Read the full transcript of Episode 82 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features 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.
Debra Wilson: Welcome back to New View EDU. I’m Debra Wilson, and I am thrilled today to have Jeff Selingo on our podcast. Jeff has written about colleges and universities for more than 25 years and is a New York Times bestselling author of four books. His latest book, Dream School: Finding the College That’s Right for You, is already a New York Times bestseller, and it just came out this September. It 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 for each student, and the book provides tools to discover your child’s dream school.
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 a biweekly newsletter called Next and co-hosts the podcast Future U with Michael Horn.
He’s also a prolific poster on social media and you can find him in a variety of places there, that you’ll see in the show notes, and without further ado, welcome to this conversation with Jeff Selingo.
Jeff, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here.
Jeff Selingo: Great to be here, Debra. Thank you for having me.
Debra Wilson: I'm really looking forward to this conversation, although I'm happy to say that I do not have a child going through the college admissions process right now. And I'm not a school leader with a bunch of kids going through the college admissions process right now. You have a timely topic, my friend.
So let's jump in. You've been working in and around higher education for a long time. And your last book, Who Gets In and Why, has become a must read for anyone interested in higher education admissions. I would imagine both those engaged in it as well, you know, from the higher ed side, as well as the students and their parents. But so, this is a question I haven't gotten to ask you before. Like, where did this book come from? You know, after you wrote Who Gets In and Why, I assume there was some impetus behind this book, Dream School. Like, tell me, where did this book come from?
Jeff Selingo: Yeah, so I went out and about, talking about Who Gets In And Why to school leaders, to parents, to counselors, to students. And I often would get a question or two at every one of these events or afterwards where somebody would come up to me or ask, you know, because Who Gets in and Why was really focused on how to get into the more selective places.
And somebody would inevitably say, what if we don't want to go to those places? What if we can't get into one of those campuses? What if we can't afford that? To most Americans, to most students, the American higher education system is a complete like black box. It is thousands of institutions. They don't really understand, you know, what are the differences between big research universities and small liberal arts colleges? And what is the real quality of these? Which is why, by the way, they run to the rankings. They run to the rankings because to them, it makes sense of something that is not very clear to them. And so they wanted to know, if we don't want to go to one of those more selective places, can't get in, can't afford it, how do we make sense of the rest of it without going to the rankings? And what's a good college? How do you define a good college? And so that's really what I wanted to do with this book.
And so the way the book is laid out is, the first part is trying to change your mindset, because still some people might say, you know, Ivy or bust, top 25 or bust. And so I, in the first part of the book, I want to break some myths. I want to give a little bit of a truth serum to say, the Ivy league, the Ivy plus, the top 25 are not all they're cracked up to be. And then the second half of the book really lays out what you should be looking for in the rest of the colleges out there. What is a good fit?
And most of all, give parents and students permission to think more broadly, because often they feel this pressure to go to one of these top institutions.
Debra Wilson: Yeah, I love that idea of it being the black box and the amount of pressure behind it. Even for people within education, I mean, I have this conversation with heads of school, it still seems kind of impenetrable on some basic level. And I will say, Jeff, you're being light on the front of this book. You take some people to task, you talk about some of the numbers, some of the daunting shifts in the admissions process, right?
Jeff Selingo: Just in the last four or five years.
Debra Wilson: Yeah, just in the last four or five years. You and I have talked a lot about Clemson and how sort of pre-pandemic, I think they were getting, I don't know, 18, 19,000 applications a year. And now I think this past year they were at like 60 or 62 or something like that. Like big shifts in some of the drivers behind that. I found that particularly interesting. But you also like, you seem to be a little bit of a man on a crusade. You're, you know, when I'm listening to other podcasts, when I'm watching your social media feeds, you know, what are you looking for to shift here?
Jeff Selingo: So I want to, I want to shift two things. I mean, as you know, I have two teenage daughters at home, and especially with my older one who's now in 10th grade, I'm starting to see the, really starting to see now the pressure I hear from every other parent out there, that's on their kids now to do all the right things. And this is another thing, Debra, that came up in a very early talk for Dream School at a school where a parent got up during the Q and a period and said, okay, What else does my kid need to do to get into Stanford, in this case?
