As a college admissions counselor, I think “The Crush” sums up the way most people feel about the college admissions process and the college experience itself. High school students fall into a deep infatuation with a potential future alma mater, maybe even many, and work themselves into ulcerous, sleepless fits trying to find a way to get noticed and give them a chance. And then there’s the other kind of crush….the physical weight of it all. The pressure of expectations for yourself, your parents, your peers, the weight of the finances you might be asked to conjure up in order to appease your hungry crush, and the crush of information in the form of mailings to your house, stories in the media, tweets, op-eds, rumors, gossip, and outright bull***. This podcast looks to explore these issues and more by talking to fascinating people who know more about it all than I do.
Ron Lieber recently completed writing a book called “The Price You Pay for College,” and if you’re interested enough in this stuff such that you’re listening to this, then you should read this book. He was kind enough to check out this show and he says it was actually pretty helpful to him in terms of podcasts that taught him a thing or two.
You can buy Ron’s book from his local bookstore here and even choose a message for him to include! www.communitybookstore.net/lieber
Here’s some data on the pitiful value of a Pell Grant over time, and President Biden has committed to change it, albeit not by much. His budget proposal is clear about the kinds of good things it would do for higher ed, including the Pell increase, and a boost in funding for HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions.
MUSIC The Prune, Arnie and His Soul Brothers (Ron’s dad’s band!) I Can’t Go For That – 2 Chainz Is It Always Binary – Soulwax
In the United States, just 6% of college faculty members are Black. It’s a really tough career pathway for anyone, but as we’ll learn from my guest today, there are so many additional hurdles to clear if you are Black. Marlene Daut is Professor of African Diaspora Studies at the University of Virginia, is the author of many books and articles about Haiti as well as a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education where she shares her own tenure-track truth called “Becoming Full Professor While Black.”
This is a podcast where I talk to really interesting people about the factors that contribute to the love and fear of this (mostly) American rite of passage called “College.” Learn more about this show, get updates, engage and share ideas.
Puerto Rico is subject to a number of unique barriers to accessing college whether they leave the island or stay. These barriers simply don’t exist for any other US state or territory and are a direct result of its colonial relationship with the United States. It’s an issue close to my own heart and something that I’m really glad to try to emphasize in our national debate about college access along with my guests today, longtime college access professionals and current college counselors in Puerto Rico, Celeste Suris-Rosselli and DJ Meehan.
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If you want to join our brand-spankin’ new NACAC SIG dedicated to college access in Puerto Rico, here’s an interest form you can fill out. You don’t have to be a NACAC member to join the SIG.
Below are some articles and things mentioned in the episode that are worth reviewing to build a little context for this conversation.
The coronavirus has forced some wildly unprecedented anxieties into an already extremely anxious space. Mindy Rose and Mark Moody of Shanghai American School have had to roll with the punches in a very unique college counseling community.
Jon Boeckenstedt is as fearless as he is smart as he is dedicated to Doing The Right Thing as a leader in the realm of college enrollment management. He’s one of these people that everyone in our field looks to first with questions that require evidence-based answers, and over the better part of the last decade, his voice has emerged as one of the strongest and clearest on the biggest questions related to the use of standardized tests in admissions.
The humanities are in a tough spot these days, and the discipline of philosophy often ends up in the crosshairs as an exemplar of Undergrad Majors That Will Waste Your Time and Money. Good news though: it isn’t!
Dr. Phil Walsh is a lecturer at Fordham University in the Department of Philosophy and he has been hard at work to promote philosophy as a critical area of study, and used it as a means of explaining to his undergrads what the point of college is.
Here are a few of the people and resources mentioned in the episode:
It’s fall! Which means this is the time of year when legions of college admissions counselors traverse the globe to find those eager minds to fill the seats in their classrooms. It is a whole hashtag life that thousands of people in this economy lead and in my case have lead.
