Peeling Back the Curtain on Highly-Selective College Admissions with Dr. Andrew Hoffman – College Bound Mentor Podcast #33

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This is Episode #33 and you’ll hear us talk highly-selective college admissions with Dr. Andrew Hoffman. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and your other favorite podcast spots – follow and leave a 5-star review if you’re enjoying the show!

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  • Show Notes
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College Bound Mentor Podcast Episode #33: Peeling Back the Curtain on Highly-Selective College Admissions with Dr. Andrew Hoffman

There are some tough, tough colleges to get into these days. Why is that the case? And how can your student crack the code? Dr. Andrew Hoffman is a College Admissions Strategist who’s worked in college admissions since college, including being the Director of Admissions for Swarthmore College and the Assistant Director of Undergraduate Admissions at Vanderbilt University. He leads his consulting firm with parents in mind – getting you ready for college admissions. Hear what students should know when approaching the college application process, how students can excel at college fairs, how the college admissions process works from the school’s side of things, how important college essays are, and what makes a student stand out with their application. This episode covers everything from selective colleges to college fairs. Here’s a small sample of what you will hear in this episode:

  • What do parents know & think they know about highly-selective college admissions?
  • Should parents go to college fairs?
  • Do College Admissions Directors remember names & faces from college fairs?
  • What does Andrew miss & not miss about working in college admissions?
  • Is anything inequitable about the college admissions process?

Connect with Andrew at AskDrHoffman.com and use code: COLLEGEBOUNDMENTOR for 50% off the Parent’s Ultimate College Admissions Course, and Subscribe to College Bound Mentor on your favorite podcast platform and learn more at CollegeBoundMentor.com

Parents coming from lower income backgrounds can also request a course fee waiver (for families applying for need-based aid AND either qualify for free or reduced lunch at school or an ACT/SAT fee waiver): https://www.askdrhoffman.com/parent-fee-waiver-form

Parents can also view the entire course listing here for all of the topics Andrew covers in the course.

He also offers free newsletters each month for students and parents: https://www.askdrhoffman.com/interest-form

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

Show Notes

  • Peeling Back the Curtain on Highly-Selective College Admissions with Dr. Andrew Hoffman
    • [0:19] Welcome to College Bound Mentor
    • [0:26] Lisa Bleich, Abby Power, Stefanie Forman
    • [0:30] Connect with Andrew at AskDrHoffman.com and use code: COLLEGEBOUNDMENTOR for 50% off the Parent’s Ultimate College Admissions Course, and Subscribe to College Bound Mentor on your favorite podcast platform and learn more at CollegeBoundMentor.com
    • [0:45] Parents coming from lower income backgrounds can also request a course fee waiver (for families applying for need-based aid AND either qualify for free or reduced lunch at school or an ACT/SAT fee waiver): https://www.askdrhoffman.com/parent-fee-waiver-form
    • [1:21] Parents can also view the entire course listing here for all of the topics Andrew covers in the course
    • [1:31] He also offers free newsletters each month for students and parents: https://www.askdrhoffman.com/interest-form
    • [2:13] What is Andrew‘s background?
    • [10:15] What do parents know & think they know about highly-selective college admissions?
    • [15:27] What does Andrew miss & not miss about working in college admissions?
    • [19:31] What’s inequitable about the college admissions process?
    • [25:01] How can students approach college fairs more effectively?
    • [29:32] Should parents go to college fairs?
    • [31:02] Do College Admissions Directors remember names & faces from college fairs?
    • [32:55] What do students need to know when approaching the college application process?
    • [39:50] How does the college admissions process work from the school’s side?
    • [52:33] How important are college essays?
    • [56:00] What does it take to stand out with your college application?
    • [1:03:29] Connect with Andrew at AskDrHoffman.com and use code: COLLEGEBOUNDMENTOR for 50% off the Parent’s Ultimate College Admissions Course, and Subscribe to College Bound Mentor on your favorite podcast platform and learn more at CollegeBoundMentor.com
    • [1:04:40] Parents coming from lower income backgrounds can also request a course fee waiver (for families applying for need-based aid AND either qualify for free or reduced lunch at school or an ACT/SAT fee waiver): https://www.askdrhoffman.com/parent-fee-waiver-form
    • [1:04:49] Parents can also view the entire course listing here for all of the topics Andrew covers in the course
    • [1:04:59] He also offers free newsletters each month for students and parents: https://www.askdrhoffman.com/interest-form
    • Theme Song: “Happy Optimistic Americana” by BDKSonic

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.

Dr. Andrew Hoffman 0:06
Research the colleges before you get to the fair.

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. We’re so excited on today’s episode to have Dr. Andrew Hoffman to talk to us about pulling back the curtain on selective college admissions. Dr. Hoffman has been in college admissions since well, college, after graduating with a master’s in higher education, he started working in admissions at Vanderbilt and became intrigued with the admissions process. For the next 15 years, he rose in the ranks and became Director of Admissions at Swarthmore College, and earned a doctorate from Penn. Throughout his time in higher education, he realized more and more that parents and family members simply don’t have the knowledge they need to help the children with the admissions process. And most people on YouTube and TikTok have never set foot in a selective admissions committee, really. So today, he’s helping families navigate the often complex and never simple college admissions and financial aid process. So welcome. Thank you so much to have you. Yeah. So yeah, as you were talking about a little bit earlier, before we started, you know, we really enjoyed your web series and also your blog and so thank you for sharing all of your knowledge with us. I felt like your last blog was really poignant about the staircase and buying and selling your first home and why those stairs were so meaningful to you know, it’s funny my dad, I’m not a first generation college student at all, but my dad was a first generation in his family to go to school. And he would often talk about, he went to USC, he was a scholarship kid. And he would often talk about, like, when he was rushing for fraternity. They would do a home visit back then, and they visited his home, and they’re like, oh, no, this is not the fraternity for you. You need to go to the poor fraternity. Yeah, yeah. They’re like, No, this isn’t for you. So very interesting. I know that story, yeah. Well, there’s some new things every day you brought it out. So you were the first in your family to go to college. So tell us a little bit about your background, how it’s informed your admissions work. The

Dr. Andrew Hoffman 2:21
foundation of my background is that I’m first generation to college. I was low income in this admissions process, and I grew up just not understanding how this all works. I don’t know where I mean, I think obviously it was from school. I think where I had sort of this inclination to, like, think about college and think about how that could transform my life. But I had no road map. I had no one kind of cheering me on, like, my teacher’s a bit, but, like, you’re not really talking about, you know, going to college. When you’re in elementary school, either at school, right? You’re just like, Oh, I’m going to do as best as I can in school. And then, you know, middle school comes high school comes. You get more involved, and then you start thinking more about it. But from a really young age, 567, years old, for some reason I was like, I’m going to go to college. And you know, I was getting straight A’s in elementary school, so it’s like, oh, I’m really smart or whatever. And you just don’t really realize, like, the things that go into it. But I remember telling my grandparents, like on our front porch, like, I’m going to go to college. And they’re like, that’s great, you know, good luck, and you’ll need a scholarship, and, and, and it was a little discouraging. It was they weren’t trying to be discouraging. They just had no idea my grandfather worked for General Motors on the line, and my grandma was a stay at home mom and, and they didn’t, I don’t, they probably didn’t even know one person that went to college. And so growing up with some of those messages, I think that was a little challenging. And then I, you know, got to high school, like, late 90s, early 2000s Yes, we had the internet, but like, it just wasn’t the same thing back then. And I didn’t know really where to, like, ask questions. I was from kind of a working class High School in Janesville, Wisconsin, and and I had peers that like, definitely had more money, but not a lot more social capital around this. Not a lot of friends, parents went to college, and I went to my school counselor at the time, you know, and I said, I’m really interested in going to college, and especially out of state. I didn’t want to stay in Wisconsin. I wanted to go out of state, but I had no idea how that worked. And she was basically like, I have no idea how that works,

Lisa Bleich 4:26
yeah. Like, you can inform me, right?