And I wanted to say, have you just been here for the last like hour listening to this discussion? Because that's what this is, often comes around, where, what else can my kid do? What other classes can they take? What other clubs can they join? What other sports can they do? Same thing I see in my own kid, where the life of upper schools and high schools have just disappeared, where it's all about getting into college.
So that's the first crusade that I'm on. 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 second thing is something that came up in the big survey we did of the books, for the book, of parents, 3,000 plus parents we surveyed, where we asked them how important is prestige in higher education to you? 16% said it was important to them, very important to them, I should say. 28% said it was very important to their kids, but 60 plus percent said it was really important to their communities. And I think that's 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.
So those are the two crusades I'm on right now, which are really hard crusades because, hard to change on both of those things.
Debra Wilson: Yeah, right, like so, you know, pressure on parents, pressure on kids, community pressure.
And you talk about, in your book, this concept of social proof, right? Talk a little bit about that and how that shows up specifically kind of in that community pressure zone.
Jeff Selingo: So this is a perfect example of where I was at a school during Who Gets In and Why tour and I met with some parents and they basically said, you know, this was schools in New York state, and they said, is it okay to go to SUNY? And I was like, shocked by the question, because again, they needed this social proof that it was okay, that here is one of the largest university systems in the country. It's a great deal for people in New York. Some of their schools made my dream school list in the book. Some of them are part of the AAU, they’re major research universities, but they felt like they needed this proof that it was okay. And they looked to other people in their community. And that's often what we do in admissions. And we have all these processes now in place that actually help push that along.
So a couple of things, first of all, most schools use some form of Naviance or SCOIR or some sort of software in counseling, in high school counseling, around college selection process. Well, those, all of those platforms are made to just reinforce where students from the previous year have gone, because you're going to see, are my chances of getting into Stanford or Clemson or whatever, but it's only based on data of that school. And so if the students apply to the same 25, 50, 75 schools over and over again, that's the only data you're going to see. And so that's a social proof that often students have. Well, I guess I have to apply to one of these schools because everyone else applies to these schools.
And then second, in terms of parents, the same thing is happening in our communities. I often see this, where parents want to know, where's your kid going or where did your kid apply or where are you going to visit? And then of course, at the end of the year, we have, in commencement programs and on Instagram pages, where everybody from that school is going.
That's another thing that I would love to get rid of. I know those are hard things to get rid of, but all of those things contribute to the social proof that what I did is right. Because I'm sending, as a parent, I'm sending my kid to X college or university. And so are other people. So I must be right in doing that. And to go off of that path is really hard, even if that school has, is a better major for your kid or that's a better fit for your kid. It's really hard to get off that path.
Debra Wilson: What should this look like for kids? But then also, what should it look like for parents coming along on this journey? Because as the parents of three kids, I know having gone through the college admissions process twice, we're a little bit on parallel tracks, but we're sort of on different journeys. My roller coaster was going up when my son's was going down.
So if you could redesign high school and or the college admissions process, you know, or if you could stabilize it a little bit, given what you've learned and what you've seen. And I appreciate in your book that, you know, you're not just talking about like campus fit, but you're also talking about the realities of the financial issues that come up in higher education now. It is wildly expensive.
Jeff Selingo: And I think that's part of the problem in the redesign, because colleges and universities are businesses, and they are more than ever trying to enroll students and particular students, whether those are full pay students or they want a certain type of diversity or they want a certain type of academic profile. And so they've leaned into all of these practices that lock in their class or especially as applications have gone up that demonstrate interest of those students who are really needed. And so that's why the whole early admissions process is the part that has really bothered me the most. And if I were to redesign it, you would almost have to get, though, all the institutions to say, okay, we're going to stop doing this together, or we're going to change those processes around early together. Because the problem is, is if one institution does it, I think that's almost impossible, because they're going to be put at a disadvantage with everybody else.
But that to me is the, one of the biggest redesigns that could happen, because all of that, the November 1 deadlines, the October 15th 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.
And unfortunately, Debra, I just don't see, colleges are more desperate for enrollment in some cases than ever before.
