic diversity there for a second because that was the last filter that I used. I wanted to make sure that we didn't just have schools all in the Northeast or all in the Southeast. So that's where a little bit of my thumb on the scale came. We looked at Both public, private, 60% of the list approximately is public. And there's a nice geographic range to the schools. And that's how we ended up with our 7:75.

So part of the beginning of your answer there was that is is part of the big underlying premises of the book, right, which is that as a culture we've over indexed perhaps on the elite colleges, those highly selective ones. And you sort of have to attack that up front because I think otherwise people won't believe the rest of the book is worthwhile. And so look for the elite colleges, there aren't that many of them. They're really hard to get into with lots of demand given that students complete loads more applications today than they did when you applied on your typewriter. And the schools spend less than 15 minutes, right, reviewing your application, and yet they have this huge weight emotionally, culturally, socially. I mean, you have this anecdote, someone telling the head of MIT admissions that not getting into MIT ruined their kid's life. Crazy saying that to someone whose daughter died of fentanyl poisoning, by the way, as you relate in the book. But it seems like there are a few big arguments that lead you to make this case. And first is what I'll call functional argument number one, that yes, going to an elite school is like getting an extra lottery ticket, but otherwise it's actually less determinative than we think it is. Can you share more by what you mean around that?

Yeah. And that really comes from David Deming's work at Opportunity Insight with the Raj Chetty folks at Harvard, the work that they've done. And I think it's important to say up front here, Michael, this book is not a screed against the elites in the Ivy Leagues and Ivy pluses and the best universities we have in the US I love them for the reason is that they are known throughout the world as having just high quality students. I think we should invest in high quality students. I think we should invest in federal research, in research in general. I think that these institutions should not be taken down, but you can actually keep lifting them up while you also lift up other institutions as well to say, hey, these aren't the only places. And I'm also not telling people, by the way, don't apply there. We're an aspirational society. We should still continue to apply there. But again, 7% acceptance rate overall, essentially, so you're probably not going to get in. And so you have to have a backup plan, which is really the purpose of Dream School. And as David Deming said to me that, you know, those kids do better overall, but we also tend to over index on the outliers with those institutions. In other words, we always have the anecdote of the kid who went to Harvard or Yale or Princeton or Stanford or Amherst and, you know, killed it in the, in the, you know, in the working world or went on to great graduate schools or made a ton of money. But the average, as David points out, the average students at those places are not that much different than the students at a rung or even two down the ladder, largely, again, at big public universities, that they're not that much different in terms of their earnings over their lifetime. Now, where they are different is that, as he pointed out, somebody who works, who graduates from Harvard will probably get to work at the New York Times and somebody who graduates from the Ohio State will get to work at the Columbus Dispatch, but they're still going to have great careers. Slightly different perhaps, but I think this is the thing that we often lose in this. We think, oh my God, you have to get into this Ivy plus to have to make money and have a great career. And everybody else kind of like is left with the scraps. And that just doesn't happen the way this narrative sometimes happens. And I wanted to attack those myths because in many ways they are myths head on, and which we did in the book.

It's super interesting. And the other part that you attack is so, yes, maybe we're putting disproportionate weight on those outliers, but it also feels like part of the reason maybe people choose or desire those schools is it's almost like insurance against a bad outcome, right? There's like a floor for how bad it can be. But then you, you come in here with like another interesting argument where you're sort of like anticipating that argument in Some ways. And you say, not so fast. And you share this research study that shows that one of the biggest factors in dropping out of STEM degrees is the academic ability of one's classmates. And I said on our first show, welcome back. And I think I said it rather inelegantly that my leaving sort of multivariable calculus and STEM behind actually proved in some ways. The study that you cited. Can you share more what exactly it found and sort of the counterintuitive aspect of it?