Well not long ago, a media representation with actual famous people! came out and showed the world what it’s really like in admissions. Or did it..? As my guest today former admissions counselor and current high school college counselor Sam Schreiber and I discuss.
Dr. Andrew Moe is the Director of Admission at Swarthmore College and has been leading a national effort to focus the eyes of his colleagues more on students coming from rural communities.
Andrew has been organizing his efforts mainly via the National Association of College Admissions Counseling’s Special Interest Group designation as the co-leader (along with Peggy Jenkins of Palouse Pathways) of the Rural and Small Town SIG.
As you’ll hear, in the few short years they’ve been at it, there have been a ton of folks join up and dial into the resources the membership has been able to generate and provide.
There’s more information below for those who want to check it out for themselves, and don’t forget to follow Andrew on Twitter @andrewsmoe
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In the summer of 2016, a Facebook group emerged to quickly become the primary space in which professionals on all sides of college admissions would gather to discuss the challenges and potential solutions to some really hard problems.
For instance, how do we make the spaces that college admissions occupies, and with which it interacts and intersects fairer to and more representative of racial minorities and other marginalized groups? Especially given that it was set up and is still run in a lot of ways that keep them out? ACCEPT, as it is called, which stands for “Admissions Community Cultivating Equity and Peace Today” was led into existence by school, college and admissions counseling professionals Brandi Smith, Steve Frappier and my guest today Marie Bigham and it is now nearly 6,000 people strong.
For the uninitiated and for those who didn’t read the Chronicle article yet, here’s the official description of who ACCEPT is and what they do:
ACCEPT empowers college admissions professionals who seek to center anti-racism, equity, and justice in our work and communities. As educational gatekeepers, college admissions professionals hold the most responsibility in removing barriers to post-secondary education; everyone in this work has a role to play. ACCEPT will lead the college admissions profession in creating an equitable, just, and anti-racist path to post-secondary education.
Soon children everywhere will be saying goodbye to their parents and to their communities and the times and the places that made them into the adults they’re on their way to becoming in college. Dr. Susan Matt, Presidential Distinguished Professor of History at Weber State University in Ogden, UT, wrote a book called “Homesickness: An American History.”
Some of them will do a bit better at handling the distance – both in terms of time and geography – than others. Well, they’re certainly not alone, and they aren’t alone throughout the history of this country when you consider the countless ways that giant groups of people that moved from the familiar to the unfamiliar.
So where’d all this come from? And how does “nostalgia” play a role in it all? How is this an American phenomenon, or at least, what American things happened to contribute to homesickness and nostalgia being woven into our national fabric? What about the role of technology nowadays making it insanely easy to stay in touch? Or its ability to make one’s experiences seem outwardly perfect via Instagram and other social media tools?
If you pay attention to the world of college admissions, then you not only know this guy, chances are he’s helped you form your understanding of what goes on in said world. Eric Hoover has been writing about admissions for about as long as current college freshmen have been alive. What has changed over that period of time? What are the constants? If I give him enough beers, will he tell me who the next big names are that will be going “test optional”??? Eric and I spend nearly 2 hours talking about all manner of admissions things over a few brewskis. We talk about how he came to this profession and this admissions beat. In the second half, we talk about his trip to Nepal to learn more about the students whose offers of admission were revoked at UT Tyler and the ensuing trip he made to Nepal to learn more about the environment they were coming from. We also discuss the matter of “financial aid verification” which is an under-reported phenomenon affecting poor families who require financial aid to go to college and the additional difficulties our government puts them through.
Here’s the collection of stories Eric did about Nepali students trying to get to college in the US.
Link to “The Verification Trap” about the pitfalls of applying for financial aid while poor in this country.
Link to the article that won Eric the Eugene S. Pulliam National Journalism Writing Award called “The Arc of Her Survival.”