Dr. Andrew Hoffman 4:29
Yeah. She’s like, there’s a big book of colleges and the Counseling Center, like, have at it. And I was like, Okay. And I just didn’t, you know, like, and that’s not even getting to, like, financial aid and scholarships and like, all the things that I really, really needed. And so I had, you know, the most, most uneven, not strategic search. I mean, at some point I was going to go to, like, a church of Christ, Lipscomb University in Nashville, because, like, her cousin was in Nashville, or, you know, something like that. And. I was also in a club called Key Club. So it was all about community service, and there is a multi level leadership structure within Key Club. And I got to know when I was a freshman in high school, and I went to the International Convention first time on a plane, went to Disney World. I was like, Ooh, I get to go to Disney World. And then didn’t realize the impact that that convention would have on me 1000s of high school students across the country. You’re sitting there during the awards ceremony with this international student board and all of these scholarship winners, and you see people walking across the stage getting these great scholarships. And I was like, Okay, I’m going to get one of those. That’s right. Grandma told me, my mom told me I needed to, that’s right, that’s right, I had, I had to get a scholarship. And, you know, Wisconsin back then wasn’t great at needy based financially for low income students, like there was, like, one scholarship for, like, the valedictorian of the class back then. And you know, I didn’t really understand loan limits. I didn’t understand how any of it worked. And I worked my tail off in high school and became governor of the Wisconsin Upper Michigan Key Club district, and sat on the district board and did all of these things across high school just for this scholarship at Arizona State like it, I didn’t know anything about Arizona State. I had never been to Arizona. I just knew it was a big school. It was in the South. It was a lot bigger than my hometown, and I got one of the four out of state scholarships, and went on to ASU, and had a fantastic time, and became one of the student body presidents, and worked for the president’s office and just did a ton of stuff, became a tour guide, did kind of the typical admissions work, and then I went on to grad school, got a master’s degree, like you said at the beginning in higher ed, I thought it was going to law go to law school. I had no idea, right? Like, what a college educated person really does with their life. I was like, lawyer, teacher, doctor. I even I joke. I tell the story quite often, but I was in AP calculus in high school, and a friend of mine said she wanted to become an engineer, and I’m in AP Calculus. Like, I probably should know what calculus prepares students for. And I was thinking. I was like, Oh, that’s great thinking she wanted to be a train conductor. I was like, choo choo. Like, that’s great for you. But that was not, not what I’m doing. I was like, Wow, what a what a choice in life. And then I realized, like, what engineers actually do? And I was like, oh, that’s actually a pretty good profession for you. So I wanted to go to law school. And then I talked to my mentor, and I was like, you know, can you write my letter of recommendation for law school? And she’s like, Absolutely, but why do you want to go to law school? And I did not think of this through, and I didn’t have a great answer for that question. And she said, I think you probably should just go into higher ed. You’re really involved in activities here, and, like, student governance, and she was the liaison to the Board of Regents, and she’s like, you’re always asking questions or and I was like, Oh, interesting. So I did, and I got a master’s degree and then later a doctorate, and I just fell into admissions, because, quite honestly, it was back in Oh 809, when every college was on the hiring freeze, and I applied to 150 jobs out there, and I got, like, three interviews, and I was like, Oh my gosh, like, I have a master’s degree, and I was really involved in college, and I worked through college, and, like, I had all these experiences, and I’m still not getting any interviews. And so admissions was hiring, you know, because they’re mission critical, and I got a job at Vanderbilt admissions and and then I started realizing, like, what admissions actually does, and I started realizing just the diversity of K 12 education out there. And really thought through like, what students have and what students don’t have based on the zip code they live in and based on what high school they go to. And so I started really thinking about that over 15 years of being in college admissions, which really led me to my little business today. It’s a side gig. It’s not my full time job. My full time job is at matriculate, which is a nonprofit helping high achieving low income students get to college, but my focus with this new role at ask drhoffman.com is really trying to think about who doesn’t have a lot of information in this process. Counselors have professional associations. Sometimes, sometimes they get a master’s degree and they have some coursework. It’s uneven across the counselor landscape, but they at least have some resources. Students have the tiktoks and Reddits and YouTubes and, you know, they not, not that that’s all good information, but at least it’s information, whereas families are kind of lost oftentimes, even if they went to college, they went to college 20 or 30 years ago, which is very different today in the selective admissions world. And so I wanted to think about, how can I offer this information to families that scale without breaking the bank? How do I use my admissions background, being in the room, making those decisions, peeling back the curtain like today’s talk, and do it while having some fun and doing something where I can use creativity and and do these sorts of things. Things where, where I can give information in a really helpful, high quality way, but do it, do it in kind of a creative way? So that’s kind of led me. Led me here,

Lisa Bleich 10:09
yeah, well, that’s awesome. Well, we’re so we’re so glad that that you’re here, right? So Alright, so let’s pull it back a little bit like, what don’t parents know about selective college admissions, because you were at Vanderbilt and then you were at Swarthmore. So Swarthmore, so arguably, two of the most select colleges slightly different in terms of their framework, but in terms of selectivity, similar. So, like, you know, what don’t they know? And then, what do they think they know? That’s really just not true.

Dr. Andrew Hoffman 10:37
Yeah. So, you know, I think that this is natural. This is not to say that parents should know this. We all live in our own towns, our own neighborhoods. We send our students to this to different schools, right? But that’s our world. It is very rare, unless you’re in a profession like college admissions, especially in the admission side, where your job is to walk into some of the most well resourced high schools in America and some of the least resource high schools in America, and sometimes in the same day, you know that that is a really unique perspective, I think, for admission officers to have. And families don’t know this. Parents just they often are thinking about, I mean, they have, might have some idea of like, okay, my students going to compete for these limited number of spots, and they’re going to compete with students all over the country and all over the world. But they don’t really see what that competition actually is. They see their own little Becky or James or jack or what, whoever. And they’re like, Oh, they’re just so wonderful. And of course, they’re wonderful. Of course you’re going to champion your own students, and maybe you can see through your student in the context of the broader class or the school, and you’re like, well, they’re doing things that their peers are not necessarily doing, and that’s fantastic. But what you’re don’t see. What you don’t see is that your student is essentially competing against Kenya’s number one students, right? Like you’re not seeing that, and you’re not realizing that we as admission officers are trying to build an incredibly balanced, diverse class, and we want all of those perspectives to come together, right? And that’s what selective admissions have the privilege of doing. Essentially is saying, Okay, we have 10s of 1000s of applications. We’re assembling a class of 2000 How can we do this in a purposeful way? And some of the best admission officers, or best admission officers, are incredibly thoughtful about that, and some are not as thoughtful, quite honestly about that. I think that’s something that parents just can’t grasp. Quite honestly, you can go to webinars. You can listen to us talk, but until you’re reading 5060, 100 applications a day, over and over and over again for years and years and years, you’re not really realizing that. I think that parents are also thinking one of the myths, or like one of the I wouldn’t even call it a myth, but I think that’s something that parents often think that is not necessarily true, is that you have to send your student to private education, to independent schools because of the better curriculum and more attention, you know, from counselors and teachers and you know, it’s going to open all of these admission doors, etc. Are there grains of truth to that? Sure, right? There are absolutely grains of truth to that. But I will also say that admission officers are looking to have parochial school students and charter school students and public school students, and you can really shine in a run of the middle public school, maybe sometimes even more so than the Independent School. So, you know, I think that if parents are thinking, you know, they’re listening to this, and they’re, you know, have students in the eighth grade or whatever, and they’re kind of thinking about that choice like you don’t have to necessarily pay 10s of 1000s of dollars a year to send your student to private education. It’s fine if you do right, but, but at the same time, that’s not the silver bullet in college admissions. I think a lot of folks think it is.

