Dream School: Finding the College That’s Right for You with Jeff Selingo – College Bound Mentor Podcast #34

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College Bound Mentor Podcast Episode #34: Dream School: Finding the College That’s Right for You with Jeff Selingo

What’s more important: where you go to college, or what you do in college? Jeff Selingo has written about colleges and universities for more than 25 years and is a New York Times bestselling author of four books. His latest, Dream School: Finding the College That’s Right for You, draws on more than two years of research and a survey of some 3,000 parents to give families permission to think more broadly about what signals a “good” college and then the tools to discover their dream school. Hear the Top 5 biggest changes to college admissions in recent years, why you should dig deeper into the universe of colleges to attend, the growing importance of value when it comes to your college choice, the most surprising things Jeff learned while writing the book, and the importance of learning broad skills vs. specialized skills in college. This episode covers everything from your dream college to getting a good job. Here’s a small sample of what you will hear in this episode:

  • Was Jeff surprised by how successful Who Gets In and Why was?
  • How common are early cuts at highly selective schools?
  • What schools get the most students into Fortune 50 companies?
  • How did Jeff come up with the Appendix of Dream School?
  • What are some myths & truths about college admissions?

Check out Jeff’s new book Dream School: Finding the College That’s Right for You, and Subscribe to College Bound Mentor on your favorite podcast platform and learn more at CollegeBoundMentor.com

Check out the episode and show notes below for much more detail.

Show Notes

  • Dream School: Finding the College That’s Right for You with Jeff Selingo

What is the College Bound Mentor podcast?

Lisa, Abby, and Stefanie know college. They also know students. With over 30 years combined experience mentoring young people, they’ll show you why understanding yourself is the key to finding the right college. Each episode, hear trends, case studies, and interviews with students who have gone through it all – giving you valuable insight to survive the college application process and beyond. Hosted by Lisa Bleich, Abby Power, and Stefanie Forman, Partners of College Bound Mentor.

Transcript

Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

Jeff Selingo 0:02
You know what? It’s okay. It’s okay that my kid is not going to those highly elite colleges.

Lisa Bleich 0:19
Hey, CBMers, welcome back to College Bound Mentor, where we help you survive the college application process and beyond. We’re your-co hosts, Lisa, Abby, and Stefanie and on today’s episode, we are so excited that we get to chat with Jeff Selingo about his new book, Dream School, finding the college that’s right for you. Jeff Selingo has written about colleges and universities for more than two and a half decades and is a New York Times bestselling author of three books. His latest book, dream school, finding the college that’s right for you is based on two plus years of research and an original survey of 3500 parents. His popular book, who gets in and why. A year inside college admissions takes readers inside the admissions offices of three selective universities, and was named among the 100 notable books of the year by the New York Times, a regular contributor to The Atlantic New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Jeff is a special advisor to the president and professor of practice at Arizona State University. He also writes a biweekly newsletter on all things higher ed, called Next. And co-hosts the podcast Future U. He lives near Washington, DC with his family, and we are just so excited to have you on I have to say that when you agree, I felt like, Oh my god, we’ve got a rockstar on our podcast. So thank you for thank you so much for

Jeff Selingo 1:25
agreeing. Well, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so your book,

Lisa Bleich 1:30
who gets in and why you’re the first book that you published was it was sort of everywhere when it first came out. It felt like you had cracked the code on college admissions for so many families. Was it surprising to you how successful that

Jeff Selingo 1:41
book was. Well, I guess you had, as an author, you’re never supposed to say a success is surprising. But yes, it was, but in many ways, not really, because Jack Steinberg of The New York Times did the gatekeepers back in 2000 and that book sold really well for a very long time. But obviously the process had changed a lot since Jack did that book. So I kind of knew from that book that it would be successful, but I also knew, because I didn’t pick one school, right? Unlike Jack, who really only looked at Wesleyan and looked at two sides of that same coin, students who were applying to Wesleyan, students who got in or denied at Wesleyan, you know, we were able to look through the whole ecosystem of the college admissions process from, you know, the fact of looking at like how Bill royal really changed marketing so that you’re, you’re constantly getting mail and now email to how, how Mark, you know, not only how marketing works, about testing works, how The admissions process works at a small liberal arts college as opposed to a big public university. So I felt like it really did update parents on a process that has changed not only drastically since Jack’s book came out, but more so since parents applied to college, parents like me and Gen X, you know, 30 years ago,

Lisa Bleich 2:58
right? Absolutely. And it seems like admissions has changed even more since you wrote that

Jeff Selingo 3:02
book well, and it’s one of the reasons why. As you know, the first chapter of dream school really gives us an update on just how much admissions has changed. You know, I recently saw a counselor show a slide about admissions over the last 100 years, and basically, admissions didn’t change for 65 of them, 70 of them, then it kind of changed a little bit, and then it changed a lot just in the last five years.

