Podcast with Andrea Brenner: The Truth About College Transition

Parents, is your teen college ready? Are you feeling overwhelmed, stressed out, or excited about your teen applying to college? Do you know what colleges are looking for? And if your kid gets in, do you know what you'll pay for it? College admission has never been so competitive or expensive. Shellee Howard will take you on a journey to help you and your teen get college ready. Now here's your host, Shellee.

Hello, this is Shellee Howard with College Ready and Parents. Is your teen college ready? Today I have a wonderful guest, Andrea Malcolm-Brenner. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks so much for having me.

Excellent. Can you please share with our listeners a little bit about yourself and, and maybe what you specialize in?

Absolutely. Um, so I'm actually a sociologist by trade. I have a PhD in sociology, um, and I spent 25 years at American University in Washington, DC, both as a sociology professor working mostly with first and second year students in my area of research was on sociology of the first-year students. So I was the natural selection when AU decided to create a first-year experience course to be the one to create that. And I, I created that course. That course is up and running to every incoming first-year student and transfer student. And it's something I'm very proud of. The program is called the American University Experience, or AUX, and it's actually a model for a lot of different colleges across the country. After 25 years at AU, I wrote a book called How to College: What to Know Before You Go and When You're There with a colleague, Lara Schwartz, who is still a professor at American University in the School of International Service and a dear friend and colleague. And that book has excitingly become a common reads book for a lot of universities, which has been really wonderful. I left American University after 25 years, went off on my own, opened my own business. It'll be now 3 years ago, and I created kind of a name for myself going to colleges and universities across the country and talking about the transitional problems and challenges that students and their parents face. And so I do quite a bit of travel, which is really exciting. I'm also the creator of the Talking College Card Deck, which is a deck of discussion prompts for college-bound students and their parents. And that deck of cards has come out in Spanish, actually just last week. And I have a new deck that's just about to come out that I worked on collaboratively with The College Spy, and it's called Talking College Campus Visits, and it's geared towards high school sophomore and junior families, and it's all about insider tips and tricks when they go look at colleges.

Hmm.

Wow!

That's so amazing that— I mean, I wish you existed when I was doing that transition, because I had parents who didn't even go to college, and so they didn't want to talk about it. It was kind of like that taboo subject. So what a gift you're giving these students. Now, what age do you start working with students, or are you strictly just with the colleges?

No. So I do a lot of talks. I don't work individually with students. I work sort of collaboratively or adjacently to independent college counselors and high school counselors, but I don't do one-on-one counseling of any sort, and I do nothing with the college application process. But I do speak at high schools quite a bit. And so a high school will bring me in and I might speak with their juniors or their senior class and then speak with their faculty. And then maybe in the evening I'll speak with parents. So really whatever the schools need that, you know, that whatever they need, public schools, independent schools, and as well as college first-year experience programs. So it's been, it's been busy and exciting. And, you know, COVID has put a twist in everything. And, you know, the transition to college Developmentally, the 18-year-old brain still hasn't changed, but, you know, the additional challenges that the pandemic threw us into, you know, the state of higher ed has changed quite a bit. And so some of those transitional challenges, especially with mental health issues, have really exacerbated.

Yeah, I'm sure my listeners can absolutely lean into that, right? As parents, we've felt it in our houses, we felt it in our school systems. What, what would be a topic that you would talk maybe at a high school? Help the, help the listener kind of get an idea about the kinds of things that you support, uh, that you talk upon. What would that look like?

That's a great question. Um, I would say that I talk a lot about the idea that adulting, the idea of adulting doesn't mean doing it on your own. It means using your resources, and that's a real challenge. You know, colleges tout the fact that they have wonderful campus resources, and they do. And a lot of families don't realize that many U.S. colleges, students can get, you know, for example, counseling hours that are already included with their tuition. But again, all of those resources are only helpful if the student crosses the threshold and starts using them. And what we're seeing, you know, data suggesting that it's really not till the spring of sophomore year that college students are even getting into office hours with professors regularly. Wow. Um, so one of the things I talk about is, you know, if you're, you know, to students, if your family, especially your parent or parents or guardians, have been your go-to support, your advocate, this is a time not to say I can do it on my own, but to say where can I shift my advocacy to. Some of it is in the self for sure, but a lot of it is using those professors, those staff members on college campus that are trained and have worked with thousands of first-year students before you. So I talk a lot about that. We have a system built in. We just get to tell high school students that it's there.