Lisa Bleich 14:15
Yeah, that’s such a good point. And it’s funny that you were saying about the perspective, because last year for early decision, I had two clients that had applied to Duke. One of them was a double legacy, lovely young woman, and, you know, I thought she should get in no issues, right? And then I had this other young man that I was working with pro bono from the Ukrainian global scholars, who was like the number one, you know, in the country in terms of, like, algorithmic programming, and he’d gone to the Baltic region, like, he was, like, a really top notch student, right? And he was living in a war torn country, right? So when she got deferred, and he got deferred, and I was telling her, like, hey, look, you know, Duke was really hard this year, like, this kid got different, right? Then, then she just laughed, she said. Good, like, if he didn’t get it, I don’t feel so bad, right? Like, to put things in perspective. So,

Dr. Andrew Hoffman 15:06
yeah, perspective is so important in this process and and it’s hard to infuse that into students and families because they they just don’t have it sometimes. And so showcasing those types of things, I think, is really important now

Stefanie Forman 15:19
that you’re on the other side of, you know, this college admissions process, what do you look back on with nostalgia, and then conversely, what do you look back on? And it just like makes you cringe.

Dr. Andrew Hoffman 15:32
Yeah, that’s a good question. So there are aspects that I miss in college admissions. I will say there’s a lot that I don’t quite honestly, I, I, I do think about the platform that I had as a director of admissions at one of the most selective colleges in America, and walking into a room, especially at a school that maybe you’ve never visited before, maybe you’re like, I know there’s talent in this school. I’m going to talk to the school counselor and set this visit up. And then every once in a while, you’d get in and they’re like, oh, we have the entire junior class because we think this is so important. And I was like, Oh, that’s great, you know? Like, I felt really good about that. And I felt like I can impart my wisdom on all of you. Please pay attention to me, right? Like, and sometimes you wouldn’t always get that, but so the the platform, the attention that folks pay to you, I think, and that from a like, Oh, look at me. I know everything, but more so from a I have this platform to use, and so I’m going to try to use it in really appropriate ways. I also really miss, like, getting to know the school counselors and schools and neighborhoods, right? Like, my first year in admissions, I had the state of Louisiana for Vanderbilt, and I just like, dove head first into it. I was like, I’m going to spend this much time in New Orleans and this much time in Baton Rouge. I’m going to go to up to Natchitoches, and I’m going to go across the causeway like, I’m going to do all of it right, and I’m going to do I’m going to do as much as I possibly can, and really get to know these schools and some of the people that I made, the relationships I made in that first year I still have today, like it’s such a small profession and so important, and I still remember those, like early, early lessons of establishing those, those types of relationships. So I love that. I love the travel aspect. I got to represent all of Sub Saharan Africa and Latin America for years and years and years and years and years. So I’ve been to all the Latin American countries across Central and South America. I’ve gone to more than 20 African countries as well. And that is a different world and a really special world in a lot of ways, because they don’t get the kind of attention from us admission officers that obviously domestic students get. And so being able to show up and choose where you want to go, and developing those kinds of relationships, and really seeing those incredibly special students come through the doors of your institution, and they’re winning the national awards, and they’re they’re the ones that faculty come to you and talk about, and that really feels fantastic. It was tough to give up, especially the international territory, when I decided to leave admissions, because I just had such an amazing time. What I don’t miss is just how much hooks and institutional priorities drive the decisions and conversation, especially those and you know, I get that colleges are essentially businesses. They have their bottom lines, they have their boards, they have their own priorities. And so to an extent, I get it, but at the same time, I don’t personally think that students should have a leg up in the admissions process simply because of the family they were born into. I don’t believe in legacies. Personally, I think they should compete for all the other admission spaces, because, quite honestly, they’re incredibly privileged to get those spaces in the first place, and they can compete for those spaces. And I just don’t think that we need to have a separate selection process, especially for those types of connections and affiliations. Doesn’t mean that those students don’t bring value to the table, of course, but, you know, I saw exactly how these classes are built, and there are particular inequitable ways that these classes are built, and so I think that that is something that I just, I really don’t miss, and it was one of the reasons why I left college admissions,

Lisa Bleich 19:20
besides legacy, what else did you see that was inequitable?

Dr. Andrew Hoffman 19:24
There’s, there’s systemic ways, right? Like and so one, there’s a couple of different categories. Recruited athletes. Is another piece of this. You know, again, it’s not that the individual student is not talented and can’t contribute to the volleyball team or whatnot. It is that the system itself, especially on the division three side, the system itself, to prepare students to get in front of coaches, is incredibly expensive, incredibly time consuming. You know, requires a ton from families to drive you to showcases. And register you for clinics and coaches only go to certain schools, and so even to even compete for those spots is almost impossible for lower income students. We did a study when I was at Swarthmore, an internal study, but it was to our board, and they wanted to know like, okay, so if we wanted to increase first generation and low income students at Swarthmore. Can we push the coaches in a particular way? Are there certain things that we can do so that you can maybe become a recruited athlete, but also bring additional perspectives and experiences with you? And we had 1600 students at Swarthmore, and about a quarter of them were recruited athletes or so, and out of hundreds and hundreds of students that particular year, but out of hundreds of students, there was one first generation recruited athlete student on the entire campus, and the campus is about 25% first generation. So it tells you just the systemic issues related to that, right? The other piece that is very systemic is just the inequity in K 12 systems. And you know, like the fact that you are in a zip code, that you are your catchment zone is to this particular public school like that, that has no bearing on your promise, your ability to do work inside the classroom, right and and so the fact that if you said any, probably any state in America, I mean for the most part, maybe not Idaho or Wyoming or something, but if you said any state in America, what are the well known high schools in that state for 15 years, I can probably name a lot of independent schools in that state or in that city, and there’s a problem with that, and it’s because those schools are paid much more attention from selective admission officers than sort of run of the mill, even more highly resourced public schools. But it’s it’s just this inequitable system that I wish we could level the playing field a bit more,