Lisa Bleich 3:24
Yeah, absolutely. I found myself highlighting so many passages in your book. In dream school, you really captured how much college admissions has changed since covid. You know, we do a yearly college admissions trend webinar, and we identified a lot of the same issues. So it was so great to see how you encapsulated so many of those issues. Can you just walk us through maybe the top five impacts on college admissions in the last five years?

Jeff Selingo 3:49
Yeah, so I think one of them was test optional, obviously. So you know, 100 Schools went test optional during the pandemic. Many stayed that way. So what that led to was kind of this application inflation. So that’s number two, right? Application inflation has been around since the common app really grew up in the early 2000s it just took off post post covid. That really led to a lot of yield protection and yield volatility, right? When more students, same number of students, applying to more colleges, what ends up happening is really don’t know who’s interested and who’s really going to come so you saw a lot of schools really try to figure out, well, who’s really interested, who’s not. So yield volatility was, was number three, and then number four was because of that, because of the huge increase in maps, you’re not sure who’s interested. You saw more schools go early decision, or more schools really go early action. So you saw a lot of the new especially the big publics, start early action programs. And then finally, this idea of the value of higher ed, we’re really starting to see families start to say, is it really worth paying? Paying full price at all of these schools. Song Richardson, who’s quoted in the book, the former president of Colorado College, talked about these full pay students as gold. You started to see a fall off of those full pay students last decade, but you really saw a fallout after the pandemic, and I think a lot of that was because parents saw their kids at home and saw how they were or weren’t learning, and they started to say, Is this really what I want to pay for when they go back in person? Because they kind of saw the inside just like I saw the inside of the admissions office. They started to see the inside of the classroom and started to ask questions about, is it really worth it? Yeah.

Stefanie Forman 5:38
Thank you for that synopsis. And before I ask our next question, I just wanted to let you know, I said to Lisa and Abby, before we started, in your introduction, I quoted you to a family this morning. You’re like, remember this. This is supposed to be exciting, this process, and I think it’s so easy to forget that, and for me to forget that too, even though I do this, because I do find it exciting. And just even to see the parent shift in mindset, just by sharing your sentiment with them that this is supposed to be exciting, was just like, I don’t know. It was really nice. So thank you for that. I’ll stop fan girling. I could do that for a bit more. On Page 42 you write that at Duke, fewer than half the applications go through the full evaluation process. I want to make sure I’m not butchering the name, but Guten Tag,

Jeff Selingo 6:27
yep, Guten Tag, he’s the he’s now no longer the Dean of Admissions. There. He’s He’s since retired. But yes,

Stefanie Forman 6:33
okay, so thanks. So guten tag says that in the early past, he he had to say no to two thirds to 75% of the applications after 15 minutes. So students have had to go beyond their high schools academic offerings now to stand out, which is something that we see all the time. So how pervasive is this early cut at other highly select schools?

Jeff Selingo 6:56
So I think it’s becoming increasingly common, mainly because of the volume of applications and the inability to really add any more days to the reading season, right? There’s only so many days that you get in a reading season, and so increasingly, they’re trying to figure out how to make these earlier cuts. And what I think is more harsh, in some ways, is that the later cuts just require so much more to get over that line than they did even five years ago. And that was probably the biggest takeaway from chapter one. Mia’s mother, who I profiled chapter one, has multiple kids who have gone through the process before the pandemic, post pandemic, and the thing she can’t quite get over, or can’t quite address is this fact of how different it was for these three kids in

Abby Power 7:46
her family. One of the overarching messages in the book is that since the super, highly selective elite, that’s air quotes, there schools have gotten near impossible to get into that rather than focusing on those schools, we need to widen our search to find schools that’ll engage the students, transform them, be a good value for the families. And I think what you’re trying to get across is that it’s more about what you do at school than where you go. And I guess I’d say that’s not a new message. There’s been other books, like colleges that change lives, that have said that. But I mean, from our personal experience, I think I could talk to all that’s a hard message for families to hear, process, accept. So do you find that now, in the current environment, it’s a more easily digested message.