Debra Wilson: Say you were a head of school and you're the college admissions person. You're wearing two hats for a very flexible industry. Like how would you be thinking about this differently? Given everything you've learned in the last two years you've been really working on this and even before?
Jeff Selingo: So I think the first thing that we have to do is redesign the college counseling process experience in high school. So what I think's happening is that independent schools have been really good about trying to close off the first two years. I see this at a lot of schools, I do, right? Like, let's not talk about college in the first or second year of high school.
But what happens is that you have anxious parents who see it and hear it all around them. They have more information than ever before. And so they're pushing it on their side to do something. They're going out and hiring their own independent counselors or they're just pushing their kids to do everything themselves without enough direction, to be honest with you, around this.
And I have a personal example of this that I wrote about recently. I was at a coffee for my eighth grader about the move to upper school. So this is a coffee, by the way, in the fall of their eighth grade year about their high school years, starting in a year from now, essentially. And at some point, the questions from the parents moved right to college, in eighth grade. And so I get it. We as independent school leaders could wall that stuff off as much as we can, but we can't stop it.
It reminds me so much of what's happened with social media and phones. We tried as much as we could to control it until we kind of had to stop it. And the same thing is true here, where I think we have to develop a curriculum, maybe starting in middle school into high school, that is age appropriate for students around kind of the college search, the college process. So actually bring it back, bring it into those grades, age appropriate so that we're not trying to wall it off, because parents will just fill in those gaps.
And then as we get into 10th, 11th, especially in junior and senior year is really focused on students looking beyond what has always been seen as success at those schools. So I talk a little bit about an independent school in my book that has students research colleges and universities that no one at that school has gone to in the previous couple of years. And I love this idea, right? I love this idea. And so they go out there, they research these schools. And this is very easy to do even if you say, even if you don't want to look at the schools that, or the colleges that your school has gone to in the past, you can just say, okay, you have to look at schools that are outside the top 100. Go out and research them, come back and present them to your peers, which they do here. And by the way, when you're presenting them to their peers, you're hiding the name of the school.
And I love this idea because what you're doing is focusing less on prestige and brand name and more on fit and what's right for you. And then reveal the name at the end. And as you know, the counselors at the school have told me over and over again, is that people are surprised. People are a little disappointed, which shows you the social proof of name, because they're really excited about a school and then they hear the name of it and they're like, I can't apply there. And parents are like, why are you even researching these schools?
So I think some of this is about changing that mindset in junior and senior year by forcing students to look more broadly. That's how I would redesign it.
Debra Wilson: I'm so intrigued by that. Like I didn't think you were going to go that way. And I'm really interested in that because I know, I think middle school as magical times, you know, it, like higher ed, that whole conversation has not tended to bleed down into that level so much. And I see more and more schools doing work with middle schoolers around like, who are you? And who do you want to be? Right?
Jeff Selingo: And I think that's important Debra, because it has to be age, I think what you're saying is that by using the literature that's out there, it's more age appropriate. Because what I fear is if we don't do anything, parents will fill in that vacuum with things that are totally wrong.
Debra Wilson: Right. Well, and you know, and it's a time when kids can start expressing themselves and exercising some agency. But, I love the idea of like, okay, higher ed might be a road you could go down and you and I can have a long conversation about the number of people who are starting to think maybe higher ed is not actually worth it. What is the ROI on higher education? And what does that look like in a time of AI? But you know, so if you're having this conversation with middle schoolers, and having them do that research given what they know about themselves now and it kind of carries with them forward a little bit, like, you know, particularly if you're a school that has a middle school and a high school, but, okay, so let's take that and let's roll it forward into high school.
So kids have done some research and they've also gotten to know themselves a little bit better, right? Like they're starting to think forward like that. What does that look like in the early years of high school?
Jeff Selingo: Yeah, and to me, those are critical years where there is a chance for more exploration and safety. And I don't think that's happening right now because I see kids, and we know this, especially it's happening in athletics. It's happened well before ninth grade in athletics around kind of specialization. It's happening increasingly in academics and clubs where it's impossible to just try things out and fail. And because there's a feeling that we have to, maybe less so in ninth grade, but definitely in 10th grade. And I see this with my own 10th grader. Okay. We have to start to specialize, whether it's in athletics, whether it's in clubs, whether it's like, I have to be the STEM kid now, or I have to be the humanities kid.