Lisa Bleich 22:02
right? And you and Swarthmore did a really good job of doing that while you were under your tenure. I mean, there were a lot of clients, and it was a lot, that’s right. See, it was intentional in the way you approached

Dr. Andrew Hoffman 22:11
it. It was very intentional and and, you know, I will say so many wonderful things always about Swarthmore, because they allowed me that platform. They said, here’s the goal, we want more first gen and low income students on this campus, and this is your portfolio. And I was able to roll up my sleeves and actually do that, and we increase the number of first generation students at Swarthmore by 99% over over my tenure this. Yeah, thank you. At the same time, there was a lot of pushback in the legacy piece. There’s a lot of pushback in some of these other pieces. And, you know, from their perspective, I think they thought, well, we need institutional dollars. Even with billions of dollars in the endowment, we still need institutional dollars. We can’t, you know, just say we’re not going to have these sort of preferences. I didn’t think that that was true, and I think I tried to prove that that was not true, and that we could do this in maybe a different way. But I just felt, if I can’t do the work that I believe in at a place like Swarthmore, I don’t know if there’s an institution out there, quite honestly, because, you know, to your point, like Vanderbilt and Swarthmore, right? Those are my two institutions in my background, exact same admit rate. Back in 2015 when I left Vanderbilt for Swarthmore, naively, I thought, well, they’re the same admit rate. It has to be basically the same process like and I can’t tell you, while the process is similar, I can’t tell you how different those two institutions really were behind the scenes. And I was like, wow, like attracting completely different students doing the work in really different ways. You’re still building the class, you’re still doing the review process, you’re still still doing highly selective admissions work, but you’re just doing it with different value systems in front of you. And so, and I had a really fantastic time at both those institutions, but they were very, very different.

Stefanie Forman 24:06
Well, I mean, yeah, again, just to reiterate the fact that you were able to do that at, you know, 1600 people like that’s, that’s amazing. And I also this is a whole other podcast, but I would love to hear more about your Latin America and Africa experience, but, but I digress, because, wow, what you’ve learned there. So another thing we discussed when we were preparing for this podcast, we really love the humor that you bring to your videos, and I think we all need to be able to laugh at ourselves a little bit more during this process, not as easy as you know, one would think, as you can imagine, we really like the one about what not to do when going to a college fair. I imagine you spent so many days, you know, with your little wheelie bag, or maybe your heavy backpack, or, I don’t know, really brief, same thing. Yeah. So I’m curious, how can students, because it’s something we don’t talk about enough. So how can students approach College. Fares differently and more effectively?

Dr. Andrew Hoffman 25:01
It’s a really good question. I do have a lot of fun with these little reels and, and I have all this unsolicited advice from students to say, You should do this. I’m like, I’m not doing that. Like, they’re like, You should do these, like, meme things that are really popular on Tiktok. I’m like, I’m not going to do that, but I can make this fun, and I can do the best that I can. So, like, acting like a teenager and, and it’s funny, because, like, those little skits are absolutely based on real life. I can’t tell you how many times I would complain to people and say, Can you believe this kid was wearing an ex institution sweatshirt at this college fair talking to like, come on, you know, like. And, of course, it’s not the biggest deal. It’s just like, you’re kind of griping to your friends, but at the same time, you’re like, really, like, did we not think this through before leaving the house anyway? So I think, I think one thing that parents, students, especially, but also parents and guardians and family members can do research the colleges before you get to the fair quite honestly, like, I can’t. There’s so many people that just literally walk in, they’re like, Well, where are we going to go? Who are we going to talk to? And you’re like, you’re just not going to be as prepared for that type of conversation. If you looked at the list, ask your school counselor. Maybe it’s a public fair. Maybe there’s a list that’s published and said, okay, like, I don’t need to go talk to everyone, right? Like, I’m not interested in all these schools, and that’s fine, but I am going to make a short list, I’m going to do a little bit of research to say, if I want to be a biology major, for example, or I want like, this is what I’m interested in. You know, let me come up with one or two questions that can be more thoughtful, right? You know, the example that I gave, I think, in the video, is like, what are some of students favorite courses in this major? Right? Keep admission officers on their toes too. Because, quite honestly, I think you get into this autopilot mode with college fairs and high school visits, and you’re just like, kind of saying the same, because you get the same questions, yeah, over and over and over again. And I actually went to one of my admission friends and and I, you know, I sent them this video, and she was like, no, what are you doing? I don’t want kids coming up to me and asking me what my favorite classes are. And I was like, well, you’re gonna get those questions. But I think that that it just, it illuminates, like, a different aspect that, like, Do you have a psych major? Like, you’re just like, come on. Like, it’s like, the brochures right here, you could Google this? Like, these are easy things. Ask the things that you’re thinking about, hey, like, I actually I’m going to need a scholarship to go to college. I know that tell me more about financial aid, and the admission officer should be able to absolutely tell you how it works. It was so rare that I would get thoughtful questions like that in college admission, especially at like, fairs, and so I know it’s a grab and go. I know fairs are not great because, like, it’s hard to, like, distill what Swarthmore is in 30 seconds. Like, you just can’t do that, and that’s really hard. But also, like, don’t go in with those expectations on either side. Admission officers shouldn’t expect, like, let me tell you all about this, as if I’m doing a 45 minute presentation with you, and students shouldn’t expect to, like, get a ton of information from those interactions. I also think more open mindedness needs to come into this process. And I am imagining that you all deal with this all the time. Of like, here’s my list, and I’m not going to deviate from this list. And you’re like, really? Like, there are more than 20 colleges in America, right? Like, there are so many wonderful institutions out there. Again, if the College Fair has 100 colleges, you’re not going to talk to all of them, but like, maybe pick out five that you have never heard of before and have a lovely conversation for a few minutes with them. I think you know there were so many, and you know, I’ve tried not to blame folks here. It’s not students faults, or even counselors faults, but like, you know, you would show up to a college fair and you’re just letting you see all these people just passing because they’ve just never heard of you. Like, they just don’t, they have no idea. And I’m like, please, I have need based aid. Like, I have, you know, I have all these things that, like, are just so wonderful. Come and talk to me and and that was that was pretty difficult. So I think just go, go in with an open mind. You know, look at some of the things that are important to you. What type of environment you want to be in? Do you want? You know, I encourage students, especially from under resource backgrounds, to look at those with higher graduation rates. They have a track record of supporting students like go in, look up some things on college scorecard or whatnot, and go in and ask, you know, again, one or two questions, and if they are saying things that you’re interested in, go ahead and fill out the inquiry card. You know, it doesn’t hurt at all.

Lisa Bleich 29:32
So, and what about parents? Because Parents always want to go to those fairs and talk on behalf of their kids, which we recommend they don’t

Dr. Andrew Hoffman 29:39
do. Yeah, that’s a good recommendation.

Lisa Bleich 29:42
We’re like, don’t talk for your kid. But that’s hard, you know, sometimes they just want to do it. Would you look down on a student if they’re there and their parents just like, overtaking the conversation?