Jeff Selingo 8:42
Unfortunately, no, no, no, right, right. And it’s why you asked about, you know, how well the last book did. It’s a concern I have about this book, and that is, it’s a it’s a message that, you know, many parents and families don’t want to hear, and I’m not it’s a message that I’m not encouraging or discouraging, I should say students from applying to these highly selective schools. That’s not the message of this book. This message is not discouraging them, but it is encouraging them, that at the same time that they apply to those highly selective schools, that they widen their lens on these other schools. And why is that? Because the outcomes, because, you know, I really kind of attack the myths about a lot of these schools that are deeper in the rankings, that they will find their sense of belonging and purpose, that they will find mentors, that the outcomes, by the way, are not that as different as they think they are, between the highly selective and the less selective institutions. And so it’s really about widening that lens on these broader set of schools, largely because, as we, as I address in the first chapter, it’s becoming almost impossible to get into those highly selective schools. But second, that you might find something that is kind of surprising at these other schools that are deeper in the rankings, and I think what’s the reason why. My parents shut that conversation down is, one is they do believe in these myths, that these highly selective colleges are like a key to future successes, and that they’ll never have those future successes if they don’t go there. But another reason why they shut this conversation down, and why I think this book will be hopefully useful to them, is that they don’t really know how to make sense of the vast world of higher ed it’s easy to know what the top 25 or top 50 colleges or universities are, but once you start to say, well, look deeper in the rankings, they’ll say, Well, what am I looking for? And my god, there are hundreds and hundreds of institutions deeper in the rankings. So where do I start? What do I look for? What am I what you know, what is? What is it really mean to have a hidden gem? And that’s what I hope to do in the second half of this book, is to give them some clues, some guide rails, some points of reference to find those places. Yeah, and

Lisa Bleich 10:59
I think that’s such great advice, because we’ve seen it play out where students who didn’t get into what they wanted as their dream school right in the beginning, and then or they got deferred from it, and then they have all these other options. And then once they start to dig in and see all of the other options available to them, oftentimes they don’t, and if they got into the school that they originally applied to, like after they were deferred, they oftentimes choose another school because they have more opportunity to really dig deeper into what’s available to them, and they’re surprised that they hadn’t even considered that school as a possibility until they didn’t have the other one as an option. So I think that’s really amazing advice that we all try to share, and we hope that parents and families will listen to it.

Abby Power 11:46
Yeah, personally, for me, I just had two sons recently out of school, and I just can’t agree more with it’s not where you go, it’s what you do with it. You know, the mentors you make, the connections you make, the opportunities you take. And one thing that I like to tell our clients is, if you want to go to a good fit academic a school that’s a good fit academically, so you can take advantage of all of the other resources and things around you, you know, you don’t want to struggle in school. You want to set yourself up for success. I totally, I just agree with that completely as a parent also, do you have any tips for helping us to convince our families that they should dig deeper into the universe of colleges?

Jeff Selingo 12:33
Well, I think first of all is having an honest conversation that it’s very difficult to get into these highly selected places, right? And so everybody I know thinks that they’re going to be different and that they’re going to get over that, over that hurdle, but they’re not, for the most part. And I think having a serious, honest conversation about that, I know that only goes so far. In fact, doesn’t go very far at all, because everybody thinks that their kid is different. I think then we start with the outcomes, because most parents are most interested in the outcomes right now. And so in chapter two, I talk a lot about how for the vast majority of students, you know the average, we tend to really look at the outliers rather than the averages. For most students and most and for the averages for most students are going to be very closely connected, whether they’re at Harvard or UCLA or Penn State or Ohio State or Clemson or Furman or Denison, right? It’s, it’s not as vast of a difference between the outcomes in those places. And so I think that helps a little bit right? Then I really want to focus then on the experience that they’re going to have as an undergraduate. You know, there’s there’s William, who’s the student I interviewed that in the introduction, who got into Columbia ends up transferring because his experience wasn’t what he expected. He couldn’t get into the classes he wanted to. There was competition to get into clubs. The professor didn’t want to do undergraduate research with him because he was an undergraduate and not a graduate student. And I think again, in our focus on selectivity and on brand and on rankings, we don’t really look under the hood enough into what the actual undergraduate experience is going to be. And as you saw through other people in the book who end up going to a less selective undergraduate college, but by by the way, then cash in that chip on many levels, including the money that they save and go to a more selective graduate campus, where, by the way, they can take advantage of different resources that are available to them that wouldn’t be available to them at undergrads. And I think with the exception of the highly selective liberal arts colleges, most highly selective universities are there for one reason, and that’s for graduate students, not for undergrads. I don’t think the undergraduate you know, and we tend to think, Oh, well, these graduate students. And these professors are just so great, and they’re going to be around all these undergraduates at the end of the day. They don’t care as much about the undergrads. And, you know, they may say they do, but they don’t. And I think we tend to forget that. And so we think, Well, we’re in the same sea, right? We’re swimming along the same stream with them, and we’re suddenly going to get impacted by that. I actually think the impact is going to be greater at these places that actually focus on teaching, focus on mentorship, focus on finding your place as an undergraduate.

