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
Follow me on Twitter @crushpod — Like the show on Facebook www.facebook.com/crushpodcast — Subscribe and rate the show on on iTunes!
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.