What a great— I mean, it's there. It doesn't cost anymore. You know, I've put— I have my two older kids. My son graduated from Harvard, and I remember that His first year was really hard because he was used to being the number one, number two student, and now he's amongst all the number one, number two students. And I didn't know how to help him with that because I didn't have— that's a quality problem I did not have. And so it would have been really great for me as a parent to say, here's some ideas, some resources that you can look into. But let's say the listeners do have maybe one of their children who's a freshman or a sophomore. What advice could you give them that I wish I would have been able to have as a parent of a student who was lost and not knowing how to navigate those waters?

Absolutely. Um, well, so a lot of what I talk about is starting these conversations at home early. Um, and sometimes as early as sophomore year of high school. You know, these what would you do scenarios. I work with a lot of first-generation college student programs, both mentorship programs at the high school level and then first-gen programs on college campuses. And so I spent a lot of time with first-gen parents who keep saying over and over again, you know, we want to have these conversations, we want to help our student be college ready, but we have no idea the conversations to have. And so that's actually why I created the card deck was to really put those prompts out there into the world. And I think part of the issue is that we wait for orientation to kind of parade all of these campus resources and all of these skills in front of our very overwhelmed first-year students. You know, in my book, we, we talk about the fact that orientation can be disorienting to a lot of students. And so to me, the answer is to start early. You know, it's high schools, it's not their responsibility to necessarily prepare the student for anything beyond the academic necessities of the transition to college. But if we present prompts to families and say, you know, we're not going to give you the answer key, right? We can't tell you how much you should be budgeting for your students' spending money, if that, if that is something that you're willing to do. But to say, here are some conversations, here are some words that your student needs to know. They need to understand, you know, how to fill their own prescriptions and make their own appointments. They need to, you know, how to care for their spaces, you know, cleaning a room, how often they need to take out their trash. So, you know, a lot of my talks, I use the language of it's more than learning to do laundry, right? Because it's the resilience skills, it's the writing and email skills, it's learning how to talk on the phone and leave a voicemail. There's so much to the college process. And, you know, I think there's a chasm in between what high schools, you know, high schools don't teach, but colleges expect students to know. And a lot of times it's the families who are kind of filling that void. And to me, instead of waiting until August before the student is heading off, we can start early and really start talking about what skills the student's going to need, you know, both emotional skills, mental health skills, academic skills, learning skills. Processing skills, all of these different things, and kind of, um, really give them the prompts for these conversations.

That is outstanding. You know, because we deal with teenagers every single day, we have the opportunity— we encourage families to, uh, really lean into community service because what we learn is while they're serving another person, they start to figure out, I'm good at this, but I have no idea how to navigate you know, when two adults are having an argument, or I show up and nobody's there. I often talk to students about it's okay to fail, fail now when I can help you or your parent can help you. And so what I'm hearing you say is we can't count on the high schools to do it. We have to lean in and prepare our students. My son's first week in the dorms, he was at orientation and he called home frantically And we did. We practiced the laundry. We practiced feeding himself like that. But he was terrified. He said, Mom, everything is pink. And I know, I know exactly what you did. And he's like, help me, I can't wear pink the first week of orientation. And I'm like, well, I'm sure you'll figure it out. And he was mortified that I didn't have like the perfect solution. And then we talked it through what his options were and But it was a little interesting that my expectation is, or was, that we did laundry at home.

Mm-hmm.

And he never turned anything pink, but he was in a hurry trying to shove everything in one washing machine to save a couple of quarters.

Of course.

Right. We never talked about that piece of it. And now I tell my students this story all the time. And I encourage them to ask those what they think are silly questions and have that conversation. So tell me more about this deck. I'm curious, what is this deck about, or how did it get started?