Stefanie Forman 15:29
Yes, that’s such great advice. And you know, I think experience everything is grounded in that word. So, yeah, I love that. So you touched on this a little bit earlier, talking about trends and value. If you could expand upon value and what that means in today’s world when applying to colleges, and how much do you think value will continue to drive college decisions?

Jeff Selingo 15:57
I think the quiet luxury movement has entered higher ed and the quiet luxury movement in fashion and other things is that we don’t, we kind of have good clothing, but we don’t advertise kind of the brand name the way we used to. That’s, you know, this idea that there is good quality found with the lesser brand names, for example, in a lot of industries. And I think the same now is true in higher ed, where, with the exception of very few brands, and I think that number is getting smaller every year, where you may only be focused on maybe the IVs, maybe the ivy pluses and things like that, maybe a couple of the top liberal arts colleges. What I saw in my research is that particularly just generation of parents, meaning Gen X parents like me, unlike their parents, the baby boomers, who are willing to kind of pay almost anything for college, because to them, it was it was worth it. You’re now starting to see among Gen X parents, and we see this in a number of surveys that I cite in the book that they want to do other things with their money. So it’s not that they, you know, there’s a whole bunch of people who can’t afford to pay full price, but there are people who can, and increasingly, they’re saying, I don’t want to pay full price, even if I can for an undergraduate experience, when I know my kids probably are going to go to graduate school, probably are going to need help during their 20s, I might as well save that money now. I might as well go chase merit, because at most of these schools, the product that I’m paying full price for is just not that much different. It’s not really worth that much more than half price off of something that is maybe a little bit lower in the in the rating, in the rankings. And so that’s the big change between the baby boomers parents and how they approached college for their kids and Gen X parents and how they’re approaching college for their kids is that they’re willing to kind of skip over, as I say in the book, these brands that 1015, years ago, parents would have gladly paid full price for. Yeah, and

Lisa Bleich 17:59
it’s interesting about when you talked about the skip over schools, there was a really interesting chart that you had on page 65 where you showed that in those skip over schools, that was actually the number of schools that had the least success getting employed at Fortune 500 companies. And so was that surprising to you when you saw that?

Jeff Selingo 18:22
Yeah, so there’s a correlate. You’re making a correlation between those two charts that I didn’t necessarily make, and it’s an interesting discovery on your part. And that meant that there is, you know, highly selective colleges. They’re they’re represented well in the in the Fortune 50. And less selective colleges are represented well in the Fortune 50, but that kind of middle group, you know, kind of just below the top, is not as well represented. And those are also the places that have lost their their full pay students significantly over the last 10 or 15 years. And again, I think that’s a choice that parents are making. Yes, I’ll pay at a private I’ll pay 7080, all in for this highly selective place where I can get a job and a really good job, but otherwise, I’m going for half off or more at a less selective place that maybe I get a job. Maybe I don’t, but I at least am saving some money on the way that I can put into, you know, helping my kid launch, maybe giving them an experience that they wouldn’t otherwise have. And that, to me, is some of the biggest changes happening right now in higher ed.

Abby Power 19:36
Along with that conclusion or observation, what were some other things that you found to be surprising that you learned or saw while writing the book?