Dr. Andrew Hoffman 29:51
No, no. I mean, you get it, you know? Like, yes, you the perfect world is that the student’s going to drive the conversation. The perfect world is that. On the car ride over, the parents are going to talk to the student about like, so tell me a couple of things you’re going to ask a few of these colleges you know, like, get the juices flowing here, because I’ve also seen where students do take a step back and they’re pushing a little bird out of the nest, and then the student doesn’t happen, doesn’t have anything. Does anyone have any questions here, like, parents anything like, otherwise we’re just going to stare at each other right now, right? And so I like talking to parents, quite honestly. Like, I don’t love talking to really pushy parents, but, like, I do like talking to parents that are like, Yeah, but so this is what we’ve talked about this and like, this is where my student kind of is, and like, yeah, why don’t you tell them about X or Y or Z, that’s a fine interaction. It’s the interaction where, like, kid is sidelined, like, there’s no way they’re asking a question, even if they wanted to, and then you’re like, Well, this is you’re not going to college. This isn’t your process. So like, let’s at least have kind of a joint venture

Abby Power 30:56
here. I’m just curious. At the college fairs, are there kids that you remember and look out for, are they really just gathering information for themselves

Dr. Andrew Hoffman 31:04
when so I don’t know about other colleges that are less selective. That may, because there are colleges that are on a fair circuit, boom every day, like boom, boom, boom. And like when I was at faberville, they were very college fair heavy. We would joke that if there is a table set up in a field, and they kind of had a couple of chairs we would be there, you know, talking to the Scarecrow, talking to the farmers. Like, I mean, we did a lot of fairs when I was at Vandy, we did not do them as much as when I was at Swarthmore, because I think we just realized, like, we didn’t have the name recognition that a lot of the larger institutions have, and so you wouldn’t have that natural flow, even if you know, the family didn’t know anything about Vanderbilt and it just wasn’t a great use of time. We would also analyze our data quite honestly and say, like, well, we got, we went to X number of college fairs, and we got four applications as a direct result of going to those fairs. And you’re like, well, we don’t need to really do that. So for the most part, no, I mean, you know, I can count on one hand the number of students where I was like, Oh, I did make that really good connection at that fair that I happen to go to, and that student happened to apply and happen to get admit. Like, there were just so few of those examples that for the most part, no, you know, I think we as admission officers see those fairs as just opportunities to like, show up, show the school that you want to be there, that you want to talk to, the students. You bring home. Like, when I went to the Vandy fairs, especially the national affairs, like I’d bring home stats and stacks and stacks, but then at the same time, like, you just wouldn’t see very much from it. It was only those students where the fair was one of the data points. They’re already in the in the system, and they just, we just happen to be in the community. And so maybe you move the student from regular decision to overly decision based on a conversation, but for the most part, you really weren’t moving the needle very much.

Abby Power 32:51
Okay, sort of backing up a little bit, if you can think big picture, what are a few things, maybe three to five things that students need to know when approaching the application process that you you know in your mind they often miss.

Dr. Andrew Hoffman 33:07
So obviously, families are different. Some families can easily write the check. They don’t need to talk about merit scholarships or needy based financial aid, and they’re set to go wherever the student gets in. They want to go, great, right? That’s not most families in America, but that certainly is a subset of families going through this process. So for those that don’t fall into that category, I think one of the things that students need to know and they really miss the mark on, is employing like financial aid and scholarship strategy like that is one of the drivers of building a balanced college list, right, ensuring, like, if you’re coming from middle to low income background, like, looking at need based aid. Like, I think the misconception, and I think the media has, has done a lot of this. But like, you know, growing up, I had the same mentality scholarships were these, like, external organization, things that you would like bring and pay your bills for college, right? It was the Kiwanis Club, or it was the ones for left handed students, or the duct tape prom dress or those sorts of things like, I mean, I think students really think that, but that’s not where most of the money comes from, most of the money, or actual discounts, scholarships from the institutions, or financial aid from the institutions themselves. I think employing financial aid strategy to say, Okay, I know my family’s not going to qualify for a lot of need based aid got it, but I still know that we do need some discounting on very high sticker prices. So I’m going to target some merit scholarship programs that are not the tippy top, like they’re not going to be the Vanderbilt Cornelius Vanderbilt scholarship, right? Like that goes to, like, a handful. I mean, it’s more than a handful, but, like, it’s based on 1000s or 10s of 1000s of applications. It’s just not going to be very many students. But I am. Look at the University of Tampa. I am going to look at Eckerd. I’m going to look at maybe less selective institutions that have pretty robust merit scholarship opportunities. And that’s where my matches and targets are going to live. And I can still get excited about those colleges. They’re great places. They just are not going to be the Harvards and Princeton, and that’s perfectly fine. So I think financial aid and scholarship strategy is really important. It’s something that I cover in my course for parents, because I believe so heartily in financial aid strategy as part of that building a balanced college list. I think a second thing is demonstrated interest. So of course, this doesn’t apply to places like SWAT and Vandy and some of the IVs, but it applies to a lot of places out there. I don’t think students realize that colleges are becoming much more sophisticated. This is not just failing out an inquiry card at a college fair. It’s not just registering for a campus tour. It is how long are you spending on the financial aid website? How long are you are you opening those emails? Are you clicking on the links? This isn’t the I have to open this email. It is the college has sent me 33 emails, and I have opened more than half of them, and I have spent time on their web. And I mean, I have seen the Reddits, I talk to students, and they’re like, I haven’t opened any. I have hundreds every day, and I haven’t opened those. And I’m like, like, that might not matter for Stanford, but it might matter for some other institutions. And so I don’t think that students are really thinking about it in like, ways in which, like, they really kind of have to play the game. And I don’t like that. I’m not saying that I believe in this, but like, at the end of the day, colleges do have to make a class, and they have to predict who’s going to yield at some of these tuition dependent institutions, and that’s one of the ways that they do it. I hope that they do it in a very equitable way to say, like, well, we don’t expect a low income student to visit us in Dallas if they’re living in New York. Like, that’s not fair either.

Lisa Bleich 37:00
But they can watch a video, right? They can watch a video, right,

Dr. Andrew Hoffman 37:04
exactly right, right?

Abby Power 37:07
Yeah, that’s right. Emails.

Dr. Andrew Hoffman 37:08
So it’s things like that, right? But it’s kind of all encompassing. And then I think the third thing that I would say that students are definitely missing the mark on is following these really random people on social media and following their advice. I mean, it really is like the Reddit and tiktoks and YouTubes, and you’re like, just because they have 200,000 views on this on this video, does not mean this is good information. You know, like, just because the student went to Yale and wrote about this in their essay. Does not mean that that’s the magic. You know, formula for getting it. You have no idea who the student is. You have no idea about their geography, their finances, their grades like nothing. And you know, it’s these, like college admission influencers, which, like, I understand how rich said, is because I’m, like, because you are a college enrolled, I guess, in the world, at least adjacent to the world. But like, I mean, I’ve been in the room to make those decisions too, so I think I have a different perspective. But I think, you know, let’s not give power to people who have never been in those positions, or don’t have any experience in the industry, and it it’s also like the folks that are like, I was in charge of grad admissions at this IV, and now I have this massive following, because that exactly translates to undergrad. You’re like, no, that’s not right either. So I would just caution students and families not to follow just like people that you don’t even know or that have no foundation in college admissions.

