Who Gets In and Why

This episode of Future youe is brought to you by Liaison Partner with the leading provider of strategic enrollment management solutions to leverage the power of community. Learn more@senisonedu.com. Hey, Jeff.

Hey, Michael. How are you doing these days?

I am doing well, even amidst our pandemic pod and all the rest that we're doing right now. But I also confess I'm good in particular because this episode is one I've been looking to for a long time now because just about a year ago we were actually in person together, if you remember what that felt like in Indianapolis. And you put me and Bob Mesta on the hot seat and did an entire episode on Future youe about our new book, Choosing College. And now I get to return the favor because your book, who Gets in and why? Comes out September 15th. And ever since I read a draft manuscript several months back, I've been looking forward to grilling you about it. So today's my chance.

Yeah, I remember that episode. We were at the Indianapolis Speedway for an event and Bob joined us. I think he wanted to try out the speedway, I think that day himself. Raining, unfortunately. So let's do this.

Let's do it. Well, first I should say congratulations. I know how much work goes into writing a book, and I know this has been literally all consuming for you for a long time. And you've put together a really compelling read that really demystifies the admissions process, I think for students and parents certainly, but also for our listeners, you know, people in higher education who maybe aren't super close to the admissions process itself. I think it'll be eye opening for them. And I imagine you have a copy of the book now in hard copy. Has it arrived at your doorstep?

Yeah, it finally arrived. There was a fascinating piece for people interested in book publishing in the New York Times a couple weeks ago about how there's a huge printing problem right now, not only because of the pandemic, but I guess there's only two book printers left in the US and it's creating huge backlogs in printing. So I want my book to sell well, but it actually sells too well. People might have to wait a month or two to get their copy.

I was going to say you'll create some supply and chain problems, but let's get into the questions, if you will, and I'm curious. Let's start with what you did in writing the book and the premise behind it for those that don't know, because there have been other books written on the admissions process, but the last one, like what. What you've done is sort of a generation ago or so, right. If I understand it. And to report on this, you really embedded yourself in some admissions offices, but you also followed some high schoolers in their college application journey. Right. Can you tell us about the process?

Yeah. And so you talked a little bit about a generation ago, and there's a great book out there that I think has been really one of the leading admissions books called the Gatekeepers by Jack Steinberg, who, when at the time he wrote it, was a New York Times higher ed reporter. And in fact, the series started in the New York Times and then he turned it into a. And that was in 1999, 2000, I think you followed the incoming class that would have graduated from Wesleyan in the early 2000s. Wesleyan University. But when I read that book a couple of years ago, I realized that it was kind of a whole different time in admissions. And the book premise itself was very different. Right. He followed just Wesleyan University, followed students applying there. And I really wanted to take a broader look and look at how admissions has changed. So the first thing that I did was look at more than just one college or university. We know that there's a huge diversity of colleges and universities in the U.S. i wanted to get a small liberal arts college in there. I wanted to get a private in there, and I definitely wanted to get a big public in there, given that 80% of American students go to public universities. At the same time, I wanted to get a selective institution in there because admissions is more interesting in places where there are more applicants than seats. Ended up approaching Almost, actually exactly 24. Two dozen colleges and universities. People always ask me, how did I pick these three? They're the only three that said yes. So that's how I ended up picking those three out of 24. On top of that, as you said, I didn't just want to look at the. Inside the admissions office. I wanted to also look at students applying to college. So I interviewed and followed a number of students. At one point, I was up into the 30s of students that I was following. As the year went on, that that was reduced because their stories changed. They dropped off. And so it ended up that I ended up following about a dozen or so very closely. And then three of them are featured in the book. Now, these are students who ended up applying and going everywhere in the book, not just the three schools that I followed. And then the final group of characters in the book are what I call the influencers, many of whom pull levers that parents and students Never see and don't even really know about. These are the rankings, the testing agencies, the direct marketing agencies, the financial aid folks that work off campus, that help with financial aid leveraging on campuses. There's all these things that go into how a class is made up and who gets in and why. That is outside of the hands, not only of parents and students, but even the admissions officers themselves. And I wanted to tell those stories. So those are the three main groups, the admissions offices, the students, and kind of these outside influencers.