So it got started because our book, um, really became sort of in this little niche world, um, kind of big news. And I would hear from parents all the time who said, I know the book is for students, but I can't get my kid to read a book. I loved your book, but what do you have for students? And so to me, it made sense to have something that was not only tactile, which is great for a neurodivergent student, but it's also great for that 18, 19-year-old brain. But the idea that we could make these categories of themes— so I have 11 themes in the deck, everything from, you know, health to safety to spirituality to relationships, academics, etc. And, um, and One of them, which is actually my favorite one, is about family expectations. And, you know, and so the idea, the deck has 250 discussion prompts and it's, we say put the deck out, tell your student to pick a topic. There's no chronology to it. And tonight on Tuesday night, we're gonna start talking about health. And in that health section, it's what is HIPAA? What is a copay? You know, and again, I'm not presenting the answers. I'm having families take their students through this. You know, are you able to narrate your personal health history? Is there a family history of mental illness or alcoholism? These are all the things that college students need to know. If they sprain their ankle or break their arm and they go to the ER in their new college town, this is the first time they're ever filling out their own health form. And is it going to have to be a call home to figure that out, or will you have prepped them in advance? So a lot of families have said, you know, We do, we did health one night at dinner. We did safety when my kid was stuck in the car when we were going to college visits and we had college on the brain. Sometimes we talk, we take them in our pocket because they're, you know, they're poker size and we talk about them when we take a family walk. One of the things I love to do with families when I give my talks is I, and this would be great for any of your listeners, starting even junior year, I would say, of high school, is to have a parent and a child sit in the same room with different pieces of paper and pens, but they can't see each other's piece of paper. Set a timer for 15 minutes, and you ask the student to write down everything that they think they need to learn before they go to college. And then you ask the parent to write down everything they think their student needs to learn before they go to college. When the 15 minutes is up, you share your lists. Would— and I've done— I've focus grouped this many, many times. There's some really interesting things that come of it. Um, one, one thing is there will be similarities on the lists, which is sort of a breathe deep aha moment for a lot of people. Okay, we're on the same page. Then what I'd love to tell parents is you don't be the teacher for every one of these. Then the next step is to figure out if you need to learn X, who is the person who's going to teach that to you? And maybe it's an uncle, maybe it's a neighbor, maybe it's a sibling. Doesn't always need to be the parent that's teacher. Another thing that becomes really interesting are the things that are in the parents' list and not on the students' list, or on the students' list because sometimes they're more cued into what college is like than the parent who never went to college or went to college 30 years ago. My favorite thing that comes out of these lists is there will always be things on a student's list that they're actually nervous about, but they don't need to actually know for that transition. And the one that comes up on almost every list is students believe they need to know how to do their own taxes when they go to college. Wow. Unless that student is working, you know, at a, you know, pretty serious job, they don't need those skills right at this point. And so this is a moment to say that's a good thing to learn as you adult, but let's not conflate that with the transition process. And you can actually breathe a little bit. We can take that off the list for now. And that's actually a little bit of a relief for some students.

Ah, it— the little things, right? The, the ideas that get put in their mind. We hear it a lot as kids are preparing for college. They— I had a student who was in tears saying, you know, I, I'm doing everything I can and I still don't think I'm going to get in, because they have made this, this, uh, opportunity into a very stressful one. And it sounds like your cards are giving them— taking away the overwhelm, the unknown. And what a beautiful gift that is. I would tell every parent listening to this podcast, this is a gift I truly think every high school person should have in their stocking. I think it's a great—

I think it's— yeah, I appreciate it. I mean, you know, it's— and what's interesting is a lot of, um, schools are actually starting to buy it sort of instead of the water bottle, uh, for incoming families because it's a gift to everybody in the family. You know, the student might rather have the water bottle, but the parent is very much tuned in. And it does give the parent a little bit, you know, these were created in focus groups and interviews over 9 months with college faculty and staff, as well as sophomore college parents. And I said to faculty and staff, you know, tell me every conversation that would make the transition easier for the student if it had at home. And then I said to the sophomore college parents, which conversations do you wish you had had? And that the wealth of information, I mean, there are cards on Greek life and what happens if you don't, you know, you don't get into what you were, you know, your path is different than you were expecting. You know, everything from your a cappella group to a team. And you're really thinking about ways to get involved and what happens if the group of friends you find isn't the one that's going to be the best for you. You know, how do you shift and change? So there's just so much packed in there. And it all comes from those folks who have lived it.