Abby Power 38:42
Yeah, it’s amazing. Like last year, there was someone on, someone with a lot of followers, and you know, a consultant who, on the day that Northwestern released their ED information, they didn’t even release any other data about the class. They just released decisions. He was on saying, here’s who got any D. And then he gave like this demographic, if you were first generation, if you did this, if you were an engineer, impossible. Literally, the no one has that into some admissions portal on there, and people were commenting and listening to him. And then he gave advice about how you get in rd. Now that we know this about Ed, and I was like, Okay, this, I can’t, people are just listening to this. And he said it was such authority, you know, really. So he was almost believable. But, yeah, it is insane. Everything, like, you know, just like with every other, yeah, okay, big question now, you know, apropos of you having this background and us being insanely fortunate to speaking with someone who’s been in two really interesting admissions offices, can you walk us through the process of what happens when you all get your hands on an application? We hear about, hello. Admissions and, yeah, all this other stuff. So, yeah, I know this is also a podcast in its own, but we’d love your take on how it works.

Dr. Andrew Hoffman 40:10
Yeah, and it is a whole unit in my parent course, by the way, so I can’t cover everything, but I absolutely will share, share as much as I can. So you know, like, there’s this whole pre section before review, it’s all the admin stuff. It is completing the application, which actually is, like a whole job in itself. There’s a whole bunch of people that care about that. And, you know, there’s, we still open postal mail, and we’re getting a ton of uploads and reminders and these sorts of things, right? So, like, there’s a whole industry behind that. But once a student’s application is complete, you know, it goes basically into this holding bin until the admission officers are ready to read. And before we’re reading, you know, we don’t just dive in and we’re like, okay, who are we going to select? Who’s most interesting to me today? Who do I want to be admitted to the college? Like, doesn’t really matter who I want to be admitted. There’s a lot of training that goes into it. And usually, and you know, I speak in generalities, because every college is a little different, but like usually, there are trainings around each of those decision deadlines. So if you have an ed one and a regular, or you have early action Ed 182 regular, like, you might have different training for each of those rounds, because each pool is pretty specific. And historically, if you’re at one of these selective schools, these look pretty similar from year to year. Ed one last year looks pretty similar to Ed one this year. It might not be the exact same, but it looks pretty similar. So we do a lot of training. There’s like inter reader reliability that we do. We talk a lot about context. We talk a lot about rarity in the pool, who is underrepresented, who is over represented. What kinds of of trends. Are you going to see if test optional is brand new, which I was admission director, when test optional is brand new to Swarthmore and I introduced it. How do we do it in a really thoughtful way? You know, we go through, sometimes it’s mock applications, sometimes it’s real applications from last year with that nobody remembers, and now we have to like, okay, so what would everyone do? Like, we have an exercise, and we go through and what’s your rating and what’s my rating. Why are these two ratings different? If we’re we need inner reader reliability, right? And so we talk about those things. And you know, you go over all of these cases over and over and over again, so that when you’re doing it for the real the real deal in the reader the reader season. You’re able to do that independently or in groups called CBE committee based evaluation. I’ll talk about in just a moment. So there’s a lot of training that goes into that. We talk a lot about the very special academic programs out there, and things that, if you’re a humanity student, you’re doing IO young writers, or you’re doing like, there’s lots of pieces, right? So we talk about, but those are the kinds of updates that we will be talking about if you’re doing the STEM programs. What does it mean to be Olympiad? What does it mean to qualify? What is AMC? Was am like, we do all of that work so that you can help identify, again, rare students in that pool. And rarity comes in a lot of different ways, but like, that’s, that’s some of those pieces. And then when you’re actually jumping into the application, it’s typically one of two ways, either traditional reading or CBE at Vanderbilt, we did traditional reading back then, and that was like, I have my territory. I am spending hours and hours and hours of my life every single day, reading applications, writing comments, doing ratings, and I would make an independent sort of assessment on whether the student is meeting institutional priorities. That’s the whole ball game, right? That’s part of the training, right, that the dean, the Vice President, gives the charge to say. And here’s what we need to do this season. Not every student who walks through the door is going to have a perfect set of priorities that we need, right? But we need at the end of the day to prove to our board who we are, and if we are more social justice inclined, if we think really highly about standardized testing, like whatever the values are, that’s what we need to do at the end of the season. And your charge is to find those students that contribute to those institutional priorities. And so we would train each other a lot on these priorities, and what are these priorities mean, and How rare are some priorities compared to other priorities? We do a lot of training on that in traditional reading again, you’re doing that independent assessment, and then you’re sending it on to wherever it goes afterwards. Sometimes that was final committee. Sometimes that was, I am checking to make sure that this student is not, you know, a great fit for our institution. Doesn’t need to be seen by the next committee, and if not, they’re going to be sorted out. And that’s how most students are. They’re just sorted out because they’re just not meeting some of those priorities, and they’re not going to have a chance in the final committee. And then when you get to the final committee in that traditional format, typically, again, I always say typically, but typically, what happens is that you are representing that student because you’re the territory manager. You have that context. You have been at, maybe that school, you have read through the school profile. Like, you know the things that you need to bring to the committee conversation, because the committee is looking at literally the whole country or the entire world, and so they don’t know about particular schools, and you’re there to really get a lot of that academic context and sort of tell that story you present the students, and the committee votes. Now, typically, what then happens? They could have vote affirmatively and say yes admit, and then two weeks later, that student is taken out, and that’s the cleanup process, and that’s the class shaping. And so in the traditional format, it can be pretty demoralizing for admission officers. You know, these are we are real people. We have real emotions. We get very connected to particular students as well. You have to try to set up aside some of those personal feelings, because at the end of the day, you are working for this institution. But that does not mean that there are no tears, that there are no emotions involved in because there, there really are, I will say that’s especially true in the international world, because there are only so many dollars for financial aid applicants, and you are reading 4000 applications for 25 spots. Oh, wow. You know that that changes lives. That changes neighborhoods, families. I mean, I’m not saying it changes countries, but, like, I will absolutely tell you that, like, you know, admitting a student from Liberia, where no one else is admitting a student from that can shift things in really important ways. And so there’s, it’s really high stakes when it comes to that, not as high stakes on the domestic side, but it still is. I, you know, I remember a student that I had in Philadelphia went to an under resourced public school was number like three in the class. Just really fantastic, really like an amazing young woman. She wanted to be an engineer. Had everything, had the grades, had the test scores, had everything that that you would need. And at Vanderbilt at that time, the years ago, but at that time, I needed unanimous decision, and I got three out of the four votes to admit. And so she did not get admitted. I went to the director, and I specifically requested that she’s like, essentially first on the wait list. Like, can I get her toward the top? And not that we ranked the wait list, but like, can I get her toward the top? And he’s like, yeah, yeah, I’ll see what I can do. And she wasn’t the first wave coming off the wait list. And I got to call her, and I said, Hey, just wanted to, you know, see if you’re still interested in the wait list. And she said, yeah, absolutely, it’s one of my top choices at this point. And I said, Okay, great. I said in this part of the script that we had, where are you attending if we were not to admit you from the wait list? And she said, Yeah, I’m going to the Community College of Philadelphia. And I was like, well, you are now admitted to Vanderbilt. And she came to Vanderbilt and was like, an amazing engineer.