Yeah, basically I always thought that you had to kind of swim with the fish you wanted, if you were a high academic student, that you wanted to be at a place where everybody was swimming at the lead of the pack. And what we found in the study, this is particularly true, by the way, in stem, is that if you do that, you're, and you're not able to keep up or you're not, as I say in the book, kind of a shark and kind of attacking it, you're actually more likely to drop out. And this is what happened, right. I met this mother in Houston whose kid gets into Texas A and M and gets into Stanford, ends up at Stanford, really struggles there. And basically at Stanford they're like, eh, you know, you're not going to make it. So why, you know, like leave the major? They don't really care that much. They have plenty of other students to fill that major. And by the way, they have more talented students. And so the kid not only drops out of the major, but he ends up leaving Stanford. And, and the study really showed that, again, because it's based on average SAT scores and that you actually want a place where there's a little bit of a range of SAT scores because that means there's a range of students. And that would have been Texas A and M for him, where they would have known that they have a range of students. This comes back to the David Yeager work that he does it at the University of Texas. Right. Is really trying to lift those students up who struggle in college. And Michael, I think what ends up happening is that we have this overconfidence among, as parents, I see this all the time. Well, if my kid is top of the class at this high school, that means they're going to do well wherever they go. That's not necessarily true. And you're actually better off in some cases being that bigger fish in the smaller sea because you're going to have a faculty and other students and others who are going to help you where, if you end up at these top universities again, great places, but if you don't have that attitude to attack it and now you're going to be, by the way, surrounded by people who are just as good as you and even better in some cases you might not be able to make it. And, and, and we don't necessarily know that going into the process.

All right, let's take a quick break. We're going to get in a word from our sponsor Ascendium, and when we come back, I'm going to grill Jeff about how to help people make trade offs and perhaps figure out what their true priorities are and if there is a solution to the rankings mania as we explore more about his new book Dream Finding the College that's Right for you. That's all ahead on Future youe.

This episode of Future youe is sponsored by Ascendium, a mission driven nonprofit committed to improving learning and training systems to better serve learners from low income backgrounds. Ascendium envisions a world where low income learners succeed in post secondary education and workforce training as paths to upward mobility. Ascendium's grantees are removing systemic barriers and helping to build evidence about what works so learners can achieve their career goals. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org.

Welcome back to Future youe Talking to Jeff about his new book Dream School Finding the College that's Right for you. And Jeff, one of the things that you get into the book is one of my favorite things. It's discussing trade offs, particularly when price forces folks to make choices that they might not otherwise, as it especially and increasingly seems to do for folks in the upper middle class families based on the research that you cite from Philip Levin at Wellesley College. Now, as you know, I've argued that trade offs aren't a negative, they're actually a great way to really understand your PRI priorities when you can't have it all, which is the case most of the time. But then you talk about how you were super intrigued, you know, by the New York Times personalization, if you will, ranking system that they came out with. And you could personalize around your priorities, but you make the point that it's perhaps not as useful as you had hoped because a lot of people actually don't know what their priorities actually are. Likely because they haven't untangled their true why for college from a lot of the noise and social proof and herd mentality at play. Or maybe it's because you just don't know until you're a little bit later in the timeline, like right against the choosing Process itself. But I guess given all of that insight, how do you recommend families actually make these trade offs as they wrestle through the college? Like, how do you figure out what you're.