No. It's fascinating that you captured all three of those, frankly, in one extremely digestible book. I'm curious. Davidson, University of Washington, Emory, was it. I mean, obviously it was hard to get schools to agree you to let you in and follow the admissions process and actually sit in there. What sort of restrictions did the school, you know, did those three schools put on the process? And I'm curious, when they agreed, as opposed to the 21 that said no, what was their interest in being a part of it? Like, what was. Why was this advantageous to be part of this book from their perspective?

It's Michael, It's a question that I get asked all the time, and I'm not quite sure the answer in some areas. In fact, a friend of mine who's in public relations said if I worked in public relations at any of these schools, I would have said no way. What was the advantage of having you in the room? And I worked really hard on persuading them that I would be fair. But we put really no ground rules on it. The only ground rule that we put on it was that I could not identify the students who were applying. So I could not identify them, obviously, also for federal privacy reasons as well. And so that was the only ground rule that we had agreed to. I told them I would fact check the book with them in advance, but otherwise we were wide open. They let me in whenever I wanted to get there. I obviously couldn't be there every day during the admissions process. So sometimes I get questions from people, well, how do you know they just saved the best parts for you. And all the things you didn't want to see, they didn't want you to see, they just did on the days you weren't there. Sure, that could have happened. But as anybody who knows who's worked in admissions or has been around admissions, the period between November and March is incredibly busy. We're talking, you're trying to process tens of thousands of applications at some of these schools. You don't have time to really worry about people like me being there. And in fact, most of the times when I was sitting in a room, people would notice me, I think, for the first couple of minutes, and then I just blend it in with everybody else. I mean, one of the things that was probably most surprising to me was that volume. And I think that's the big difference between this book and Jack's book. Because of the rise of the common application, because of the rise of online applications, we're talking a place like Emory, the year I was there, received 30,000 applications. They passed the 20,000 mark just four years earlier, and it took them a century to even hit the 20,000 mark. So just the increased number of applications and then not only that, but the high number of those applications that come from high quality applicants. Right. There's a moment in the book where I describe. We're looking through these applications one afternoon and we're reading them, and it's another student with like a 1490 on the SAT, another 4.0 plus whatever, somebody who's taken X number of AP courses, you know, you name it. And there was a moment I said to myself, well, we just saw this applicant. And we just saw this applicant. And we just saw this applicant. I mean, there was just so many of them. And I think that's something that parents and students in particular don't appreciate because they, they, they think, well, I'm strong in my high school and I know some of my friends around us, but they don't appreciate what is true in Boston or D.C. or LA, or you name it. Right. Is also true in every other part of the country. And so you're essentially replicating that strong pool in your own high school everywhere.

Yeah, that's fascinating. I mean, you really getting to sit in the admissions room where the debates around individual applicants occurred and these intense conversations around shaping the class. I guess I'm just curious, like, you've written about this process a lot, you've talked to these sources a lot, but you actually got to be quoting, you know, in the room where it happened. Happened, so to speak. Right. And do I have to sing that hymn? Yeah, yeah, you have to sing it now. Exactly. Yeah. And the dance too, on Zoom. But the, the question, you know, what was that intensity like? Because, I mean, it sounds like your eyes are glazing over trying to distinguish these applicants. How do they do it on a day after day basis when they're seeing thousands over, over that period?

Well, it was definitely intense. And it's because, as I said earlier, there are so many applications and one of the things, and I point this out in the book that admissions officers haven't been able to figure out how to do is add more time to January, February and March. And obviously early decision has helped. So they have multiple. Most of these schools now have multiple application rounds. And so you've been able to move some of that work up into November and early December, but the bulk of applications still come in as of January 1st. And so in January, February, and now early March. And there's this push to try to get out responses as early as possible, acceptances and denials as early as possible in March. You're really trying to do most of this work over the course of two months. And because of that, you're moving very, very quickly. And, you know, for the most part, these conversations might be 5, 6 minutes on each applicant. Some applicants might get more than 10 minutes, but you're essentially reduced to that short amount of time. Many cases, it's very easy up and down, vote for somebody. And for example, somebody like Emory was reading in pairs. So they would have, instead of having a single reader read the application, pass it on to another reader. Those two readers essentially combine that into one step and they would read the application together. And so they would split it up and did this, this paired, paired reading. But it's just fascinating, the little things that come up. And a lot of it depends on what day you read. Are you read in the morning, Are you read in the afternoon? Are you read near the end of the pile when they're moving more quickly? Even when you're doing this paired reading, it's not the same pair of people every day working together. So there's not a lot of consistency. Colleges, universities talk about consistency, but this is a human process. And just to finish this one point up, I asked the Dean of Admissions, Stephen Farmer at Chapel Hill a couple of months ago. I said, why can't we just outsource this essentially to artificial intelligence? And because it would maybe be more consistent then. Although I know there's a lot of arguments about whether a computer algorithm could be biased. Questions, questions and so forth. Right. But. But his thing was when people, when we reject people, or, as people in admissions say, deny, because they don't reject anybody. When they reject people, they want students. They feel like students and parents want somebody on the other side to, in some cases blame or to say, you know, a person decided this, not a computer. And I think that's. I think that's critically important.

