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New View EDU Episode 82: The New Dream Schools

November 18, 2025

Available November 18, 2025

Find New View EDU on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and many other podcast apps.

What is a “dream school?” Almost since the college admission process began, students have dreamt about where they’ll end up after high school, and increasingly, those “dream schools” have existed on a very short list of what we think of as prestigious, name-brand institutions. But what if we’re wrong about that list? What if everything we think we know about what makes a college great is misguided? Higher education expert Jeff Selingo joins host and NAIS President Debra P. Wilson to talk about his new book, Dream School. They engage in a frank discussion of what needs to change in our approach to college admission. 

Jeff SelingoDrawing on his deep knowledge, unparalleled research, and surveys of over 3,000 parents, Jeff has created his own list of “dream schools” that he believes offer students the value and experience they really want from college. He shares that the idea for the list, and the book, came from repeatedly getting questions about how to get kids into the Ivy and Ivy-plus schools—and what to do if a student can’t get into a school on that list. Jeff says he realized that the narrative around college admission was focused on a small subset of institutions, and that those institutions aren’t right for many students. With thousands of colleges and universities to choose from, he felt compelled to help parents and students better understand what a “good” college looks like and how to approach the process with a healthier mindset.

Jeff says he wants to help bring back a sense of normalcy to high school, so kids have more room to explore, learn who they are, and try new things without fear of failure or being pigeonholed into a particular track. Increasingly, he observes, every decision a child makes, from what sport they play to what classes they take, seems to place them on a defined path that only gets narrower as they get older. This forces specialization before students are even sure who they are and what they want out of life. The admission process, he says, isn’t helping anything, with ever-earlier deadlines that have shifted important conversations about college down into sophomore year—and, in his own experience, even earlier, with questions about admissions overtaking parent events in the eighth grade. 

He advocates for schools to help students and parents divest as much as possible from the rat race of admissions and, instead, to focus on broader preparation for college and for life. Among Jeff’s many suggestions for K-12 schools include ensuring that a curriculum is in place starting in middle school to help students learn about themselves, their strengths and interests, and what they may want out of their futures. He points out that attempts to “wall off” college discussions in middle school tend to have the unintended consequence of allowing parental anxiety to fill in the blanks with often overly restrictive and unhelpful ideas, so ensuring that there’s a positive, forward-thinking curriculum is important to keep things balanced. Jeff also encourages schools to do more to help students go beyond the usual lists, which he says are reinforced by social proof, with parents and schools feeling reassured of the “right” outcomes when students continually apply to and attend the same tiny cohort of colleges. And, he says, we have to help parents understand that there is a good college out there for their students, without having to aim for perfection. Straight A’s aren’t required, a slate of rigorous extracurriculars isn’t necessary, and what parents think of as non-negotiables may not be that important at all. 

What constitutes a “dream school?” Jeff says he structured the list based on three factors: 

  1. A robust and intentional experience for first-year students (and often beyond), designed to help them build community and find purpose and mentorship on campus from the get-go; 
  2. Quality faculty and staff who can, and will, invest in guiding students and helping them get the most out of their education; and 
  3. Hands-on experiences. 

Jeff says experiential learning, job training, internships, and other real-world experiences have become a cornerstone of the best quality education, and it doesn’t always have to look like a high-level co-op to be effective and valuable. He says the institutions that will “win the next 10 years” are the schools that help blend the critical thinking and soft skills of a liberal arts education with the real-world skills and hands-on learning that are helping students advance. And these factors, he says, are often more robust and accessible outside of the “top” schools we’ve come to associate with prestige.

Key Questions

Some of the key questions Debra and Jeff explore in this episode include:

  • After the success of your book Who Gets in and Why, what was the impetus for writing Dream School? What shifts have occurred in the college admission process and what led to this list of “new dream schools?”
  • If you could redesign the college admission process, what would you want to see happen? What are the cultural shifts you’re trying to enact with your work?
  • What’s the role of K-12 schools in making the college process more humane for students and parents? What should the student experience look like, and how can we help parents buy into a less competitive, name-brand-driven narrative about college?
  • How did you arrive at your list of 75 “dream schools?” What should parents and students be looking for in a college that would make it a “dream” for them?

Episode Highlights

  • “I want to bring back some normalcy to high school so that not everything is about, not everything you do is about getting into college and into the right college, that you're doing things because you want to challenge yourself. You enjoy them, you want to try new things out. And so that's the first thing I want to do…The other crusade that I'm on is that, even if parents say, I want to bring some normalcy to my child, or my kid’s just—I hear this all the time—my kid's an average kid. They just want to find the right-fit college to them, but there's so much pressure around me to apply to a certain set of schools, and I want to change that conversation.” (6:08)
  • “The November 1 deadlines, the October 15 deadlines now, even earlier deadlines, has just moved up the entire college search process now really into the junior year. And then now what used to happen in the junior year is happening in the sophomore year. So you're not even getting through half of high school without really thinking about college. So that's the first redesign, and it has to happen at the college level because high schools, I get it, are responding to what colleges are doing. And then parents are in the high school system and they're responding to what the high schools want out of them. So that, to me, is where it starts.” (11:33)
  • “I tell parents, look for these very intentional first-year experiences. They look very different at different colleges, but they're extending orientation throughout the year. They build these very small cohorts of students that are like-minded so you can actually find a friend very early on. They assign you to a … faculty member who could become your mentor. Maybe not, maybe so, but at least you have a faculty member you get to see on a regular basis during that first year. They'll put you in living learning communities. Again, there are many different flavors of these first-year experiences.” (25:09)
  • “I mean, the big unknown here, Debra, is the role of AI in the job market. What are the jobs of the future really going to be and what are they going to need? What are the skill sets they're going to need? It was pretty certain over the last 10 years that we've seen, one of the reasons why liberal arts colleges have kind of gone out of favor, is because we've seen a huge shift in majors to the business and STEM because parents thought that's where the jobs were. … Now parents are asking, huh, now what's the next major? And by the way, maybe this brings the liberal arts back into vogue and maybe the liberal arts institutions with their ability to have a mix of problem-solving and communication and critical thinking and bring in hands-on learning to that, that might bring them back in a way that we didn't quite expect.” (34:14)

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Full Transcript

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About Our Guest

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 (September 2025), draws on more than two years of research and a survey of 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. He is also the author of Who Gets In & Why: A Year Inside College Admissions, named one of the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of the Year in 2020.

A regular contributor to The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, Jeff is a special advisor to the president and professor of practice at Arizona State University. He writes the biweekly newsletter Next and co-hosts the podcast Future U. He lives near Washington, D.C., with his family.