Yeah, I mean, it just comes flooding back having two kids who have graduated from college now. The one that shocked me, and maybe parents listening, it'll shock you, but when my, my son, he left when he was 18, he split open his chin and had stitches, and I was never notified until he came home and I said, what's on your chin? Nothing. And it was shocking to me that I was a nobody in his world and nobody notified me. And I've heard students with broken this and, you know, surgeries.

My niece is having— or failing grades, right? Yeah, parents not notified. Sure, totally.

My niece just had her appendix out and the parents were not notified until after the surgery when she called them. And I'm like, oh, so parents Yes, they need you still. This is not like— and there, there are documents that I can tell you how to get, um, where you can be notified. You are still very much a viable part of that child's life, to get the grades, to get notified when they're sick, and I'm happy to do so. Please reach out. Um, that's a whole nother podcast, but I think what you're doing is you're allowing parents and students to talk about the big elephant in the room, the unknown, the scary thing that they don't know what they don't know.

Yes.

So what about your new deck? Let's talk about how this new deck came about and what that's going to look like.

Yes, absolutely. So the new deck is called Talking College Campus Visits, and it really stemmed from a collaborative project that I was working on with a colleague who has been on— she's a college counselor herself, and she has been on hundreds and hundreds of campus visits and, you know, has said— and I've certainly heard this from high school families as well— a lot of times people just show up on a tour and they think, this is where it begins. I'm going to just sort of absorb the info session and the tour and go along blindly. And in fact, I think it's really important, or we both feel— felt it's really important to, to do that research in advance. Know the tips and tricks. If your student is going to need, for example, disability services, that's a— that's a— when you're going to that tour, you should be setting up a meeting. These are offices that would love to meet with your student. If your student wants to write for the school paper, you know, have them reach out to the junior or senior who's the editor of the school paper and say, I'm a potential student, I'd love to stop by the office, would that be okay? I mean, to have a tour as an 18-year-old of, of, of the campus newspaper office if you want to be a writer is just So exciting. And so, you know, really to take advantage of learning what's downtown, getting the feel for the school. We have cards all about the learning and how do you learn about the campus culture? What are some, you know, symbols to look for on campus that will give you some nods to the different campus cultures? Because a lot of schools start to blend together if you're not well prepared. And then in the way I always do the Talking College Cards, there are discussion prompts. For conversations. And one of the things we say again and again in this deck is parents, listen first before you share your opinion, because it really matters to see a campus through your student's eyes, not necessarily your eyes first.

Well done, well done. Right now I have juniors who are doing a lot of campus tours, and you know, um, in my book I also talk about doing a solid campus tour where it's really all about the student and seeing it through their eyes because we need them to understand. Do they like big schools or small schools? Do they like private or public? Do they like, you know, teaching schools or not? Like, there's so— and if parents say, I really like, then all of a sudden it's a little tainted in the child's mind. So what a gift that will be. When is that deck coming out?

The deck should be here by the last day of April, so it'll be ready to mail, um, as soon as it comes in, which is really exciting.

We are—

we have been in pre-order sales, and, um, those are going really strong. So we're, we're excited to get them into high school parent hands.

Outstanding. Well, if a family wanted to reach out to you, what would be the best way they could connect?

Sure. So my website is ambrenner.com, A-M-Brenner.com, and you can contact me through email that way. You can follow me on social media that way. If you follow me on social media, there's often giveaways and, and, you know, free books and workshops and things like that. I'd love to also advertise colleagues who are doing good stuff that's out there. Um, and you can buy the decks, uh, through the website, um, through either my web store or through Amazon. There's links to everything.

Excellent. Thank you so much for being on our podcast. And parents, another resource to make your life a little easier. Thank you, Andrea, for being on the show.

Thanks for having me, Shellee Howard. I appreciate it.