That's really interesting from that emotional sort of social point of view, I guess that that's an important attribute of it. I'm curious on. On the admission officers side, you tracked some folks who were, you know, veterans of the process, but some of the people were relatively new as admissions officers that, that you wrote about. You know, for someone new coming into this process that hasn't been through a grind of making a choice about someone on the bubble in seven minutes, say, or something like that, what's it like for them to get systematized or to get used to this process? I mean, that. That sounds shocking from the outside.

Yeah, it is. And that's one of the advantages people claim for this idea of committee based evaluation. It was an idea that was started at the University of Pennsylvania about a couple of years ago and about 50, 60 schools now do it. And so many people say, well, it roots out the bias because you're usually pairing a more senior person with a more junior person. Even though when there's single readers, usually if it's a new inexperienced reader, they'll be doing the first read and somebody will follow them. But I think the readers had the same issue that I had that same blind spot in knowing just how big and deep this pool is. It is so easy as a reader to come to like somebody. You may have met them, you know, at a smaller place like a Davidson. You will have an admissions officer in the room who remembers meeting one of these students at a school visit, when they went to visit the school, because, you know, they're mostly reading within their admissions area. Most of the admissions offices, these big admissions offices, break down their territories by regions. So they're going to visit these schools, they're doing school visits and other types of events. So they remember meeting these kids and they really like them. And now in this moment, they're denying them. And so it's very easy for, I think, especially the new folks to this to really get attached to people. And one thing you just learn is that as the process goes on, it just gets more difficult and you really do have to move some folks into the deny bin, or in many cases the waitlist bin.

That's quite a human element to the story. So let's take a brief break right there and when we come back, we'll tackle the topics that I suppose are on many people's mind right now. The role of the SAT in admissions and the test optional movement, as well as how the pandemic has changed admissions and maybe forever. So with that, we'll be right back on Future you. This episode of Future youe is brought to you by Liaison. Any of the 31,000 programs that are members of Liaison's cast community will tell you the challenges of 2020 have proven that you can rely on us to provide uninterrupted admission services, to streamline your processes and to fill your pipeline. When you partner with Liaison, you gain access to our technology and our team of devoted customer service representatives. But most importantly, you gain access to the universities and leaders who have been members of Liaison's cast community for over three decades. Learn more at liaisonedu.com. Welcome back to Future you. I'm grilling Jeff right now in his new book coming out September 15th, who gets in and why? And Jeff, I want to turn to the role of tests because they've been in the news a ton lately with the pandemic canceling, sats, people, you know, schools going test optional or and a lot of students and parents not believing that they're actually test optional. All sorts of conversations around standardized testing. What is the role of tests like? It's, it's, you know, how does it differ from what I think people think it is and how does it differ even from within institution? Right. You were at a large public institution looking at a flagship college versus a small private one. Is the role of tests different in those two systems even? That maybe clouds how the public thinks Tests are in fact used or historically used, I should say.

