Demand & Reward

At SSATB this week, Pat Bassett, President of NAIS had some interesting things to say. He always does. I like to hear him speak. But, then again, so did the person who introduced him!*

Among the many interesting things he had to say, he said our schools really needed to wrestle with what are the skills and values that the 21st Century will demand and reward. I love that question and I would love to think about it and wrestle with it. I would love to have my school consider it and make it the topic of a faculty roundtable. It challenges our pasts and makes us ponder the future.

But, unfortunately, it is the wrong question.

Sad as it may be, our colleagues in the university admissions offices sit squarely between what programs and experiences we choose to offer and the very skills and values that the 21st Century will demand and reward. The reality those of us in school administration must face (versus those in school classrooms or those big thinkers like Pat) is that at the end of the day, the vast (vast!) majority of parents are not shelling out independent school tuition to a school without an impressive and mission-appropriate university placement list. Until the likes of the universities our parents envision for their children start to demand and reward those 21st Century skills and values in the admission selection processes, we will not be teaching or nurturing them, lest we do so at our peril.

This whole line of thought is similar to the one I had when NAIS was in Boston a number of years ago. Ruth Simmons, the president of Brown University (the first African-American named president of an Ivy League institution), charged us with what we should be doing to prepare students for the likes of Brown and all of higher education. She spoke so passionately and interestingly about diversity (in all its forms) that I raced back to my hotel room and logged onto the Brown University website. I was so excited and curious to see their application materials and how the criteria and questions therein reflected this important skill set and perspective their president valued. Call me an admissions geek.

Crushing disappointment followed by anger were my emotions as I noticed that standardized test scores, generic college essay questions, class rank, and gpa’s were still all of import to Brown University’s admissions committee. Nothing on their website or in their materials asked applicants about their experience with diversity, contributions they have made, lessons they have learned, perspectives they would bring to the Brown community. I actually sent her a letter. I never heard back.

We know the world is a changing place and whether you work with kindergarten or upper school candidates for admission, we can’t imagine the demands that will be placed on them or the life they will inhabit. We want to give them all that we can to make them the best prepared they can be, as has always been our tradition in independent schools. It’s a good and noble and valuable tradition.

But it comes with a high price tag, particularly in this economy. And unfortunately, it leaves us having to instead ask ourselves what are the skills and values that the 21st Century university admissions office will demand and reward.

Sad.



*If you weren’t at SSATB, I had the honour of introducing Pat. My remarks included a porn reference. I'll leave it at that.

Who are these people??

Greetings from SSATB in Phoenix. For those of you not here, apologies this post may be conference-centric. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the fact that the most popular workshop I’ve attended in the last two days was called “Keep the Job. Lose the Stress”. The room was literally standing-room only. People were seated on the floor in the aisles and piled up at the door, peeking and listening in. Now, I was in this session because I have to renew my Canadian work papers this school year and I thought it a good idea to have a back-up plan in case the Canadian government decided it would have no more of me.

What was fascinating was the number of very seasoned and very respected colleagues who were in this session. One was a past winner of an SSATB award and another I know has been at his school over 20 years and enjoys full enrollment! And then there’s the sheer volume of people in attendance, ranging from rookies to seasoned professionals. What are we to make of this?

Heather Hoerle has gone on this international listening tour through the US and Canada as she has ascended to her post. A great idea I think and my understanding is the tour has made 14 stops so far. In the opening session, she shared with us what she has learned and heard from her far-flung tour of member schools. The very first thing she mentioned was a call from the membership to invest in the test and be sure it is the best it can be.

Who are these people??

I’m not doubting what she’s heard but I’m wondering from whom. The colleagues I talk to are worried about the recession, meeting unrealistic enrollment goals, fighting back the flood of Chinese interest, and figuring out how to maximize financial aid. They are jockeying for respect and resources from their head and board, and trying to be heard by their administrative colleagues. And based on my experience today, they are a bit nervous about their job security, despite their accomplishments. Not a one of them is questioning the validity of the SSAT test. But that’s just my personal network.

SSATB: is it a testing organization with admissions professionals or an admissions organization with a test? I think there is a challenge going forward to finally wrestle this question to the ground. Can it be both? Maybe. But it better know which is the dominant personality and, for now, it seems to me that we have never craved more than we do at this moment a national voice of advocacy and expertise.

In 500 words.

As I start this post, I expect it to be short because I’m not sure what to think of this article from the Wall Street Journal about changes in admissions essay questions to elite MBA programmes. I’m really just sharing. Some of the questions are interesting and even the formats can be intriguing, like the school that wanted the response limited to a tweet. (I guess they assume any MBA applicant worth their trouble has a Twitter account and “tweets”.)

There is some noted concern that paid consultants influence their essays although that’s not much of a stretch from our own concerns that parents influence the essays that we read. I like the essay topics that are grounded in the mission of a school better than the generic ones about challenges, role models/mentors, and what should we know about you. I just spent the last half an hour looking for some good examples from independent schools and what I found was that most of us now have our applications and questionnaires hidden behind logins and online applications. But that’s another topic.

One school did make a nice statement about itself but then followed it up with the pedestrian “how will you contribute?” question. It started well enough but the actual question could be copied and pasted from most other applications. On the other hand, how much does it matter?

I hope they are out there but I don’t really know any colleagues who place so much emphasis on the essay that it can sway a decision one way or the other, despite all other measurable evidence to the contrary. If that is true and the essay can’t win admission for an otherwise weak candidate or deny admission to an otherwise strong candidate, then why bother?