Lisa Bleich 47:49
Oh, that’s such a heartwarming

Dr. Andrew Hoffman 47:52
story. No, that’s not typical. Typically, you’re like, Well, I mean, I’m going to Emory right now, or I’m going to Duke whatever. But, like, this can also be high stakes in the domestic world. So just to make sure that everyone knows

Lisa Bleich 48:05
that. So if they were going to a school that was similarly life changeable, would you then not give them the offer off

Dr. Andrew Hoffman 48:13
of the No, no, and that had nothing to do with no, I just wasn’t sure. Yeah, no, the script was more for internal purposes of like, okay, where are we getting the student from? So that they could say we got X number of students from wherever? You know, like that was more internal. That had nothing to do with it. But I was shocked, because that’s usually right response that you get. It was, it was pretty incredible. In CBE committee based evaluation, we’re still holistically looking at the applications, just done in a different way. So whereas I would read 30, maybe 40 applications a day in traditional I was reading 90 files a day, when it’s committee based evaluation and you have two readers, you have a driver and you have a passenger. The driver is the academic. It’s the territory manager, the academic person, the person’s looking at the transcript, the school report, the letters of recommendation, and they’re trying to place the student in the context of their territory, whereas the passenger is looking at the personal side. So this is the the essays and supplements and extracurricular activities and honors and interview report and those sorts of things. And you would talk it out. You you basically have an abbreviated like, I’m just going to look at this. You look at that. We’re going to talk this out. You know, you can sort of point things out to one another as well. Hey, can you take a look at this second paragraph of the teacher letter recommendation. I want to make sure that I’m assessing this correctly. And then you would rate it, rate the file appropriately based on your rubric and and you would come together for a final recommendation. Usually, these were not recommendations. That was like, Well, I’m at admit, and you’re at deny. Like it was more so like, well, I’m feeling like, admit, minus, I mean, ever again, colleges do this differently, but like, I’m at a two. What are you at? Sort of thing? So it’s usually like, I’m I’m at a two, you’re at a three, we’ll split the difference or whatever. And then you would make a decision on where the. File goes so, you know, the the main thing that we would do in CBE is basically ask ourselves, like, does the file need to be seen by another committee? Like that was, that was it wasn’t it. It wasn’t, are you admitting the student? It was, does the file need to be seen by another committee? Because we would never be able to make it Swarthmore, at least we were never able to make a final decision in the after the first read. It always had to go to a committee. And so if you sent the student to the committee, then you get to the committee. And very Quaker, like at Swarthmore, we would have to have, usually unanimous votes, but we would all be voting. So when I was at Vanderbilt, I didn’t get a vote. I had to present the file to the committee, and the committee would vote on their decision. Whereas at Swarthmore, every person had an equal vote. When the Dean was on the committee, he had an equal vote, and really tried very hard to ensure that those were equal votes at the end of the day. But we would have lots of conversations. Sometimes you would see the same student come to the committee multiple times because they had multiple institutional priorities, and they still didn’t have unanimous votes, but the chair of the committee thought, we need to see the student again, and the student needs to have another review by this committee because they were so important to the institution. Sometimes that student still wouldn’t get in because there was a holdout, or like, sometimes it was like but I still have some very strong feelings or strong concerns about their ability to do engineering work here, because of X, Y, and Z, whereas everyone else sort of said, I have enough evidence to suggest that with support, they’re going to be able to do the work. And so you’d have these conversations, and they were pretty incredible conversations. I actually do in my in my parents. Course, I do mock admissions. This is not mock admissions like we usually do, like, admit one, wait list, one, deny one. This is actually like, what would a conversation actually look like in this selective admissions room? What are things that they’re calling out talking about, and how does that play into institutional priorities? Just to sort of shed some light on like, actual conversations we would have at the committee level.

Lisa Bleich 52:03
That’s fascinating. Wow, yeah. Like, we need to listen to, we need to take that class.

Abby Power 52:10
Yes, my kids are

Lisa Bleich 52:11
graduating. I want to take, yeah, exactly. Well, you got time stuff. You mentioned the essay, and we haven’t really talked about that as much, so much. But, like, what are you reading? And people think it has to be a lot of times, people say, people say, I have to stand out. Has to be really creative. It has to be about an unusual topic. But honestly, what does a standout essay mean to you when you guys are reading it? And what are you actually reading the essays to find out about students?

Dr. Andrew Hoffman 52:35
You know, an essay fits into the larger narrative. An essay is never going to get a student in. It. Rarely is going to keep a student out unless we have, like, pretty significant concerns. Concerns could be like, you don’t know how to write, so I don’t know why we’re applying to college, or at least this college, or there are some character questions here that I don’t know if they’re going to be a good community member. That was so rare that, like, I can still think about some of the essays I read because they were so stark compared to the other essays. So I would say, you know, 70% of essays that I read were fine. They were not going to they were not standing out. They were not but I just don’t think that that’s necessary for the college admissions process. I think what you want to do in an essay is convey, is to convey to the admissions office and admissions officer, like, who are you? What do you value? You know, what’s, what’s an interesting story that only you can tell. Try not to go with the things that folks talk about all the time, right? Like, when I was especially at Vanderbilt, this didn’t happen at Swarthmore, but when I was at Vanderbilt, my gosh, the mission trip essays over and over and over again, and you’re like, does anyone have any other experiences like, I mean, it was, it was a lot. I also had Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, so I would see Katrina essays over and over again. And it’s hard to separate yourself because you’re like, that was an important life moment for these students. And so I don’t want to take away from that, but it’s also hard to tell the committee, like, well, this really unique experience of going through Hurricane Katrina. And they’re like, well, we just heard that 17 times. I’m like, I know, but like, this is the spin that they took on it. So you would be searching, though, for like, what are some things about you that are really coming out of the essay? I would say. But most are just fine. You know, most are not going to be like you have to read this essay. Or sometimes the essay was so good because it pertained to an institutional priority. Meaning, like at Swarthmore, we really valued intellectual curiosity and vibrancy and life of the mind, and you know, someone who really can think for themselves and contribute in those ways in the classroom. And so you sometimes did read those essays, you’re like, I don’t even understand this. Like, this is, I think, great, right? Like, but then you also don’t know how much help have they had with the essay? Like, that’s the that’s the challenge, right? And now, with AI and those sorts of things that can be really challenging to discern, what are some original ideas from the student, and what are some ideas that their counselor gave them, or their parents gave them, or, you know, that sort of thing. So that’s probably one of the reasons why the essay wasn’t as important as I think most people think it is, but it does, it does, it is part of the larger conversation. So if I can learn something more unique to you, something that I don’t necessarily know by looking at your extracurricular list of activities, that’s a good thing. If you’re just regurgitating what I already know. That’s not really

Lisa Bleich 55:33
going to help. I think that takes the pressure off. Because, I mean, we tell students the same thing, but there’s always this pressure that I don’t know if it’s good enough or, you know, I read this one on the, you know, the internet, and it was so great, and I want mine to be like that. I was like, Okay, well, you don’t write like that, and that’s not you. But yeah, you were talking about a lot of the like AMC and the, you know, the various national robotics competition and things like that. So from an academic perspective, how do you think the bar for outstanding academics has changed, say, in the past five years? Like, what would a top academic profile look like? What does it take?