Well, I mean, at some publics, and this was not the case at the University of Washington, but they use testing exactly how the College Board tells you not to, which is essentially as an automatic cutoff. It's an easy way to sort a large number of applications. Washington didn't do that. And actually none of the three schools used it as an exact cutoff. What really surprised me, and I think again, I talk about this a lot the last couple of months, is that parents and students place a lot more emphasis on the tests than the colleges do themselves. There was a moment in the book where somebody who scored a 1570 on the SAT and ranked very high in her class might have been two or three in her class was denied. Meanwhile, there was and this is at Emory, right? And there was somebody, so that's a 1570. And at the same time there was somebody that I was in the room with who scored an 1120 who they admitted. Mainly testing in all three places is really used as a check in for the top two primary reasons why somebody is admitted or not to these selected places, and that's high school curriculum and grades. It's by far what they want and what they look at. And it's largely because they know that's why students succeed at their colleges and universities. And so I will never forget when I was at Emory for training. So at the beginning of the application season they go through several days of training and this year they're going to actually do more of it because of all the changes because of the coronavirus. But there was a slide that the dean of admissions, John Lading showed about the success rate of students based on various factors coming into Emory. And they have years and years of data. And number one was high school gpa. Number two was strength of high school curriculum. And then there was a huge gap and then it was test score and then it was a variety of other things, right? So they've tracked this and every university has done this. So they know that. And we even know from national surveys that SAT ACT scores are the best predictor of freshman year grades. And that's about it. So they basically used it, as I said, as this check in when they may not have been familiar with the high school. It was not a high school, that was a busy high school for them. They had maybe a question on the student's transcript, something didn't look right. The grades were all over the place. And that's where they would use the test score as, as kind of another data point. And that's really, at the end of the day what it is. It's one of several data points.

So pulling that apart for a moment, it does seem like then if, if you're a student who is focused on getting it one into one of these public institutions that uses it as a cutoff, that that's like one conversation, right? If you're a student that is focused on one of these schools that is doing what, what you might say more holistic, where it's a much smaller part of the puzzle and putting together the class, one thing I was struck by is that as all these schools have gone test optional right now, one of the big things that people who've pushed for end of standardized tests for a long time has been that they say that it's biased against minorities, low income students and folks of that nature. When I read your book, at least from these selective schools, actually it's being used almost the opposite. It's as a way like I don't know this school because it's predominantly low income, we don't get a lot of applicants from it. This is a way for me to actually verify that you did something rigorous and for me to quickly get a check on your school. And so in many ways, at least as I read your book, it was helpful actually to people from low income and minority backgrounds to allow the admissions office to get comfortable that this student will actually succeed in throwing thrive in this environment. Am I missing something there?

No. And there's not an easy answer to this. And this, you know, the debate over testing puts people into two camps. You either like testing or you don't like testing. And it's unfortunate because there's so much more nuance to this debate. So I had a journalist asked me this question just two days ago and you know, who does, who does test optional hurt and help? And you know, in many colleges who really like testing and testing advocates talk often about that diamond in the rough person, right? That they're going to find that diamond in the rough kid who went to a poor high school under resourced high school, scored really well and thus ends up at a selective college as a result. And that happens. Now people who don't like testing say it's overstated. People who like testing say there's a lot more of these kids out there than the testing opponents like to admit. And the reason why they end up not going to selective colleges is, is because either they don't apply or B they can't afford it. But there's a, there's a student in my book, Chris from Pennsylvania, went to a very under resourced school in central Pennsylvania, actually not very far from where I grew up, would have never ended up at a selective liberal arts college if not for his test score because he wouldn't have known or his counselor in this case wouldn't have known to encourage him to apply to that place because you know, he scored a 1300 or something like that on his SAT at a high school where it was 935. So he's clearly helped by taking the test. Then there is, on the other side there is a, there was a woman at Emory who was initially rejected and then she was eventually accepted, who had very good high school record at an okay high school and blew it out of the park in terms of, in terms of her recommendations and her essays and things like that. But she had a low test score and on the initial read she was not accepted and then they eventually put her back in. So again, this is where people from students from under resourced high schools the test score could help in some cases and it could hurt in other cases. So it's not an easy answer. And I think this is why test Optional is a good idea because if you could get a test score and it's going to help you, there's no reason not to have it. But if it's going to hurt you or you can't get a test, especially this year, it's optional.

Yeah. The other thing I'm taking away from this is this conversation may just be overhyped in general, or at least in the way people think that it plays out. But to move along from tests to another concept that you tackle in the book, you have this concept or this construct that you introduce of the schools themselves being either buyers or sellers. Can you explain what you mean by that and tell us more about it?