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In this country, there are over 700 2 and 4-year colleges and universities designated as Minority Serving Institutions which educate 26% of ALL college students and over 40% of college students of color. Almost 80% of their students receive Pell grants, and these schools include Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions, Tribal Colleges and Universities, and Asian American and Native Pacific Islander Serving Institutions.
Professor Marybeth Gasman has helped institutionalize and elevate the work of these critical American spaces, their staff, faculty, and students as the director of the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions at the University of Pennsylvania and has learned a lot along the way.
This week it became known via a federal indictment that rich people used their wealth to break the law in a variety of appalling ways, all with a mind to skip the line and receive guaranteed admission to famous/elite/highly-selective colleges. Nobody knows more about this world than Chronicle of Higher Education reporter Eric Hoover…let’s unpack #AuntBeckyGate emergency-style!
So much more to read here:
“Bribery Scandal Reveals ‘Weak Spots’ in the Admissions System. Don’t Look so Shocked.” (Hoover, Chronicle)
“Admissions Officers Didn’t Create the Scandal. But They Helped Shape the Culture That Spawned it.” (Hoover, Chronicle)
“They’re Already Rich. Why Were These Parents so Fixated on Elite Colleges?” (Becky Supiano, Chronicle)
“Born on Third, Stealing Home, Paying off the Ump: The Unhinged Greed of College Cheats” (James Murphy, Vanity Fair)
Temple University Economics Professor Doug Webber does some fascinating research on the impact of our academic choices in college. In a world plagued by a lust for prestige, how much does it really matter in terms of your ability to earn a good living?
I’m thrilled to have Doug back as my first repeat guest! Make sure and take a listen to Episode 18 where we discuss the value of New York State’s “Excelsior Scholarship” which is meant to provide a free college education to a certain segment of New York’s households. Here we spend more time on the research that really occupies his time, which is the impact of college on the labor force. Are there good jobs for humanities majors? Will you, in fact, be doomed if you do not attend a Top 25 US News-ranked school? Are the robots coming for our jobs, and how soon? Professor Webber was kind enough to host me in his fancy corner office on campus at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA.
Nike and Oregon – the state as well as its flagship university – go way back, and their relationship became a template for underfunded state universities all over the country. Josh Hunt takes a deep dive into this complicated and painful reality in his new book, “The University of Nike: How Corporate Cash Bought American Higher Education.”
I grew up in Portland, Oregon alongside the growth of Nike from a hip local shoe company to a global empire. Michael Moore’s film “The Big One” came out in my junior year of high school, and first blasted Phil Knight and Nike’s lack of action to curb its exploitative labor practices into the national spotlight. We all saw the swooshes on the jerseys of athletes at Oregon, and also at Michigan, Florida State, and my alma mater USC. But I definitely never understood the depth and breadth of the bargain Oregon and its then-president, Dave Frohnmayer, made with Knight and Nike, and the grip its implications still has on our public systems of higher education. But then I read this book, and I encourage you all to read it too.
Emmi Harward is the Executive Director of the Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools (ACCIS), and it’s her job to keep her finger on the pulse of the college counseling profession so she can help her members do their best work helping kids apply to college.
As they put it “ACCIS is a national membership organization providing support, shared knowledge, and professional development programming for college counselors based in independent (non-public) schools across the country and internationally. ACCIS counts nearly 600 schools as members, represented by over 1700 counselors and office assistants working to support the students in their care.” Emmi spends her time in airports, schools, and her home base of San Diego, California, and joined me in new york, and she and I talked in a conference room in the Collegewise New York City world headquarters at WeWork on 49th street in Manhattan. Further reading: NACAC State of College Admissions 2018
The Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success emerged 3 years ago to provide an alternative application platform for, at first, 32 colleges, and now over 150 of them. Executive Director Annie Reznik is helping this group of colleges execute a mission to improve the college attendance and graduation chances for more of the kinds of students who don’t go and don’t graduate.