Jeff Selingo 19:50
So I think the biggest one was around student engagement. So I was able to persuade the National Survey of Student Engagement. Which surveys nine surveys students at 900 900 colleges participate in what’s called Nessie, the National Survey of Student Engagement comes out from Indiana University. He’s been around for 20 plus years. The thing I always hated about DESE is that they don’t release the scores these engagement scores of colleges and universities. They really send them to the colleges, but then it’s up to the colleges to decide if they want to publicize these scores, and Nessie survey students on a variety of things like, how much do you study and do you talk to peers and how much you interact with professors? Have you interned 18 different measures of engagement? And I was able to persuade nesi, well, what if I send you a list of 1200 colleges separated by selectivity, five buckets of selectivity, so the most selective colleges all the way down to the least selective colleges. You match them up to the 900 colleges that participate in your survey. And by the way, students who participate in the survey at these colleges, they’re either freshmen or seniors. So they survey students their first year, they survey students their fourth year to see how things change. And the biggest takeaway from this was that at all levels of selectivity, only four or five percentage points where they were the difference between the most selective colleges and the least elective colleges in first of all, in terms of satisfaction on so many measures, including, by the way, faculty student interaction, you actually had higher scores among the less selective institutions than you had about the more selective goes back to what I was talking about with the kid in my lead who really didn’t get to talk to his professors. You’re going to do that at less selective institutions. And so if we tend to think that student engagement is the most important thing that happens during the undergraduate experience that we’re sending our kids to these highly selective brand name colleges because we want them to be totally engaged in what’s around them. Actually, you’re better off sending them to a less selective college, because there’s going to be more engagement there. Now, why is that my theory, and there’s this theme throughout the book is that there’s this competition that’s kind of never ending at these more selective colleges. And I heard this so often from the students I talked with that I don’t need to be smart, I don’t need to show that I’m smart. I don’t need to show I don’t need to repeat what I did in high school to get into a highly selective college again in college, to get that top job, I just want to learn. I want to be around people who enjoy themselves. I want to join some clubs. I want to take classes that I’m interested in but don’t really care about the grade, like all these things you could do at less selective colleges. And oh, by the way, get to know your professors at the same time, there was a thing the other day, the 2026, Olympics are coming, and one of the top figure skaters is not going to compete, and he, you know, because he wants to go to medical school instead. And he said, I’ve already achieved what I wanted to achieve. I don’t need to keep achieving. And that’s what I heard so often from these students who had decided, You know what, it’s not worth it to me, or, you know, I did try at these highly selective colleges that I decided to transfer, and I think that’s what really kind of kept coming back to me as I was reporting this book, is that if we know why we’re doing this, if we know why we’re going into this process, if we’re honest with ourselves about what we want out of the college experience more than just that name brand I think you’re going to make better choices in the end.

Abby Power 23:29
Yeah. Could not agree more.

Lisa Bleich 23:31
Yeah, 100% I think that’s so true. You know, I actually went to one of those skip over colleges that you had, but I don’t know that it was a skip over back then I went, probably not at the time, I went to Brandeis undergraduate, but it was undergraduate, but it was, it was a small, you know, school, and I actually was able to, I didn’t love the social life, but from a faculty engagement and from the opportunities that I had, I had, you know, I could do whatever I wanted to do, there was no, there were no limitations in my way. And then I did end up going to a name brand a graduate school. So yeah,

Jeff Selingo 24:00
and I think it’s important to clarify for those who are listening, who haven’t read the book yet, that skip over schools doesn’t mean that people are skipping them because they’re academics. Yeah, no. Just means that they’re right. It means that they’re not willing to pay full price and that they want to chase merit. And there’s nothing wrong with chasing merit.

Lisa Bleich 24:20
No, absolutely not. And it’s interesting because some of the schools during, you know, pre covid, like I’m thinking of, like Franklin and Marshall, and even maybe Connecticut College there, they weren’t offering a lot of merit money. In fact, Franklin and Marshall wasn’t offering any merit money at all, and then they realized they couldn’t compete unless they offered merit money. So we’re definitely seeing that. And even with, you know, some of the the public universities as well for out of state students. But one of the things that was really interesting that you talked about was the difference between foundational skills and technical skills, and that these are, this is what students need, both for the current job market. And we’ve definitely seen this with our clients and our kids, our own kids, like, for example, my youngest, i. Graduated with a degree in Film and Media Studies and a minor in marketing. So you would say, okay, what are you going to do with that particular degree? She graduated in 21 so she didn’t get to do her internship because of covid, so she just kind of took a job and was kind of one of those post covid kids that was just not hadn’t quite figured out what she wanted to do. So I had recommended that she go back and get one of these, you know, micro credentials, and get a certificate in data analytics, because she found that some of the jobs she thought she wanted needed that, and then she ended up getting a job and using that, and now she’s she’s good, she’s in a good place. But it was just interesting, because it was that, almost that data analytics that she didn’t necessarily feel like she got in school, that she was able to get outside of school, but it was the critical thinking and the strategic, strategic writing, the way to communicate. Well, those are all the things that are helping her do really well in her job. So can you kind of describe the difference in what you’re seeing colleges are doing to try to bring those two together? Yeah.