That's where I would love to open up the curriculum, Debra, a little bit, take that pressure off a little bit. Maybe there's something around grading, but more so on the extracurricular side, because I think that's where there is a lot of pressure for students to feel like they have to lean into a sport, lean into an activity at that point. And what ends up happening, and I see this at a lot of schools I visit, I hear this from a lot of parents, my kid just wants to try things out. They haven't found that thing yet. But there's then no opportunity for them to just experiment and to try things out.
And this is the same thing, by the way, happening on the college side, where the competition to get into clubs your freshman year in college is really hard because again, everybody wants to subspecialize very early on. And we know from the work of David Epstein and Range and things like that, that it's actually better to open this up a little bit more. And that is where I think school leaders really could design those first two years of high school to make sure that's happening.
How can we open up our sports so that it's not just for students who have participated in club sports year round and now they basically take up every roster spot? How can we give more flexibility to clubs so students can have the ability to try things out without feeling like they have to dig deep on something at the same time that they're trying to manage their academics, and how can we have more fluidity between kind of the humanities and the sciences so that I don't have to pick, my freshman year of high school, that I'm going to be on this track in math and this track in science and this track in English, et cetera?
Debra Wilson: I find that fascinating because the grind has started so much earlier and that flexibility or that fluidity and it's not valued in the application process, right? There is no college application question.
So how do you bring parents along in that ninth and 10th grade year? And I think some of it is exposure. I have a daughter in a highly selective college, and it's a grind. And the club application process that you talk about is a very, very real thing, much to the consternation of the administration, because that’s student administered, right? The kids learn to grind it out in high school and then they get to college and then they create a more intense application process for the very clubs that they're starting.
Jeff Selingo: Right, the doors just keep getting narrower and narrower to get through.
Debra Wilson: Yeah, so, and I don't know that all parents understand that either, particularly ones who went to highly selective, you know, today's highly selective colleges, say 20 years ago, 30 years ago, their experience at those institutions, I think is probably dramatically different, at least in some very measurable ways than they are now, I would think. I mean, so how do we bring those parents along in those ninth and 10th grade years?
Jeff Selingo: So I think education helps. I would love them to know a little bit more. As I tell parents in ninth and 10th grade about the college application process, but more about what I saw on the other side happening in college admissions offices, the first thing is they think everything's important. And they don't really understand that a holistic system puts weights and measures on certain things. And it's different for every child.
So sometimes a child who has a certain set of activities and is more normal academically gets in. And sometimes the academic superstar who is not as well rounded on the extracurricular side gets in, right? They think there is one formula to get in, and there isn't. And then they want to copy that formula over and over again because they think it's true of every college and university, and it isn't.
So what I would love to do is bring in, you know, and colleges, I mean, high schools do this, but they're often reserved for junior and senior parents. I would love them to bring in college admissions deans and officers and others who read applications to talk about who gets in and why, essentially what the book did. So you get to see that my kid doesn't have to be, you know, doesn't have to participate in everything. Doesn't have to get an A in everything. Doesn't have to be that academic superstar in everything. That there are, as I often get questions like my awesomely average student, where are they going to go? And I keep telling people there are many places for that awesomely average student, including, by the way, some places that they think are closed off to them because they are just awesomely average.
Debra Wilson: So let's talk, actually, about that group. So I want to start talking about your list of 75, right? Your dream school list of 75. I know you've got a great list of schools that are buying and schools that are selling. So we'll put that in the show notes as well. And in one part of the book, you talk about the schools that are sort of being squeezed in the middle.
So they're not the Ivy or the ivy plus, or I don't remember what the other breakdown was, but they're, they also don't tend to be big state institutions. I think you had, I know Skidmore was on that list. You had a, you had a couple of–
Jeff Selingo: –Lot of, unfortunately, it's a lot of liberal arts colleges because they're not seen as valuable as they used to be.