Reach Higher is former First Lady Michelle Obama’s college access initiative, operating under the leadership of my guest this episode, Eric Waldo.
He’s hard at work countering the systematic efforts to dismantle the education policies of his old bosses, Barack Obama, Arne Duncan and John King. Reach Higher is responsible – and perhaps best known – for College Signing Day, but also for recognizing the School Counselor of the Year, for their Beating the Odds Summit to control “summer melt” and make sure students who enroll in college actually show up there in the fall, and UpNext, an innovative texting platform to deliver important college admissions information to students’ cell phones.
Eric and I spoke from the annual NACAC conference in Salt Lake City, UT.
6 million people attend community colleges in this country, and yet we somehow don’t tend to consider it as “college.”
Bart Grachan earns his keep doing everything he can to help students succeed at LaGuardia Community College, and also to helping us all change the conversation to include these students, their concerns as well as their successes.
Community colleges disproportionately serve low-income and minority students and can act as a massive social mobility device, but we put a lot of roadblocks in the way of these students making the most of this experience, especially as pertains to transferring to a 4-year college and graduating on time. In addition to helping us understand the role of community colleges in our national system of higher ed, Bart talks about those roadblocks and the kinds of things that 4-year institutions could do to help these students on their road to success.
You can learn more about community colleges here at the Community College Research Center at Columbia’s Teachers College.
It’s a company with a loyal following to rival almost any brand, and everyone in college admissions is buying it. Slate is the technology of choice that admissions offices use to read applications and manage every interaction that students make with that office, from mailing list subscription to every click on an email to admission notification.
I talk to Technolutions/Slate CEO Alexander Clark about his personal path to creating Slate, why it’s so popular among admissions offices, and where it’s headed. We also discussed any would-be rivalry with Naviance, the phenomenon that is the Slate Summit, digital privacy issues, and how Slate figures into the conversation around “demonstrated interest.”
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Stanley Nelson has been making movies for a long time, and his latest film – airing Monday, February 19th on PBS – called “Tell Them We Are Rising” is the first of its kind fo explore the topic of Historically Black Colleges and Universities or HBCUs.
NYC native Stanley talked to me about his personal connection to these schools, their place in our history and in our national culture, and how they’re uniquely stuck “between a rock and a hard place” in Trump’s America.
Professor Nathan Grawe of Carleton College developed a demographic model which says that ’round about 2030 this country is going to lose a giant share of its population of college-going age. How will this impact colleges and universities and how will it impact each kind of higher education environment? I talked to him about his book “Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education” to learn more.
During the great recession, the fertility rate in America fell 13% in 5 years. This plus several other demographic factors have conspired to guarantee that the nation’s enrollment managers have a big job on their hands: How do we continue to sustainably operate if there are fewer students to serve? Professor Grawe digs into a really dynamic and complex national picture of demand for higher education to deliver a prognostication that gives the people in enrollment management world a lot to consider both in terms of problems and solutions.
Chronicle of Higher Education reporter Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez visited the island of Puerto Rico to see how people were recovering at its most important institution of higher education, the University of Puerto Rico.
Her story – available in both English and Spanish – tells a tale of, as she puts it, “higher education at its most improvised.” The well-being of Puerto Rico is in many ways linked to its cherished university system, and over 120 days after Hurricane María struck the island, neither has recovered substantially. Fernanda humanizes an experience that has been overshadowed in part by high-minded economic debates and low-minded tweets from President Paper Towel. Meanwhile, the people of Puerto Rico attempt to carry on, to get an education, to build a future for themselves against obstacles that feel painfully familiar.
0:00-11:11 – Brief History of Puerto Rico 11:11-44:16 – Interview with Fernanda 44:16-50:21 – Wrap up
The Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC) is a group of over 150 private schools that have coalesced around an idea that our current model of grading students is not only outdated, but harmful to their development. Scott Looney is the Head of School at the Hawken School in Cleveland, Ohio, and is the driving force behind the Mastery Transcript, a brand-new way to consider how we assess student achievements in high school.