So this, this is a construct really to help students think about their college list in the context of financial aid and financial fit. Right. So we tend to talk about college fit in a college. We tend to talk about it as academic fit and social fit. We rarely talk enough about, I think, the financial fit of a college, especially when you're putting together that college list. And so what I did was divide the world into buyers and sellers and admissions. And the sellers of admissions, very few of them, basically 50, 60 schools, less than 10% of American colleges and universities. Those are the institutions that have something to sell, big brand names, lots of money, way many more applicants than they have seats for the most selective colleges and universities. And they're sellers in this way, in that they sell something that people want to buy, and so they don't have to discount tuition to get people to walk in the door. And they dedicate a bulk, almost all of their financial aid to need based financial aid based on financial need. The majority of colleges and universities in the United States are buyers, and they're somewhere on the spectrum of buyers. It's not a clear bifurcated world here, but they are buying something. They are buying students to fill their dorm rooms, to fill their classrooms, they have to discount their tuition. And in fact, when you look at their financial aid budgets, they dedicate most of their financial aid budgets, in some cases most or a large percentage of it, to discounted aid, to non need based aid, to merit aid, as we call it, when it's really just a discount to get people to enroll. And here's why it's important, Michael and then I could talk about how a school ends up in one bucket or the other. Here's why it's important, because there were so many students that I met while reporting this book who were so enamored by the name brands to get on their list so the sellers, right, the sellers, right. And so basically they had a list of all sellers. They didn't get into many of them because they were in some cases too big of a reach school for them. But even when they got into them in April, when they had to make a decision about where to go, they got their financial aid package and they didn't get any money or they didn't get as much money as they expected. Now these are people who come from obviously very privileged backgrounds, but their parents were unwilling or unable, they say unable, in some cases, probably unwilling to pay for essentially full tuition. And they said, well, what did we do wrong? And it was clear what they did wrong is not have enough buyers on their list that would allow them to get some merit based financial aid. And the thing about buyers is this is not a indication of the quality of education. Right. We're not saying all the sellers are good schools and all the buyers are bad schools. There are tons of good buyers out there that actually are name brands that people would recognize. And it just requires a little, a little research and putting together your college list to make sure you have this balance so that in April you're not stuck with all the sellers on your list and no financial aid.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense and helps to explain why students should care. What's the easiest way for them to figure that out?

Well, I have a list so they could come to my website to download that list. But if they don't want to do that, here's a, here's a guide. It is acceptance rate. The lower the acceptance rate, it's yield. The higher the yield. That's the percentage of students that, who you give an offer to who decide to come. So those two numbers show desire that somebody wants to go to that school. And then the third number is the percentage of aid that is spent on non need based aid, meaning that it's not tied to financial need need. And those numbers are all over the place. As I said, most of the sellers, almost 100% of their aid goes it's zero on non need based aid because most of it goes to financial need. Whereas some of the buyers, half of their aid might go to non need based aid. So you're looking at those three numbers and then we put different weights on them to end up whether somebody's a buyer or seller. And as I said, there are some extreme buyers and there are some moderate buyers. So it's more of a spectrum that you have to think about.

But my takeaway will be go to jeffsalingo.com Right. And just get the list.

Exactly. Jeffslingo.com Buyers and sellers. And you could download it. Download it.

All right, so. So you love creating constructs like this, and you're not just this book, but in other books. And I'm fascinated with this as a writer. Right. You know, how you come up with these and why and so forth and the purpose that they serve in the book. What other big constructs, you know, were important to you as you were writing this. This book?

Well, I. The other construct I use, not as much as buyers and sellers, is this idea of drivers and passengers in the college search, as I describe people, as I describe students, is that you have these drivers who really drive the process. They start early on, and then, you know, most students are passengers and they're kind of just letting others kind of push them along. Parents, counselors, deadlines, things like that. And the reason I do these constructs, maybe in the next book I won't do one, but is because it makes it, I think, easier for people to understand a more complicated. A more complicated concept, especially when you're giving a talk about your book. You know, for people who are, as you know, Michael, for people outside of higher education especially, financial aid is incredibly hard to understand. And so what I'm trying to do is to break it down into some very easy to understand concepts, but also to bring the conversation about financial aid into the conversation about where to go to college admissions, because I think too often we see those as two separate things.

Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so switching gears, another theme. You alluded to this in the beginning of this episode, but another theme you spent a good chunk of time on is the direct marketing game in recruitment and missions. You started to lay out the rationale for why you spend time on this. But. But why does it matter? And what does it reveal about admissions? And what exactly is this direct marketing game? It's. I mean, you have a fascinating set of stories about the tarmac and the, you know, getting to the, the lists before any other school gets them and things like that. But. But break this down for us.