Jeff Selingo 26:00
So I think it’s really critical these foundational skills are critical thinking, communication problem solving that are really transferable to any career. Specialized skills are really domain specific, coding or data analytics that are really critical to particular jobs. And both are essential, right? This is the problem, I think, with the liberal arts right now, is that you get those foundational skills, but then you don’t get very specific skills that help you specialize, skills that help you get a job. Example, being, you know, a history major who knows how to do either data analytics or data visualization really puts them over the top in terms of getting those jobs. And the problem right now is that many schools don’t tell students they need to do this. Don’t encourage it. Really, the faculty don’t know it, or they don’t want to encourage it, because they see kind of job training as like a dirty word, and they don’t want to talk about it. So I really think it’s up to you to go to colleges that are going to give you that experience are going to encourage it. You know, Denison University, which is one of the schools I highlight in the book, is very focused on Career Services from day one, very focused on getting these very specialized skills, whether on campus or taking courses during winter break or getting hands on experiences like that’s what you’re looking for those places that will either encourage you give you a pathway to get those that skill set, maybe even help you get those micro credentials that I talked about. But the problem is most parents don’t know to ask those questions, and I think this is why so many students now are going into specialized careers. They want to be a nurse, or they want to be an engineer or they want to be a computer coder, because they’re very specific, they know well that that’s a job that’s going to lead or that’s a major that’s going to lead to a job, by the way, I’m questioning that giving AI actually, right? I actually think that having this broad set of foundational skills is great, as long as you pair it with something that gives you a very specialized skill in a major I

Lisa Bleich 28:02
think that’s such that’s such great advice. And it’s so true that I know there are certain families who are like you the end. The goal of this is to have a job by the end, and then it’s very it’s a very different thinking than when we were going to school, which was that you want to get this broad based education, learn how to learn, learn how to think, and then that will take you where you need to go in your career. So it is, it is a very good motivation. And we actually, we interviewed on episode 29 we talk about hacking College. When we interviewed, talking about exactly how you can do that, and you gave some examples as well of how have you seen kids pair those things together, the specialized and the foundational skills successfully.

Jeff Selingo 28:44
So I think that it mostly comes from students understanding what are the job requirements for jobs that they may want to have. So I always encourage students, once they kind of figure out maybe a major or maybe they’ve interned, maybe they’ve job shadowed in some way, to start to look at job ads, to see what employers are looking for, and look at the skill set that they’re looking that they’re advertising. And if you don’t have some of those skills, that’s how you can start to pair it, no matter what major you have. You know, I talked in the book about marketing. You know, having data analytics with marketing is incredibly important, but you wouldn’t know that unless you looked at the job ad, right?

Lisa Bleich 29:26
No such great advice. And I loved how you in the book, you talked about going on to LinkedIn and looking at the company or the colleges where students went, and then seeing where they’re working, and then seeing what their what their skills were. That was really great advice.

Stefanie Forman 29:40
So I’ve been spending a lot of time in your appendix, so I just wanted to bring that up the new dream school’s a selected list. And to quote you, you say that finding your dream school isn’t about fixating on a single name or a universally understood brand like the Ivy League. It’s about choosing a place where you can thrive Learn. And become the person you’re meant to be. And you say, you go on to say, to help us you being the reader in that endeavor that you’ve compiled the following list of colleges that might not but perhaps should be on our radar. I would love if you could walk us through how you came up with your ratings for the schools in the appendix and the three categories of your schools, the three categories being hidden values, breakout, regionals and large leaders.