We live in an age of disruption, and ripe for consideration in our collective educational consciousness is the notion of grades as we know them. Scott Looney and the member schools of this consortium are interested in assessing students based on mastery within different areas of learning that include the development of character, not just subject area knowledge.
While it won’t be in operation for between 6 to 8 years, you canclick here to see a few examples of what the MTC is hoping will become reality. A student’s achievements are presented in an online format with clickable elements, allowing the viewer to drill down all the way to individual assignments that contributed to the result you see on the transcript, should you so desire.
Mr. Looney is committed to make sure that admissions counselors with few precious moments to spare in the review of hundreds and hundreds of files won’t have to spend any more than 2 minutes reading Mastery Transcripts. And while those in admissions may have functional concerns about how this fits into the logistics of reading applications, there have been others raised about the impact this is liable to have on college admission outcomes for students at environments with fewer student support resources than Mastery Consortium schools.
I spoke with Mr. Looney during the annual NACAC conference in Boston in September, 2017.
More news about the Mastery Transcript
A Plan to Kill High School Transcripts…and Transform College Admissions (Inside Higher Ed)
Why Getting Rid of Grades Would Help Rich Kids and Hurt Poor Ones (Washington Post)
Akil Bello is a friend of mine who is also one of these odd sorts who concerns himself in life with all things Standardized Test. Following up from Episode 4 where I pledge to take the SAT, I finally sit down to register to do it, which in itself can take up to an hour. Naturally, I thought this would make for gripping radio. We document this epic experience of simply registering for the exam and attempt to read the minds – and fine print rivaling the iTunes terms of service – of the College Boarders who’ve put this experience together.
So we have literally all of humanity’s knowledge at our fingertips thanks to the Internet, and Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) are making it easier to get more education to more people for free. Dr. Andrew Ho has done research on MOOCs and their impact and assessing the knowledge obtained in a MOOC such that any credential you receive after passing a class matters in the marketplace.
What are these and where did MOOC’s come from? Will they replace college as a physical destination? Are they making the world smarter and knocking down socioeconomic boundaries to accessing education?
New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo recently championed and passed the nation’s first plan to offer free college tuition to state residents attending state public colleges called “The Excelsior Scholarship.” Free always sounds good, but does it make for good policy? Professor Doug Webber, a labor economist at Temple University who has contributed to fivethirtyeight.com, Fortune, and has testified before congress on matters of higher education, helps us understand what about this plan is good, and what about this plan might actually be really bad policy. We use NY Times columnist David Brooks’ scathing 8-point critique (“The Cuomo College Fiasco” NYT 4/14/17) as a frame for this discussion. Here are some links for further reading on the subject:
Right now, college applicants are anxiously waiting to hear back from the colleges they applied to, while legions of admissions counselors read their applications and those of anywhere from hundreds to thousands of their fellow applicants. That’s a lot of decisions to make. How are they made? What influences that process? What can research tell us about how to do it better so that we can be fair to students and their circumstances, while also being fair to the admissions counselors and their (physical, mental, emotional, marital) health? University of Michigan School of Education Professor Dr. Michael Bastedo has done research on exactly these questions, and I caught him at the NACAC conference in Columbus OH this fall to ask him about his research.
I needed to go back to something that I think Oregon State Representative Lew Frederick is uniquely qualified to talk about and something that’s been on my mind almost every day since about the 2nd presidential debate: and that is, is Donald Trump racist? And if he is, how should we feel about that? More specifically what does it mean if you vote for him? What does it mean if I know people who are voting for him, does that make them racist? I veered from the path of this podcast’s mission of discussing higher education in this one instance because the opportunity presented itself and in my mind and placed it into it’s own “part 2” and I called Lew back to ask him some of these questions.