Well, and I think this gets back to the title of the book, right? We think there's a single dream school. And that's not the purpose of the book. As I explained in the introduction. Right. A dream school is not a single entity. It's not a type of school. And what I come to realize in this process, especially in trying to put together that dream school list at the end, is there is no perfect choice. And in fact, I tell the anecdote in the chapter explaining kind of how I went about my view of trying to find those perfect colleges is that I put together the list and I sent it off to Michael Iskowitz, who I said, you know, did this work on ROI with me? And he said, oh, Jeff, there's, there's someone here I would question. And I'm like, Michael, that's because you're only looking through the lens of roi, but I'm looking through other lens. I'm looking at not only affordability, but I'm looking at ability to graduate. I'm looking at geographic diversity. There's all these other aspects I'm looking at. And that was the problem when I started going down the rabbit hole of that New York Times great college selector that they have. But it's kind of, you're constantly making choices and you come to realize that in there you have to make trade offs. You have to make trade offs. So there is going to be no perfect choice that no matter where you go to college, there's going to be some trade off that you're going to have to make. And I think if families come to realize that very early on and by the way, understand the trade offs they want to make or are willing to make very early on, because I sometimes think that happens too late in the process. And the big trade off is money. Oh my God, I'm going to stretch for this. And then they regret it or they, or they don't. They knock schools off where they could have had a great deal. I think that if they know that upfront that they have to make these trade offs, I think it makes this entire process a lot less anxiety. Anxiety ridden.

Well, yeah. And you have a really cool anecdote that people should read about with this parent sort of focusing on Jesuit schools, right, for their, for their daughter and finding a really good deal in it. One of the other things that's implicit in the answer you just gave is that a lot of the students are sort of parroting the adults around them. I found that in the research for the book Choosing College. You found it here? Right. They don't really understand what a career means or ROI when they're picking a major and so forth. And if you subscribe to the philosophy that like to understand what's actually motivating people, you should watch what they do, not what they say. It's not always clear that expected value is driving decisions as much as people sort of of say it is. But I guess what I was curious about, I think the book argues that people, you know, are less weighed perhaps by money than people think they are. But then how do you explain the migration away from English history majors to STEM and business? Like, how do you sort of reconcile those two things? Does that make sense?

Yeah, I think that, I think a lot of this is around the larger outcomes of college and where I think there's a lot of uncertainty right now. You mentioned earlier an insurance policy, and I think, think that's a great analogy because I've heard so often from parents who are just worried. You know, we have, we have young kids, both of us, like, what are they going to do? Right. And we keep seeing all these reports about AI taking away entry level jobs. And I think that for many parents out there, the insurance policy is a highly selective college no matter what the major is. And, and so that's where I think what's been happening over the last couple of years, actually really over the last 10 or 15 years with the flight away from the humanities, is that there is just concern, not necessarily just about earnings, but about job stability. And now I'm concerned that that's really almost any major unless you're in kind of a helping career right now. We may talk about this someday. Like the AI teacher. Right. So you don't even need teachers, the AI nurse. But you know, I think nurses, doctors, teachers. Right. There's a couple of professions that at least in the short term, I don't think are going away with AI. But this, this was like an undercurrent. I heard so often in my discussions that, and this is why I think again, people double down on the elites is because they think of it as an insurance policy.

Yeah, it's interesting we could go deeper on this major question, but I want to move to one other piece of this, which I'm curious, like how much of this is on colleges to help give some, you know, reduce some of this anxiety and make it easier to choose. And I found this whole discussion in the book about the great student swab really interesting. But I want to pull out one piece in particular, which is the part about Alabama and how the Crimson Tide made, quote, the rules for getting discounts very easy to understand for families perplexed by the black box of financial aid at other schools. So they have a clear objective formula, specifiable, verifiable, predictable. And as judging by more students going to Southern schools, it's. And certainly the University of Alabama, it's arguably working. So sort of along this theme, like, what can colleges do here? Should more schools be more transparent and upfront and committal about the full four years and what it's going to cost, maybe more. You know, what are, what are steps that they can be taking?