Dr. Andrew Hoffman 56:09
I think admission offices need to be very careful in the academic review. And what I mean by that is, I think the most responsible way to do this is through thresholding. It’s essentially, can, can you’re answering the question based on the evidence in the file, and then context of the file, can the student to the academic work given the support that we have at this institution? Right? That does not mean that they need to be the next Einstein. It means can the student do the academic work when we ask them to be an engineer or a psychologist or whatever the major is, plus our core curriculum or open curriculum or whatnot, can they do it? And do they have evidence in the file that suggests that they can if a student has Bs and Cs on their high school transcript? I’m going to say maybe not, if you know like, it depends on the institution, right? Again, I come from the selective admission admissions world. If you’re going to Rowan or Stockton or whatnot, B’s and C’s are probably fine. You’re probably going to be fine. You probably need to adjust your study habits. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t do it, right? Whereas, if, if you are, like in some of the classrooms with the brightest minds around the world, like and you have some really high expectations from faculty, you know, I went to Penn, and I’ve been at the, you know, like, that was pretty different than high school and ASU, quite honestly, it just was. It was a different caliber of student. It was a different caliber of education. You need to be prepped for that, right? I would also, I would always say, when I was at Swarthmore, our lowest math class at Swarthmore is single variable calculus. We don’t have anything else below that. So if you’re coming in, you want to be an engineer, but you only got up to Algebra Two, and sometimes that’s that no fault of your own. That doesn’t mean you’re going to be successful in an engineering curriculum or in a heavy STEM curriculum. So we have to be really responsible. We don’t want to set Anyone up for failure, either. And so we would look at some of those micro decisions. Are you putting on your application that I want to be pre med, but you’re also saying you want to be a French language major and philosophy major? Okay, so how do we assess that? How do we think about that? Well, you one of two things. You could say, well, they don’t have to take any math classes for French or philosophy, and so, like, doesn’t matter, like they can get here, they’ll be fine. You know, maybe everything else about the file, they get A’s in English and these sorts of things. Maybe you’re like, fine, but then you’re also thinking, but they did put pre med, and so does that mean? Because if you’re pre med, you’re going to have to go through the high level math classes and science classes in order to prep for that. And if we already see that maybe standardized testing is lower on math section or your grades or class selection is lower, are you actually going to be prepped for that, right? And then we would have to discern, and sometimes we weren’t able to answer this question all the time, but then we would have to think, Well, did they put pre med on their application because they’re actually interested in going through that type of curriculum, or is it because they were like me, where it’s like, lawyer, teacher, doctor, pick one, and you’re like, not critically thinking about what it means to put pre med on your application. And sometimes that was the case, especially with low income students and underserved students. So you had to tease that out as much as you could. That’s why you’re looking at the letters of recommendation. Is there any suggestion in this teacher wreck that they are actually pre med, or are they talking flowery language around philosophy and French language, right? Like so when I say like we, we do. Did our due diligence. We absolutely did, but we also took that threshold approach, and so if you cross that threshold, meaning, like we knew from all of our research with standardized testing and curriculum and GPA and class schedules, that you need an X on the math section of the ACT or SAT plus, you needed the. Curriculum, and mostly getting A’s in this curriculum, and that predicted that you could probably do a heavy STEM course load at a place like Swarthmore, then that’s what we were looking for. And so it was more of that threshold, and then it was what else you bring into the table? What else about your application when we’re building a diverse class, who else do we need in this class? And sometimes that was a top oboe player, and sometimes that was a top visual artist, and sometimes it was all of these things, right? Whereas I think other institutions are like, how do we get our average SAT score as high as we possibly can? It’s not really how the essay T is made. Like there really isn’t a difference between a 1580 and a 1560 so we shouldn’t be splitting hairs that way. And I do think a lot of the larger institutions do similar things. I’m not saying across the board, but I do think when you have 10s of 1000s of applications, you can only admit 7% it’s an easy shortcut, and I fear that places are using some of those shortcuts in inappropriate ways. And I think we just need to be all really careful about that. So I don’t think, personally, that the academics have really shifted in the last five years like I don’t. I just don’t believe that. I think students are applying to more and more schools. That’s why we are seeing 10s of 1000s in these pools. It’s not because there’s so many more talented students out there. It’s because students are like, Oh no, I can’t just apply to six schools any longer. I have to apply to 12 and that. And that’s the result of just unpredictable yield rates and admit rates. But I don’t think that those things are really shifting. I think that students are just applying to a lot more schools, and admission officers have a tougher and tougher job to discern who should be in that class.

Lisa Bleich 1:01:49
Yeah, I think that that is so, so true, and this is exactly what we’re seeing as well. So I think bottom line, can you do the work, and what are you going to contribute? And that’s kind of in a nutshell what it’s all about, right?

Dr. Andrew Hoffman 1:02:03
And we would also ask, in an academic sense, what advantages or resources do you have in your community? Are you outperforming your context, right? For students, so you know, like, we would often have families that just didn’t understand how this all works, and they’re like, Well, wait a second, why is it that this student can have 200 points slower in the on the SAT than my students. I’m like, Okay, well, you were in the Bay Area at one of the highest performing public high schools in America, and that is your community, right? This students is outperforming their contacts by 400 points on the s a t, so this student does look pretty good. Ari is your student take advantage of the resources in front of them, and if they are, that’s great. That’s what we ask. We should not be asking, and I’m not saying that colleges don’t do this, but we should not be asking students to go way well and above and beyond their individual context. We should be asking, if you have a number of APs, if you have a number of extracurriculars, if you have all of the resources in front of you, how well are you taking advantage of those resources at the end of the day, it’s still a zero sum game, though. There’s only so many spots and so there are really talented students every single day that are denied admission. It is not a value judgment based on who they are. It is really a numbers game, and we can only admit so many students.

Lisa Bleich 1:03:24
Yeah, no. And on that note, well, thank you so much. CBMers for tuning in. Thank you, Andrew, for this amazing conversation. We will have links to your website. Ask Dr hoffman.com on our website. Do you have a subscription? Can they subscribe to your web series?

Dr. Andrew Hoffman 1:03:42
Yeah, absolutely. And I’m happy to give your listeners coupon codes they can take advantage of that awesome, awesome. Yeah. So I do have a subscription model. It’s canceled at any time. It’s by either a monthly or an annual service, but you get nine units, 96 lessons and six hours of content in the parents course, the parents is the first one. I’m going to have other courses for students and independent counselors as well, and school counselors slightly different for each audience, but the parents one is live now. You can do a sample on my website. You can get a taste for it. I do have a free YouTube channel as well. You can log in and see what kind of content that I do. But the nice thing about the course is that it’s an A to Z. It’s a curriculum. So it’s on my YouTube channel. I’m kind of, do I dabble in different things, whereas, like, if you’re like, I need to get started first, and then end with financial aid and transition to college, you can do that through the coursework. And so I’ll be sure to include that coupon code. And then if you do have any students, or, excuse me, families coming from lower income backgrounds, any pro bono clients, etc, I do have a fee waiver process as well. So if students are on free or reduced lunch or qualify for an ACT SAT fee waiver, I’m happy to waive that. I love that. Yeah, that’s

Lisa Bleich 1:04:55
awesome. That’s great. Well, we will definitely put links to that. And when we, when we, I. Publish this episode and 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 the podcast to learn more, visit CollegeBoundMentor.com. Until next time, you got this!

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