Debra Wilson: Right. So when you're talking with parents, I mean, I imagine you've spent a lot of time in the last few months in a room with very sort of stressed out parents who are asking you very concrete questions about who gets in and why. But you know, your second half of the book really talks about like, what should you be thinking about? I've got the book open next to me. There's a great chapter called Mentors Matter.
So you're the parent of an average kid, and you're the head of school of a class of, I don't know, 120 kids, right? Independent school. And invariably, like 15 to 20% of them are rock stars of some kind, right? And you also have a good number of kids, and they're just good kids. They're solid academically, they're solidly engaged. They might not know what it is that they want to be when they grow up. So they're going to college pretty wide open, right? They're not going in saying, I want to get a PhD in neuroscience. They're really looking for that broader picture. Like, how do we have that conversation? And just talk a little bit about how you thought about that when presenting this in the book and how you thought about your dream school list.
Jeff Selingo: Yeah, so first, what are the key factors you should be looking for? And the first thing was, how do you give, how do you find places that give students a supportive start? Because it was interesting to me, Debra, you know, a couple of months ago when the new semester started at colleges and universities, the class of 2025 ends up there as freshmen. And all these parents and different parenting groups I'm in, my kid calls, you know, day two, day three, sometimes classes haven't even started. They want to transfer. They can't find their people.
And you know, often the advice is, I think all of us were in that position. I know I was in that position. The first semester of college is often not great. And just give it time and it improves, but there are some college, there are some colleges and universities that are very good about creating very intentional first year experiences. And now even second and third and fourth year experiences that really build a scaffolding around students as they come in from high school and then take it down as they get ready to go to the workforce.
But 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 mentor who could actually, or 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, but they're very intentional and they're not like what I think a lot of highly selective colleges are. Look to your right, look to your left. One of you won't be here at the end of semester, who cares? Which is often the attitude, unfortunately, of some of those schools. So that's the first thing.
Second thing is finding those mentors. Incredibly important. Often they are with faculty. They could be staff, they could be coaches. I think faculty are critically important, but most parents and students really never meet faculty members on the college tour. Maybe they'll meet the star faculty member who gives a presentation and that's about it. I would dig a lot deeper on the quality of the faculty in this.
And then third is hands-on experiences. So much of what college is about today is experiential learning, internships, co-ops, workplace learning experiences, long-term projects in the classroom, whatever those might be, but getting real hands-on experiences critical to getting that job afterwards, even more critical, we found in the book, than where you went and what you majored in, more important. So those are the, really the big three that are so important to look at during the college search process and led many of these institutions that are at the end of the book, the 75 new dream schools, to be on that list.
Debra Wilson: Did you look at like the Gallup Purdue index work? And for our listeners, what Gallup figured out was for the most part, big, small, private, public, didn't really matter, but really what mattered was what you did when you got there. So having a mentor, faculty member was a big piece of that. Engagement with extracurriculars, getting to focus for a semester on a project related to your major, getting to do work. So a lot of these internship co-op programs, getting to do work related to an area of study.
Jeff Selingo: Yeah, it was like the big six that they had, but they all surround in many cases, people and experiences, which brings back to me belonging and purpose. Like if you have belonging and purpose in college, you're going to hit it out of the park. Your sense of belonging helps with people, and your sense of purpose is like, why am I doing this? Why am I studying this? And often that comes through experiential learning.
Debra Wilson: How do we bring parents along on that? I don't know that they always believe the data around that. You tell this fabulous story about this young woman who I think was looking at Rice and was looking at the University of Mississippi. And, you know, it just brought her to tears. Like she was like, there's only one reason I would go to Rice and it doesn't actually have anything to do with what I want to study and what I want college to feel like.
Jeff Selingo: She only wanted to go there because people would know she was smart if she goes there. And Debra, I tell that story in a lot of independent schools in front of parents. And I always warn them that you're not going to believe where she ended up going. Because most parents would say, Rice and the University of Mississippi?
Emily ended up graduating from the University of Mississippi with no debt because she, and actually she didn't really pay for it because she got a full scholarship. She got study abroad support. Got undergraduate research support. She's on a Fulbright now in Germany, because I had to reach out to her recently for an update that I was writing around the book, and just had a great experience, as opposed to Rice, where she probably could have also had a good experience. Who knows? I mean, this is part of the problem with higher ed, is it is an experienced good. You really don't know what you're buying until you've already experienced it.
