Dean of the Faculty
Speeches & Articles
Playing the College Admissions Games: Some Advice
Published by the Catlin Gabel School, 2004
I know a little something about colleges. I also know what it’s like to be the parent of a Catlin junior who – like my daughter – is being sucked into the college admissions game. Herewith, then, a few more-or-less unsolicited – and more-or-less irreverent – suggestions:
1. Don’t visit. Or if you feel you absolutely must visit (admittedly the case in my family), then don’t take your visits too seriously.
The main problem with on-campus visits is that a day or two isn’t nearly enough to provide really useful and reliable information. In fact it’s not even close. Suppose your student’s dorm host is a jerk. Should you conclude that everyone at the college is a jerk? Remember: all colleges have at least some jerks, and probably have them in roughly equal proportion. Similarly, if you visit on a rainy day, you won’t know what the campus looks like on a sunny day; and if you visit when it’s sunny, you won’t know what it looks like in the rain. If you visit a class that’s going well, or that’s not going well, how could you possibly know whether or not that class is at all representative of other classes at the college? The fact is that your student’s college career will last (at least) four years, and the quality of those four years will be determined primarily by the relative handful of friends and professors at the college with whom your student comes into close contact. A campus visit will tell you virtually nothing about who those potential friends and professors will be, or what they’ll be like.
But the situation is actually much worse than this, for the really dangerous thing about on-campus visits is that you and your student will think you’re getting good information. That jerky dorm host, those gray and rainy skies, that uninspiring class – although all truly meaningless – will inevitably color the way you think about the college, and this makes it much more likely that you and your student will choose for all the wrong reasons. The college selection process is already irrational enough. No need to make it even worse.
2. Don’t read the catalog. Or if you must read it, then read it with several large grains of salt. It’s not that the catalogs lie. To the contrary: they’re almost always scrupulously honest. The problem is that they tell you virtually everything except what you really need to know.
College catalogs are basically comprehensive compendia of course offerings; and it certainly can be a lot of fun to sit back on your sofa on a Sunday afternoon, flip through a nice, fat, well-produced catalog, and imagine – vicariously – of all the wonderful, fascinating, and exciting courses that your student will be able to take. Trouble is, during a four-year college career your student will in fact take a total of only about 30 courses. Since the average catalog of a small college – I repeat, small college – is likely to list something in excess of 600 courses, this means that at least 95% of those wonderful, fascinating, and exciting courses are basically irrelevant. Your student will never experience them.
But doesn’t a nice fat catalog mean that there are more courses to choose from? Arithmetically, true enough; but as a practical matter, pretty uninteresting. The goal should be to get a good education, which means (among other things) taking good courses; but even if your student winds up taking, say, a total of four courses in American literature – which would be a lot – the quality of those courses is unlikely to be affected by whether a college offers thirty such courses or only twenty. In either case, your student will taking only a small portion of what’s available, and will have more than enough to choose from.
For all intents and purposes, moreover, college curricula are not all that different from one another. There are exceptions – colleges like Harvey Mudd, Claremont-McKenna, St. Johns and, yes, Reed – that have quite distinctive and unusual curricular strategies or emphases. But these exceptions only prove the rule. Every reputable college will have more than enough options, and more than enough stimulating and rewarding educational experiences, to satisfy any student several times over.
3. Ignore the rankings. Especially U.S. News & World Report! (Full disclosure: for more than a decade Reed College has been virtually the only national-level school that has adamantly refused to cooperate with U.S. News.)
The idea of ranking complex and wildly diverse institutions according to a single formula is worse than absurd; it’s profoundly dishonest. Consider some concrete examples that are near and dear to my heart. U.S. News gives bonus points to Amherst College for having a 9:1 student/faculty ratio, whereas poor Reed has only a 10:1 student/faculty ratio. Yet average class size at Amherst – according to its own literature – is 18, while average class size at Reed is about 13 and a half. That’s the number that really counts, yet you won’t find it in U.S. News. Similarly, Carleton College gets bonus points for having a much larger endowment than Reed. But a fair chunk of Carleton’s endowment income goes to pay for some enormous heating bills – ever spent a winter in Minnesota? – while another fair chunk goes to pay for varsity athletics, which Reed doesn’t have at all. So the endowment figure is actually profoundly misleading, unless your student is really into snow or intercollegiate sports. Another example: College X (which shall be nameless) gets bonus points for “selectivity” because it admits only 40% of its applicants, while College Y (also nameless, though located in Eastmoreland, USA) is ranked as less selective because it admits 45% of its applicants. But average SAT scores at College Y in Eastmoreland are about 200 points higher than at College X – a massive difference – which means that College Y is actually much, much tougher to get into. It’s not enough to know what percent of applicants are admitted; you also have to know about the quality of the applicant pool. The U.S. News survey – like all ranking systems – is riddled with errors of this kind.
So what’s a mother – and a father – to do? How to help your student choose? Here’s some seat-of-the-pants advice. First, determine whether your student wants a small school or a big school. If a strong sense of community and close contact with profs are really important, then go with a small school. If wonderful facilities, elaborate resources, and nearly boundless extracurricular opportunities are more important, then think big. Next, consider any special cases that you or your student want either to rule in or rule out: schools with strong religious ties, women-only schools (there aren’t any men-only schools), military schools, etc. You might want to look for special academic programs – particular majors, for example – but I’d be very careful here; most high school seniors don’t know and shouldn’t know what their college majors will be, and a large number of those who do know wind up changing their minds. You also might want to think about location – East Coast vs. West Coast, suburban vs. rural – but again be careful. Jet planes, along with weird plane fares, make location far less important than it used to be; and wherever your student goes to school, the odds are that he or she will actually be on or very close to campus about 95% of the time (unless we’re talking about New York), and this means that college life in, say, rural Iowa and college life in suburban Los Angeles won’t be all that different.
With these thoughts in mind, your student should ask Catlin’s college counselors to make some recommendations, especially with a view toward thinking about where your student might actually get in. That should provide you with a list. And now for the best advice: try to help your student get in touch with Catlin alums who are currently attending colleges on the list, and who are at least somewhat similar to your son or daughter in terms of likes and dislikes. Encourage them to share emails or, even better, to get together in person – perhaps over the summer – for a long, long cup of coffee or an even longer breakfast or lunch. The fact is that despite certain curricular and physical similarities, colleges do often differ from one another in important ways. They have distinct personalities or cultures. But I think the only way to penetrate the culture of a college from a distance is to sit down with someone who actually goes to the school, hence someone who really knows it inside and out; and if that someone is willing, as a fellow Catlin person, to talk turkey, then that’ll be worth far more than all the visits, catalogs, and guidebooks combined.
But – tuition payers will ask – what about money? Shouldn’t affordability come into play? In one sense, obviously yes; but here again I’d be very cautious about jumping to conclusions. The world of financial aid is arcane, Byzantine, and bizarre. Frankly your chances of mastering it in advance are not good; and the fact is that some students may find it actually cheaper to attend a Harvard or a Duke or a Reed – despite their $30,000+ tuitions – than a U of O or an OSU. My suggestion: pick the places you like regardless of price, apply for financial aid, and then see what kinds of concrete offers you get. You really won’t know what it’ll cost until you actually look at those offers; and you might find yourself pleasantly surprised.