As a candidate running unopposed for the State Senate of Oregon from a Portland district, Lew Frederick stands to be one of the most if not the most influential black politicians in the state of Oregon, which makes him one of the most influential black politicians in this country. I wouldn’t normally use the qualifier “black” but Lew is one of two elected officials in the state legislature who are black and that characteristic is particularly meaningful especially in this day and age as we consider the direction of society and the politicians who want to direct it. He’s been active in politics his whole life, and active in the politics of Oregon – and apropos of this podcast, Oregon’s systems of education – for decades.
Learn more about Lew and his work here: http://www.lewfrederick.org/
Here is an article referenced in the episode: “This is why finland has the best schools.” http://www.smh.com.au/national/this-is-why-finland-has-the-best-schools-20160324-gnqv9l.html
Dr. Christina Warinner works at the University of Oklahoma’sLaboratories of Molecular Anthropology and Microbiome Research(LMAMR) and studies some incredibly cool and incredibly small things: the bacteria in the teeth of our ancient ancestors. She does this to learn about our ancient diet in an attempt to gain insight into the nature of periodontal disease. I interviewed her because I wanted to learn more about this stuff, and also to have her provide insight into the value of doing research as a component of your college education, and what it’s like to be a woman making an academic career in science. Oh also: The “Paleo Diet” is silly and she can prove it.Subscribe on iTunes, rate the show, follow me on Twitter @crushpod, more to see at www.crushpodcast.com
Learn more about Dr. Warinner’s work at www.christinawarinner.com
Watch Dr. Warinner’s extremely popular YouTube video “Debunking the Paleo Diet:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMOjVYgYaG8
Maria Maisto is the Executive Director of the New Faculty Majority, an organization fighting to improve working conditions for adjunct and contingent faculty at American institutions of higher ed. The name grew out of the reality that only in recent history has higher ed leaned on adjuncts to the degree that they comprise 75% of the teaching workforce.
They’re members of the “faculty,” at 75% of the teaching labor force in higher education they are the “majority,” and it’s “new” because a combination of factors have only recently made them the unstable majority of the teaching workforce. Follow @nfmajority on Twitter for updates on their activities and progress, and if you want to learn more, I recommend checking out the articles that the New Faculty Majoirty have compiled on their website: http://www.newfacultymajority.info/media-2/adjuncts-in-the-news/
Julie Lythcott-Haims, former Dean of Freshmen at Stanford and mother of two herself, has been on a world tour promoting her book How to Raise an Adult in an effort to help today’s parents to, well, back off. Because “we” aren’t going to college, are “we”?
You can follow Julie on Twitter @deanjulie and get updates on the book at www.raiseanadult.com and chances are pretty good she’s coming to your town to talk if she hasn’t already. Learn more about the podcast she hosted on college admissions “Getting In” here: http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/getting_in.html
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Here’s the NPR story that I referenced at the end of this episode about whether or not college should be for everyone: http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/07/10/482784573/why-high-school-students-need-more-than-college-prep
Rick Weissbourd and Lloyd Thacker are new partners trying to solve an entrenched problem: How can college admissions change to better encourage healthier student outcomes and to promote ethical engagement in their communities? Their “Turning the Tide” report is their best and latest stab at it.
Lots of people refer to the college admissions system as “broken.” Admissions offices at selective schools have turned more into “denial” offices with historic rates of selectivity…kids are applying to a million colleges and packing their high school schedules with a millionAP courses…the extracurricular activities list is a reflection of things kids did to get into college more than it is a reflection of the lives they’re naturally inclined to live in spite of the process…the essays are boring or narcissistic…SAT scores create too much stress and don’t actually tell us anything meaningful about the student.
But what’s to be done?
Over a hundred colleges have signed on to endorse the recommendations laid out in the report titled, in full, “Turning the Tide: Inspiring Concern for Others and and the Common Good Through College Admissions.” Lloyd and Rick talk to me about the climate that gave rise to this report, why these recommendations are the right ones to create change, and the challenges inherent in these recommendations actually generating the social change they’re seeking.