But one of the things that she knew going into that is that her parents would have to pay more than half the tuition there, given her financial circumstances. So she was going to have to go into some sort of debt or her parents are going to have to spend some sort of savings that they had for that, which would not enable them to have the flexibility or her to have the flexibility she has now after graduation. This money, the financial piece plays a much bigger role now than even I really thought going into the research for this book, even among families who have the resources to pay full price.
Debra Wilson: Share a little bit of that, because the finances have become, and you, I think, write extremely thoughtfully about this, and particularly the addition of honors colleges and what states are doing to keep kids basically in state.
Jeff Selingo: The Southern schools have had a huge push in using merit aid at the state level to keep students in state and eventually recruit students from out of state. And what you're seeing parents and students do is there's a, there's a student in the book who says, you know, who has a couple of financial aid offers from a number of different institutions, and one is, wants her to pay 20 more thousand dollars a year. And the other wants her to pay 10 more thousand dollars a year. And then she said, at the end of the day, as you're looking at it, is this school worth that much more a year? And their financial calculation is, it isn't, right?
And this is what I saw in the book, including in the survey and in the data that we were able to get for the book is that among a certain class of institutions, the very, very top, think Ivy, Ivy plus, parents are willing to pull out all the stops financially. But then what we're seeing historically now over the last couple of years, is that they used to be willing to spend that money a little deeper in the rankings of institutions that expected them to spend that. And now they're not, they're not just not, they're skipping over those schools, as I say, and they're going to, often, public universities in state or out of state. And when they go out of state, they're often getting some merit aid discounts for that. And they're showing up at these honors colleges, where they feel like they're getting a great small college academic experience within the larger collegiate experience that includes football, school spirit, Greek life, and just fun.
Debra Wilson: So if you were a school leader and you could see your list shifting in that direction, like how do you talk about that with parents? And you know, and maybe what research would you be doing on the back end?
Jeff Selingo: Well, so I think it's a great question. And this is, actually has come up in recent weeks where I've been at different independent schools and I always ask them, how has your list shifted? And they talk about this, right? And it's everywhere. It's in California, in Colorado, in New York, in New Jersey, DC. These are all places I've been in recent weeks.
And the list is shifting in many of the same directions, away from small liberal arts colleges, more towards big publics. Prestige still plays a factor, but not as deep and wide as it used to with the senior class, often because they can't get in. And that's not a knock against the schools. It's happening everywhere. It's happening at all types of schools. And so how would I talk about this?
I think we often look at these lists, you know, when schools put them out on Instagram or they put them in their profile or they use them in their admissions materials. They often don't put context around what's been happening. I would put a little bit more context about it, not just list the names of the colleges and universities, but write a little narrative about what's been happening. Pull some of the data and the national data, plenty of it in my book that you could pull from. I'm happy to help here, I'm going to get calls now from school leaders, but that's fine.
And then second, bring back those alums. I still don't think that schools use their alums enough, their most recent students, their near peers, to have them come back and talk about their experiences with students who have gone to these places that maybe that school has never sent students to before. Bring those alums back, have them talk about their experiences, not only, by the way, to students, but also to parents, to have them understand that there's a broader set of schools out there and it's okay.
Debra Wilson: So how does that meet up with, you share a lot of forward thinking data, right? Like looking at the demographic cliff, which some of our schools are managing now. And you share data, I think it goes through like the class of 2040. I don't know that you can put the toothpaste back in the tube around the cost of tuition, particularly in small liberal arts colleges, but like sort of projecting forward, not just on what parents think, but like how is that shift going to change the admissions landscape?
I mean, the actual college applications are way up, right? Like kids are applying to 12, 19, 20 colleges, but as the number of actual people who will physically attend schools falls off, and you've got parents who are looking at different kinds, they're very open to different kinds of institutions–
Jeff Selingo: –Yeah, and even including outside the US by the way, which is an increasingly big question I get now in talking to parents. It's definitely going to become easier to get into some institutions and I think there's going to be a ton of meridians being thrown at them, but that's just tweaks on a current model. So I don't think that's a big shift.