Yeah, so, you know, my editor and I had a slight disagreement on this in the. In the beginning. He didn't think we should necessarily start the book here. Chapter one is about direct marketing. But as I say in the introduction, we start there because direct marketing in many ways sets the playing field for students. It's how they sometimes hear initially about some schools when they suddenly get mail from Yale or Princeton, because even Yale and Princeton sends out Mail, they suddenly start to think differently about where they're going to apply. So direct mail may not work as much as it did 20 or 30 years ago, but it still works. And obviously, direct mail is very different now. It's not just print mail. It's obviously email. And direct marketing takes on a lot of different things. So that's. That is the reason I started there. But I also wanted people to understand how much higher ed is a business, just like anything else that's trying to sell you something. And that, to me, is why direct marketing was an important piece to talk about in the morning. Like, why early on in the morning in the book, it's why do I get more mail than my neighbor or my kid's friend or, you know, my friend's kid down the street? You know, why? Again, if we may look alike, we may grow up in the same zip code. We may have similar academic backgrounds. So why does one person get mail from some schools and not others? And a lot of this, as you know and I explained in the book, is driven by the College Board and the act. And it's going to be interesting now because we have so many fewer students taking tests. So when you take a test, you may remember this. When you took your own sat, you fill out that little bubble. Registration, answering all types of questions about your family background, about what you want to study, religion, a bunch of different things. And all of that goes into a database that colleges then buy these names. College Board will tell you they license the names. They don't actually buy the names, but essentially you're buying names. 45, 65 cents a name. I mean, this is a huge business for the testing agencies. Some names, by the way, on average are sold 17 times to multiple schools. So you're being sold to multiple schools, and that's why you're getting so much mail. And the person who really figured this out, and you mentioned the tarmac story, the person who really figured this out was a guy named Bill Royal, who's a main character in the book. And it's really un unfortunate. Bill passed away.

He recently passed away.

Passed away in July, just a couple of months ago. And really sorry that he didn't get to see the book done, but I went to spend some time with Bill Royal in Richmond, and, you know, he owned Royal and Company, which he sold to the Education Advisory Board for something like $800 million a couple of years ago. So it just shows you, by the way, how big of a business this was. But Bill was a. He was in direct Marketing and politics in Virginia. Ran Gerald Ford's campaign in Virginia in 1976. Licked his chops, basically got his chops going in Virginia on politics. Moved to the national level. And then in the late 80s, he was at a conference for summer camps, New England summer camps that were worried about the demographics. We talk about demographics in colleges. They were worried about their own demographics dropping off, and nobody would want to go to summer camp. And so I'm probably telling too many stories from the book and people won't want to buy it. But great piece here where he gives this talk. It totally bombs. Nobody in summer camps want to do direct marketing. And somebody runs up to him at the Capitol Hilton here in D.C. afterwards and says, hey, do you do direct marketing for higher education? And it was the admissions dean at the time for Hampden Sydney College in Virginia. And he said, no, but I guess we could try. So Hampton, Sydney was their first customer. And then it just went on and on and they ended up being, you know, having hundreds of colleges be their customer. People love. And when you mentioned Bill Royal's name in higher ed, people love or hate him, but there's no doubt about it, he changed. He changed to higher education marketing for forever. And if you want to know that story about the tarmac you mentioned, by the way, get the book.

Yeah, then I was going to say get the book. So. And for folks listening, there are plenty more stories in there that are worth. It's worth purchasing this for. But two last topics on my end. Jeff, I know we've talked a lot about this offline and even a little bit on this podcast, but, you know, a lot has changed since when you reported this. We've had the pandemic and the tide of interest around racial justice and anti racism. And I'm curious, you know, the book still seems incredibly relevant to me, but from your perspective. Thank you. What's different? What's different from when you wrote it and what's the same?