Jeff Selingo 30:24
This list makes me very nervous, for the main reason why I don’t love rankings, and so it’s, I want to be very clear, it’s not a ranking, it’s not a rating, it’s not a definitive list. I find I talked earlier when I encourage people to look deeper in the rankings for schools that are further, quote, unquote down the list, they always say, Well, what am I looking for? This is all confusing to me. Jeff, you have done this every day for 25 years. Of course. You know these places. Just give us some examples. And that’s really what the list is about the list is to give us some examples that put the tools that I outlined in the book to work to showcase some of these schools. And so we looked at a universe of four year schools. So we had to start somewhere. So we looked only at four year schools now two year schools, although I talk about the benefits of two year schools in the book, we looked at institutions with over 1000 students, largely because, given the financial realities of higher ed, in talking to a number of people, they think that colleges under 1000 students, if they don’t have a large endowments or large a lot of cash on hand, are going to be in trouble. And I kind of wanted to stay away from those schools as a result. So that gave us a universe of still a couple 100 Schools as a result. And then what we looked at was, are they accessible? So I took out any school that had under 20% acceptance rate, because basically, go read how, who gets it? Why? If you really want to know one of those schools, I wanted schools that were more accessible. And in fact, most of the schools on the schools on the list have acceptance rates 30 and above. Most of them 40, 5060, and above. Then we looked at financial sustainability overall, even beyond the 1000 number, to make sure that these were not schools that were in real trouble. And we looked at a number of factors on that we looked at their outcomes. How much are you going to pay to go to this place and how much are you going to make in return? So essentially, the saw a saw what we’re calling a earnings to net price ratio. But those numbers can be manipulated, not manipulated, but can be misleading. If you go to a school that has a high number of STEM majors, for example, and everyone goes into engineering and computer science, you’re going to have great outcomes. So we also looked at data about the wide variety of jobs that students are getting from schools. We looked at graduation rates and earnings based on the students they’re bringing in. It’s much easy. It’s very easy to be Harvard and bring in the best students and really not ruin them for four years, it’s much harder for schools to take somebody who is from the lowest income, no social capital, and turn them into something that’s great. And those are schools that I wanted to highlight. So those are all the different measures that we looked at. We used a bunch of different data sets and mash them together to come up with this list, and then we weighted it so we had a mix of publics and privates, also geographic diversity as well. To end up with this list of 75 but then, to be honest with you, as I was looking at the list of 75 I felt that a little further, you know, separating them out was was necessary. And why is that? Because some of them are regional publics, for example. So if you know Montclair State University, New Jersey is one of them. If you don’t live in New Jersey, you’re probably not going to go to Montclair, and that’s fine, but if you’re in New Jersey, you should definitely look at it. So we wanted to separate these schools out into, as you said, hidden values. These tend to be smaller privates that we tend to kind of forget about, because they’re not in the news every day. As I said, these breakout regionals. These are mostly publics, but some privates that are really well known within their state, but increasingly are known within their region, and then really the large leaders. These are places that compete in some ways with the, you know, the flagship universities. So an NC State, for example, not Carolina, Michigan State, not the University of Michigan, places like that that, I think that people tend to not recognize and should, and that’s what we ended up doing with these three buckets. There’s no differences between the buckets. Really. What I was trying to do was filter them in some way, so that if I’m a student in California, I could start to see what might be possible for somebody in my backyard.

Lisa Bleich 34:47
Really helpful. Well, it’ll be interesting to see if this becomes the new list, the new the Jeff salingo list. Some people will start quoting it. What do you think are some you know, we always like to end. Myths and Truths About finding the right college. So what did you so through this, what have you found to be some Myths and Truths About

Jeff Selingo 35:06
It? Well, rankings and selectivity might be are seen as a proxy for quality among parents, and they’re not. They just don’t equal that, right? So I think that’s one thing. Second is that you could get a really good deal at less selective institutions. I think that’s that’s a truth that I think that most parents don’t quite understand, especially if they’re new to the process. I’m amazed that, you know, in the last book, I had the buyers and sellers list when I explain kind of the buyers, which are the vast majority of institutions which are using merit aid to try to attract students. I get this blank look from parents because they think financial aid equals financial need. They don’t really realize how colleges and universities are using financial aid as an enrollment tool, as a discounting tool to get their students, and so as a result, they kind of discount those colleges right off the bat, because they’re not kind of in their wheelhouse academically, or they don’t think they have the best brand name. And I keep telling them, don’t take those off the list, because you actually might get a really good deal from them. Many of them, by the way, end up in the dream school list at the end of the book, and they have great outcomes to boot. And I think that’s the other thing, is that they really don’t look at the outcomes data, especially in these very popular majors. So you may remember in reading the book that there’s a student who was like interested in Holy Cross ends up going to Leo on Maryland because the father, who’s a teacher, realizes that her his daughter, who wanted a major in math, is actually going to have pretty similar outcomes among a bunch of different places, whether she goes to Johns Hopkins or Lowell of Maryland, two very different places, selectivity wise, to very different places in terms of the rankings. But you know what their outcomes in terms of salaries, pretty similar when you look at the data, and that’s the thing that I don’t think parents look at. Now, there may be more differences if you’re an English major at one compared to the other, but if you’re going to major in what the vast majority of students major in, business stem, you know, a pre professional programs, the outcomes are remarkably unshockingly In some ways, similar between a lot of different colleges.