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. But now suddenly you're starting to see headlines of computer science majors who are working as baristas at Starbucks, nothing wrong by the way with being a barista at Starbucks, but you know, it's kind of the usual meme that we have around this. And so now parents are asking, huh, what is the, now what's the next major?
And by the way, maybe the, 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. To me, the institution that wins the next 10 years in higher ed are those institutions that really bring job focused, job integrated learning into the curriculum, and not in a bolted on way. I'm not talking about, you know, 10 more Northeasterns here with a co-op.
I am talking about an integrated way where students in the course of a semester could be job shadowing. They could be working on a two week sprint project for a company. They could be in a campus job that is giving them real skills in, you know, something like Adobe or a Canva or, you know, Salesforce or whatever it might be, where they do have real internships that are integrated into the school year. They're not just summer experiences. Those to me are the institutions that are going to win the next 10 years, in addition to having, you know, a great core curriculum that allows students to have more flexibility and the ability to navigate ambiguity. That to me speaks a lot to liberal arts colleges that are able to do it.
Debra Wilson: You hit on a point that I've actually spoken about with a number of heads of school, which is –
And I think you're marrying it nicely as higher education has gotten a little more transactional and more about the career path and job shadowing. And there's a lot of learning there, but there's also an element of you're going to higher education to get a job. One head of an all-girls school asked me, she said, do you think we're sort of the last bastion of true liberal arts?
I'm kind of intrigued by the notion that the future jobs for AI are actually knowing a little bit more than AI so that you can kind of gut check AI. There was a New York Times article about that and that involves a lot of knowledge and a lot of critical thinking. But I mean, like, so if that's sort of the vision of higher education, what does that mean for K-12 and where K-12 should shift and maybe not shift and sort of like we’re sort of the bastion that's holding the line?
Jeff Selingo: Well, I think it really does speak to a lot more exploration, including into high school. Again, that sub-specialization where students are like, I know I want to go into medicine or computer science or STEM. That happened so early on, I think it closes off these other pathways and doesn't really make them the broad cross-disciplinary thinkers that we need. And we see this in the data. David Deming, who's an economist at Harvard and a Harvard Dean, who's featured prominently in chapter two in the book, talks often about earnings after college and STEM and business, STEM in particular do really well in the first decade after college. But then there's a split where first of all, the humanities majors really start to catch up. That's often because they've gone to graduate school, but they've also fallen into careers where they're very valuable as they move into higher level jobs that pay them more. And STEM majors then hit a ceiling.
And that's because at the very top, the best STEM majors are going to go on and get advanced degrees, they’re going to learn new programming languages or whatever. The rest of them though, kind of fall off and they flatten in their careers because they didn't really want to do STEM. And they find it like, they're at a point in their career now where like, this is not really what I wanted to do. They don't go back to get further education. They're not getting upskilled and re-skilled.
And I think I blame that on going all the way back to the sub-specialization in ninth and 10th grade, where we kind of put them into a very narrow field and they, you know, whether it was their parents, whether it was their school or whether it was this external pressure to say, I want to go into STEM and that's all fine and good, but it's often the same thing that I see in sports. Now I'm really mixing groups up here, but where, you know, I talk to college coaches and they tell me, kids get here and they're tired of playing that sport. And the same thing happens in academics. It may not happen in college, but it happens then five or 10 years after college, according to Demian's research, where they just got tired of it because we forced this specialization so early. So to go back to your question, Debra, can we open that up a little bit?
And I know what the school leaders who are listening to this are going to say to me, we can't because colleges don't want us to do that. I don't think that's necessarily true. I really don't.
And maybe, maybe we could do this as NAIS, bring together a group of like college leaders and independent school leaders and really try to say it's okay to allow high school particularly, especially those first two years, and open it up a little bit more.
Debra Wilson: I love that. That is a perfect note for us to end on. Thank you, Jeff, so much for joining us today. And I look forward to the next time we can catch up in person.
Jeff Selingo: Thank you.