I mean, it's simple, Michael. They need to be more transparent about their outcomes in general and about money. And I think you're right on Alabama. But the other thing is, I recently hosted a webinar on something also that's in the book around teaching. Like, we have no transparency around the quality of teaching at any of these universities. And I might argue that. And people will argue that sometimes the quality of teaching is better at the less elites because the elite professors are more worried about their graduate students or they're more worried about their research or writing their next book, right. Where other professors are more focused on their students and they grind it out a little bit more because they're not at these selective universities, but we just don't know. And which is again, and one of the problems I was trying to solve with this book is that I think colleges have created this problem by not really trying to differentiate around the things that matter to families. What matters most to families, Affordability. Just be super clear about how much this thing is going to cost us over four years. You remember, I think we might have discussed it last season, the story that I did on Syracuse in New York magazine, right, where they're throwing these extra dollars at students at the last minute? Well, like all these parents would say, why couldn't they just tell us this a couple months ago, right? Like why this is this again. It just seems so simple. It keeps coming back to. One word for me is transparency. The more transparent they are are throughout the process about everything that they do. I think parents would actually appreciate that honesty a little bit from colleges and universities.

All right, so part of that then also falls back on ranking systems, which you referenced at the beginning, and sort of the pluses and minuses you Go through of different rankings in the book, the flaws and so forth. I'd love your take on this is the best answer to actually just have a lot more rankings that take very diverse approaches so folks can triangulate.

Triangulate. Yep.

Right.

I think it's a really good. I mean, if they could really triangulate. And again, as I said earlier, one of the problems is that the same top 10 universities often end up right at the top 10.

Well, so let me follow up with this then, which is maybe it's more about getting away from that and giving more social proof to other types of schools. So that as I'm trying to look for the insurance bout on the Facebook board or in my high school about what other parents and kids did, I can be like, okay, it's okay because this school made this other list.

Yeah, Michael, I think that's an important point. A survey work that Todd, a mutual friend of ours, Todd Rose, has done where this idea of how do people think individually and then how do they think other people think about something? And we kind of followed that in our survey that we did of 3,000 plus parents. And one of the most fascinating results from that was, you know, 16% of parents said prestige was important to them. 27% of parents are very important, I should say to them. 27% of parents said it was very important to their kids. 61% said it was important to people in their community. So that social proof is so important. What's that bumper sticker? We're going to put it back at the back of the car. That becomes so important to us. So if we could figure out ways, ways to give social proof to these other universities beyond, by the way, the just the rankings or just acceptance rates, I think that will help people open their eyes to many more colleges and universities out there.

My dad hated those bumper stickers. All right, so last question.

Because he probably didn't want to ruin the car.

Yeah, I'm probably right. Last question on the substance of the book. And then I want to do a couple questions as we wrap up on process of book writing. Because I know we both get a lot of questions around that. But for this one, you have a chapter at the end titled the doom loop of college finances. I think this will be interesting to our audience in particular because you give some very concrete ways to evaluate whether a school might be in trouble. But you also make a really important point, which is that maybe, yes, more schools will close, maybe they won't. I would note that if Robert Kelchin is right. And an additional 80 schools close each year. That's a lot of closing colleges. But more important for students might be this was your argument, which is that perhaps your school will not close, but it might have to cut and it might cut your major or some really important services and substantially change your experience. Can you say more about that?

Yeah, and I think that's really, I think we're really losing sight, Michael, of college on college closers because really what I think is going to happen more so is something where our already seen all these colleges cutting majors, cutting back. I also tell students if you're really focused on careers, what if they start cutting back on the career center? We're really focused on student success and they start cutting back on advising. That's really, I think there's a lot of colleges, as I say in the book, they're almost like the shopping malls. The malls just like keep going, but there's just fewer stores in them and they kind of seem like a little bit of zombie malls, but they're kind of. They have a couple stores open, but the place looks kind of dead. I'm fearing that we're going to see a lot more colleges that look like that than actually close. And that as a prospective student is what you should be most worried about. And so if I'm on the college side, because I know we have a lot of listeners on that side, that's really what I really want to worry about. And by the way, I think that might press people, my press boards might press senior leaders to say, you know what, we just really need to pick our investments. Where are we really going to invest? Maybe we don't want that many majors and we're going to cut back on majors and be very transparent about that years in advance to students. And then we're going to say we're really focused on career center. We're really focused on student success. We're going to cut a few athletics because maybe that's not bringing in enough money. Like that's on the college side of this. For those listeners, that's where I want to focus. Like focus on what's making you money, focus on what you're known for, focus on your mission and cut out all that other stuff because at the end of the day, that's really what's going to be your downfall.