Lisa Bleich 37:29
I think it’s also important to note that I don’t know if you took into account graduate school because you met you made an allusion to it earlier, but if you’re going on to medical school or law school or business school or any any graduate school, it really matters more about what you do there and how well you do and how engaged you are and how prepared you are for that graduate school, because that’s what they care about. They don’t really care necessarily where you went to school. They just care about how well you’ve

Jeff Selingo 37:55
done. Yeah, and there’s a student in chapter two who went to such a small college that I don’t even name it in the book, because she could be then easily identifiable, but she ends up going to Harvard Law School. And not only goes to Harvard Law School, but ends up on the Harvard Law Review from this very tiny liberal arts college that is not even in the top 100 and she talks about her experience at that small liberal arts college, where she got to know the President, she spent a lot of time with professors, and by the way, professors who really cared about seeing her succeed, including getting into Harvard Law School. If you go to a top 10 school and you want to go to Harvard Law School, first of all, there’s a million people and no professor or that school’s not really going to help you, because it’s not really a feather in their cap if you end up going to Harvard Law School, but if you come from these small, little colleges where maybe every other year, or maybe every five years, they send somebody to a place like Harvard Law School, holy cow. Are they going to put a lot of time, effort and even money behind you to make sure you succeed?

Lisa Bleich 38:57
Yeah, so true. I had a student that I worked with for medical school. And he went to Baruch College, undergraduate from New York City, and he was there for two years, and then he transferred to Hopkins, Johns Hopkins, and did did very well at Johns Hopkins, really smart young man. But then he decided for medical school, he’s like, You know what? I’ve done the prestige, and I didn’t really like it so much. I mean, I got a good education at Hopkins, but I don’t want that in medical school. I medical school. I just want to be a doctor. So just get me into any medical school. And he was like, very happy to go to, you know, any American medical school. So it was just a different mentality when he was looking at that for graduate school. So it’s interesting. All right, any last pearls of wisdom you’d like to share with our listeners?

Jeff Selingo 39:39
I just want people to at least give this idea of a chance. I’m trying to give parents permission because I think there’s a permission structure that’s needed here. You asked about, how do we persuade parents to look deeper in the rankings, to widen their lens on the college search? And I think a lot of it is and as you mentioned, I did a survey of more than. 3000 parents, and when you ask them about prestige and who prestige was important to, it wasn’t that important to them, although sometimes, I don’t always believe that maybe it was a little bit more important to their kids, but you know, who was really important to their neighbors, their friends, people in their community, and so that’s really it’s all about that signal that it sends to other parents. Hey, we must be a good parent. We send in our kid to, you know, fill in the blank of Lee College. And so I feel like when I start to talk to parents about this message, especially in these like cities where there’s this panicking class of parents who are so worried about their kids, I really feel like I need to give them permission to say, You know what, it’s okay. It’s okay that my kid is not going to those highly elite colleges. By the way, I’m going to have a lot more money to spend on them. You know, years later, they might end up with a great mentor. They might end up with lifelong friends. They might really discover their true passion because they’re not so pressured to find the right thing. It may actually bring joy back to their this process. I know that’s a hard argument to make with a lot of the families and parents and students that we come in contact with, but I just want them to think for a moment about it again. Doesn’t mean they can’t apply. It doesn’t mean that they don’t apply to these high, high index schools, but hey, just throw an application to some of these others. You might be surprised.

Lisa Bleich 41:29
Well, maybe now that will be the new bragging rights is how little did I pay for college and how much merit did my kid get? You know, I hope so. Yeah, so, I hope so. Well, thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure, and we really enjoyed your book. We will definitely thank you, CBMers, for tuning in. Thank you, Jeff, for this amazing conversation. We will have links to purchase your new book, Dream School, which came out on September 9. You can also subscribe to Jeff’s amazing newsletter and listen to his podcast. To catch more episodes of College Bound Mentor. Make sure to follow, review, or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and tell a fellow parent or student about this podcast. To learn more, visit CollegeBoundMentor.com Until next time, you got this!

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