Yeah. So the way I describe this, since I'm a baseball fan and I think I've used this analogy and people probably have heard it already, but the playing field is essentially the same. So in this shortened baseball season, you know, the Yankees are still playing a Yankee stadium, the Red Sox are still playing at Fenway, but the rules are very different in some cases. And that's the same in admissions, where the playing field is the same. They're still going to assess students in much of the same way and do it with the same process that they've had in the past. But some of the rules are changing. Many schools went test optional. They have to think differently about how you use high school grades. They have to think differently about how to use extracurricular activities that they've been canceled. So in many ways, I think the book is still relevant because it describes this playing field that you're going to be playing on in the years to come, pandemic or no pandemic, and how to navigate that, even though some of the rules are changing. So that's what's that to me is what's the same. What's different is I think really the test optional movement is here to stay. I didn't lean into testing too much in the book and kind of thankful now I didn't because that would have probably been an irrelevant chapter. But it's going to be hard for me to see how all of these colleges, 400, by the way, just since the summer that have gone test optional, are going to be able to go back if they get the class that they want, that the place didn't fall apart because they didn't require an SAT or an act. It's going to be very hard, I think, for some of these colleges to go back. And that to me, that to me is going to be, at the end of the day, the very, the biggest difference pre pandemic, post pandemic with this book.

Yeah, that's really interesting. And obviously rankings and other things that you do write about in the book will adjust accordingly. But I don't want to go into rankings right now. Read the book for that. But what I do want to end with is the students and their families. What are the biggest misconceptions that they have? What will be they, what will they be surprised by when they read this? And the flip side question from my perspective is what should schools do about their misconceptions? Like, why should schools care that students have these misconceptions and do they have a role to play in clarifying them?

Two great questions. So I think the biggest misconception is that the college search is also an educational opportunity. And I think that most students don't. They approach it as yet another activity to do another thing, to check the box, that I did it. And they don't use the process itself as a learning opportunity. And as I point out in the book, the students that I met who were happiest at the end were willing to change during the process based on what they learned. And they weren't focused on these 10 to 15 schools that were on their list in junior year, that had to be on their list in senior year and they had to go to one of them if they got into it. And so that to me is if I, if I leave people with anything, it's use this as a learning opportunity. And so on the flip side, what can schools do about that? And I mean, I'm assuming you mean high schools.

High schools, but even colleges, should they care? Yeah, I'm just curious.

Should they care? I think we should turn, we have information overload in admissions right now. I mean my book will be, and your book and everybody's, you know, there's a million books out there about admissions. I think there's less information or education about admissions. And I describe a scene in the book at a very privileged school, the Baltimore Friends School, that teaches a class on admissions to juniors. And I have a scene in the book from it. And what really impressed me about it was that it was meant to educate students about the process and to make them understand at the very early on of how much this was going to change them and should change them. And I wish that more schools can do that and I wish that maybe, hopefully somebody's listening because with online ed now, you know, we could create that class for schools and to turn it not into how to pick a school, but to learn about what higher education is all about. Right? Michael, we know. There's so much we know about higher education that, you know, the average person who doesn't live it every day doesn't know. Like, and especially an 18 year old doesn't know, like, what does it mean to major in something? What does it mean to go to a big public university or a small liberal arts college? What does, you know, so what do all of these terms that we throw around so often in admission actually mean? And so to me it's about, and that's the role, I think colleges, universities, instead of promoting their own products, why don't you promote the product itself? Right? We talked recently with Paul LeBlanc about this in an episode that will be appearing in the future about the promotion of higher education. Right. Let's, let's stop thinking about the distinctions between colleges and universities and let's just promote the idea of, of higher education and help educate everybody out there. Because it's not just by the way, low information students, students in under resourced schools, but it's students everywhere, even as I said in Baltimore Friends School, who needed to be educated about what it means to go to college.

That's a good place, I think, to end the interview. So, Jeff, thanks so much for coming on your own podcast and being willing to be interviewed for a whole episode. And good luck, seriously, over the next couple months with the book launch and for everyone listening, buy the book. It's who Gets in and why A Year Inside College Admissions. And this episode is getting released before the book comes out. So order it now because pre sales, pre order sales do matter. And I'll say that, Jeff, you don't have to say it, but they're important. So get on Amazon or wherever you buy your books and buy one now. And in seriousness, thank you for listening. And if something struck a chord during this episode, send us your questions, comments, even your complaints and suggestions for topics or guests to futureyou podcastmail.com or send us a message on Facebook or Twitter. Thanks so much and we'll be back next time on Future youe. Hey folks, Michael Horn here. Hope you enjoyed the latest episode of Future you. And just a reminder to please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform and if you like the podcast, rate us so that others can find us and find out about the good conversations that we're having here. As always, thanks so much for listening.