Yeah. And there's obviously a lot of work to be done there because you can hear the cries, right. If you cut a certain major, faculty are going to say how could we be a college without X Major. But I want to transition us off the substance. You could tell. I have like 10 other questions I want to ask you, but I want to focus on the reporting of the book. And because you do a lot of reporting, you collaborate with a lot of folks to do surveys, you run numbers, you build models and more. And I work with you a lot, Jeff, and I know you're busy, but I have no idea how you find

time to do all this.

But it's impressive. But one of the things I noticed that I think will be interesting to future you listeners is you quote a lot of our past guests from the

show in the book.

Ana Humayun, Laura Hamilton, who I think was with US back in 2018, episode nine, I think some others. So do you then go back to these folks and schedule interviews?

No, no. I actually sometimes I just go back and listen to the episode and then

say, oh, so with their actual.

The episode. Yeah. Or there are some, some of our interviews. Or I go back and Laura Hamilton I actually ended up talking to again because I wanted something specific from her and she was on so long ago that I wanted to go back. But actually this is, you know, we're not to toot our own horn here at Future you, but our archives are,

there's a lot of unbelievable.

There is a lot of content in that archives. It's not always easy to find, by the way. That's our fault. But, but you know, I kind of remember, oh, I remember that interview. Let me go back and, and grab something from it.

Super interesting. And then last question. You're really good at getting publicity also around your books and creating a dialogue. And you had a major piece in the Wall Street Journal, for example. I left it in my kitchen. So I was going to show it on the video. But you're on morning shows, you're on npr. People, I suspect, often ask you, like, what's the secret? How do you get into the big places? Is it who you know? Is it the pitch? Is it the conversation? How would you describe that process?

It's being relentless. I am about to get a pretty good excerpt in a, in a nationally known magazine. I don't want to say, yeah, because it may, maybe it won't happen. But, you know, I emailed this person with a very, you know, it is about the pitch. It is about who you kind of who you know. But I actually didn't know this person. But I looked at my LinkedIn network and I said, oh, this person knows somebody at this publication. I wrote to that person. I said, hey, could you recommend somebody? He recommended somebody who recommended somebody else. You know, it was kind of a flyer, but I took it, and the person loved the pitch. And then silence. And I emailed the person back, silence. And then I tried to, like, think of something else. And then here's what I did. I. I wanted one more try, but I didn't want to feel like a stalker on this, on this editor. So I put into ChatGPT and I said, here's what I'm trying to do. Tell me a subject line to like. So I. I feel like it's a fresh subject line coming into that person's email box. And you want to know what? It worked. Now, the person ended up on vacation. It was on vacation for a while, and August was a busy month. But a lot of this is also just tenacity and not giving up. And as Michael, as you know from working with me all these years, I. I'm kind of a pain sometimes. And I think that could work both ways. I think you push people away, but sometimes people say, okay, Jeff, you wore me down. We'll have you on.

It's an affectionate thing, but all right. With that, Jeff Salingo, you are off the hot seat. But for everyone listening, check out his new book, Dream School Finding the College that's Right for you. Follow him on social media so you can see everywhere he is at j. Salingo on LinkedIn, Instagram and more. You can of course, catch me at michaelbhorn and all the social media platforms and substack and the podcast Future you podcast is on social media, so check that out as well. Jeff. Congratulations again and thanks to all of you for joining us. We'll see you next time. For an exciting conversation with reporters covering higher ed, we're bringing back one of our favorite segments. That's right, the Reporters Roundtable on Future youe. Sam.