Dr. Denise Pope is a professor of education at Stanford and a founder of “Challenge Success,” an organization that “partners with schools and families to provide kids with the academic, social, and emotional skills needed to succeed now and in the future.” She’s out to reduce stress among teenagers through a variety of methods including a reduction in homework and more sleep. These were two of my favorite concepts when I was in high school, but for some strange reason even the students are pushing back.
Jon Burdick is the VP of Enrollment and Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at the University of Rochester. He was also my admissions counselor when I went to USC, and now he’s my boss. He’s also one of the more articulate (and relatively fearless) thinkers and speakers on all things college, so I put the money questions to him. It took up almost two hours, so I’ve split it into two parts.
This is part 1! Follow Jon on Twitter @deanburdick
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Jon Burdick is the VP of Enrollment and Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at the University of Rochester. He was also my admissions counselor when I went to USC, and now he’s my boss. He’s also one of the more articulate (and relatively fearless) thinkers and speakers on all things college, so I put the money questions to him. It took up almost two hours, so I’ve split it into two parts.
This is part 2!
Follow Jon on Twitter @deanburdick — Follow me on Twitter @crushpod — Like the show on Facebook www.facebook.com/crushpodcast — Subscribe and rate the show on on iTunes!
As a full-time anthropologist at Intel (recruited at a bar in Palo Alto off the faculty at Stanford), Genevieve Bell has a job that makes a lot of us go, “Wow…what’s that?” She sits at the intersection between anthropology and computer science, and as such, a big part of what she does is to help her company – and by extension us – understand the future to come, and our place as humans in an increasingly technological and data-driven world. Relative to the mission of this podcast, I was really interested to learn about the intersection between seemingly disparate disciplines in creating a job that earned her a place among Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business,” and placed her ideas into publications like the Wall Street Journal, NY Times, Wired, Forbes, The Atlantic, and more.
She also has one of the top 10 laughs of all my 9 interview subjects thus far. In fact, I might place her at a tie for the top spot with Siva Kumari.
Follow me on Twitter @crushpod — Like the show on Facebook www.facebook.com/crushpodcast — Subscribe and rate the show on on iTunes!
The weirdness created by a lack of obvious, consistent formula determining who gets into selective colleges makes it feel super secretive. Stephanie Shyu and her colleagues at AdmitSee think they’ve come up with a tool that can help cut through some of the static, and it’s rankling some folks in the college counseling world.
AdmitSee is many things, one of those things is supplying a platform for the buying and selling of successful college applications. In this interview we talk about the beginning of this new company, how it works, plagiarism, how international students might be especially interested in learning how to “apply like an American,” the value of authenticity in college admissions, and how much AdmitSee’s top earner has garnered from selling the contents of the applications he used to get in to college. Bonus: I also find some way to use “Total Recall” in an analogy about college admissions!
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On March 30th, Ben Casselman blew up a Facebook group I’m a part of with about 10,000 members in it, all of them college admissions professionals in one way or another, high schcool, college, independent consultants, all of ’em. He blew it up with an article titled: “Shut Up About Harvard.” The premise of the article is that the “frenzy” and “panic” around getting into college is driven by the idea that only the most selective colleges matter, and that those are impossible to get into and you might as well die trying. It’s a topic close to the hearts of everyone trying to help high school kids figure out where to place their energy (emotional included), and needless to say, I’ve got a lot of questions for him.
To show you how popular his article was in this particular Facebook group, here’s a message from the group’s admin to spell that out:
Students always talk about the “feel” of a college campus being that indescribable and critical deciding factor that influences their decision to apply and eventually to enroll at a college. Are colleges supposed to feel a certain way? Why? Where’d this feeling come from and what are today’s designers thinking about when designing spaces of higher education? Nader Tehrani, former head of the architecture department at MIT and current Dean of the School of Architecture at Cooper Union helps me answer these questions and more.
It’s April in the college admissions world (in the rest of the world too I guess) and that means that admitted students and their families are visiting campuses across the country in the final effort to make up their minds about where to enroll. This always involves fairly heavily-curated and well-produced dog and pony shows meant to display all the glory that is any given campus. The “feel” of a campus is one thing that really won’t be the same at any two places. So what’s behind that feel?
In this episode, Nader Tehrani of gives us a heady explanation of the art, history, and sociology involved in helping design spaces for learning in a community. We talk about the differences between colleges in the middle of a city (like his alma mater the Rhode Island School of Design) versus the more traditional “New England Campus” (like RISD’s neighbor down the street, Brown). We talk about how the history of collegiate instruction and how that has shaped learning space, the value of “brick and mortar” campuses in the era of MOOCs and online learning, the value of “the spaces in between” those which are designed, and how elements of campus space can in themselves be offensive.
The International Baccalaureate, or IB, is the hardest and most thorough preparation for college out there today. Not only is it out there, but it’s really out there as a global curriculum in almost 150 countries, and it’s growing. Dr. Siva Kumari is the leader of this complex and fascinating entity, and she is also an utter delight. She spoke to me via Skype from The Hague…which is not a bad place to have an office.
Here is the study I reference in this episode, demonstrating that the IB is doing great work in low-income communities.
Tests suck and they suck real bad. I know because I cried the day I got my SAT scores in the mail. BUT- we need them in our lives in the college admissions world…or do we? Adam Ingersoll, is the co-founder of the west coast’s leading test prep company, Compass Education Group, and he helps us think about the value of these tests, their present and future, and whether grownups like me should take the new SAT. And then cry about it for old time’s sake.
So, as referenced in the interview, here’s a fun look at what an already-smart person can do when it’s also this already-smart person’s job to take the SAT.
Behold: Adam’s recent score history, and the tragedy that is a nearly-perfect SAT score on multiple exam sittings, but…never quite getting there.
Bob DeMars lived the dream of kids in streets and backyards everywhere when he played college football for the University of Southern California. He paid a heavy price, and entered into a fraternity he didn’t see coming. With the release of his new documentary “The Business of Amateurs,” which has been met with wide-ranging acclaim, which includes being used in John Oliver’s absolute The People’s Elbow-ing of the NCAA on “Last Week Tonight,” Bob hopes to spread the word to kids before they make the decisions he and the film’s subjects did.
Emily Harris has an incredible job as the Jerusalem correspondent for National Public Radio. How do you get a job like that, and how do you prepare for it in college? (Hint: You kind of don’t.) Being a radio correspondent in Jerusalem requires a pretty diverse skill set. How did college prepare Emily for her job? (Photo credit: Ahmed Abuhamda for NPR)
I know Emily tangentially, which is to say, not really at all except for email correspondence and our conversation for the show. She was a student’s of my dad’s at Lincoln HS in Portland, OR and is still in touch with him. My fondness for NPR has grown over the years from it being that background buzzing noise in my kitchen growing up, to it being the same thing now, only I tend to actually pay attention to it. At any rate, I’m fascinated by these personalities, why they do what they do, what it’s like working in a war zone, and how it is to be far away from home (if such a thing even exists as an international correspondent). I asked Emily about all this stuff last summer (yeah, it’s taken me that long to get this done) and the result is a fun and informative conversation.
So what’s the point of college? Bill Deresiewicz wrote the book “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life” which I’ve come to regard as one of the most important books about college available today. The nature of going to college has changed dramatically from its early inception, and economic forces have shifted the conversation away from developing people into better human beings and citizens, to one based on “return on investment.” What’s the point of going to college, anyways? Bill Deriesewicz has some compelling ideas. WARNING: The F-word gets said one time. By me. Sorry.