I always read the essay and it is actually one of the first things I go to when reviewing a candidate. But I admit it’s not going to make a paradigm shift in my thinking or decision-making. It is just interesting.

So why require it? I don’t quite know.

Meet Erin

Interesting post this week in Jacques Steinberg’s blog at the New York Times, “The Choice: Demystifying College Admissions and Aid” about campus visits. (If you don’t follow Steinberg’s blog, you should. I’ve added it to the sidebar here. You should also read his gripping book, "The Gatekeepers.") As anyone who has done this work for a while knows, what happens in higher education eventually trickles down to independent schools. Following “The Choice” has proven to be a forewarning of things to come.

The most recent post was written by Lily Altavena about the somewhat unexpected consistency of campus visits this summer. Going to a campus and checking your gut for the right elusive “fit” is still a sacred part of the process, seemingly unhampered by the uptick in plane ticket fares or prices at the pump. I have certainly seen the same in my own experience this past year. As I prepared year-ending stats last week (yes, just a fortnight before we start with year-beginning stats!), Ridley College had a 27% increase in campus visits in 2010/2011. It certainly makes me wonder—if not actually assume—that the campus visit is even more important at these more tender ages. After all, at Ridley we start boarding at age ten. How can a parent enroll their ten year old in a school they have never seen? And when possible and affordable, I would imagine we get more visits featuring both parents instead of maybe the more typical one-parent/one-student combo on the college tour circuit.

Last summer I read somewhere (I tried earnestly to find you my source to quote but I can’t) that 77% of college-bound students listed the campus visit as the most influential factor in their decision. I don’t suppose that surprises much of anyone. No matter how much we spend on marketing materials, websites or plane tickets around the world, nothing confirms a student and family’s choice more than the proverbial “gut feeling” they get from a visit. It’s actually maddening how little control we have in the end when the gut can override an expensive, expansive and sophisticated marketing and yield campaign.

So my office started thinking about this at the start of the summer. We know those 2012 families visiting early are going to be key and we wanted to cement their interest in Ridley before school started in the fall and they had to make decisions about where to file applications. But how could we take an essentially abandoned campus and make it memorable? How could we get them more than just interested but actually excited about coming to see us, sometimes with both temperature and humidity at 90%+!?

Each summer we hire a recent graduate to work in the office and give all our tours (and stuff envelopes and fetch Starbucks and take inventory of our brochures and do data entry and…). Since we have only one tour guide all summer, we decided to generate some excitement and anticipation among our visiting families. We created a video that was emailed out to families before their visit introducing Erin and hitting some of our key messages. We thought if they felt they knew her, it’d make the connection both more immediate and more authentic.

We won’t know until a year from now if we saw uncommon yield success among those families but certainly the feedback we received was most positive. Families—and, more importantly, prospective students—felt they had a connection to both Ridley and to Erin before they even stepped foot on campus. We were excited to welcome them and they were excited to be here. And by having information about Erin and about Ridley before their visit, it shaped their questions and heightened their enthusiasm.

Meet Erin here.

The D-Word

Friends were visiting from Washington, D.C. this weekend. Actually, it was my first admissions boss ever and her husband although she long ago stopped being my boss but thankfully has remained my good friend. But you can still feel free to blame her for my presence in our profession—she encouraged me!

This was their first visit and so I took them on the obligatory tour of campus—after, of course, the obligatory visit to Niagara Falls. While touring, she commented on the stately grandeur of our d*rms (see, I can’t even type it out!). It was at this point that I struck with the precision of a rattle snake and corrected the error of her ways. “They’re houses,” I exclaimed, and went on to explain Ridley’s residential commitment and philosophy as the largest boarding programme in the province. Being a true and traditional boarding school, you approach your residential program with the utmost seriousness.

Now my friend has since left the world of admissions (it IS possible apparently) and is in project management for a real estate development corporation. Part of her work involves overseeing apartment complexes throughout the mid-Atlantic. As we continued on our tour of Ridley she explained to me that her company is very clear on their expectation that those who live in the apartments are considered residents, not tenants (the T-word). In doing so, they send a message, if only a reinforcing one amongst themselves, about how they do business and how they treat and engage their customers.

These little rules might seem silly or trivial but, in my experience, they aid in creating a mindset and an approach to our work that helps dictate our actions and priorities. At a previous school where I was director, we implemented an internal office motto of “Families First” to remind ourselves that walk-ins, late arriving appointments, and telephone calls were all our top priority and not an interruption to our day or our duties. Our enrollment did not allow us to roll our eyes at any of these people and instead we needed to embrace them. And from my perspective as the objective outsider who had joined this office, it worked. I saw a decidedly different—and better—outlook from the staff and how they approached some of our more challenging prospective families. And, even more importantly, it was reflected in the numbers.

The famous organizational guru Stephen Covey and author of the The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People coined the phrase, “Start with the end in mind.” If we think houses not d*orms, and residents not tenants, then we just may shape the thinking of our staffs and our colleagues towards our enrollments ends.

And wouldn’t our schools (if not the world) be a better place if everyone thought as we did??

No Salesman Sundays

There is a car dealership in the GTA (that’s Greater Toronto Area for my American friends) that has blitzed the radio airwaves with a new campaign. And if the goal of such a blitz is to create chatter about your business or product, they win! Everybody is talking about this ad—and the concept behind it.

This car dealership has introduced No Salesman Sundays. The dealership will be open and there will be a skeleton staff on hand to distribute keys and the like but they promise not a salesman will be found. They won’t be lurking behind SUV’s, jumping out from between cars in the parking lot, offering a coffee and their friendship, or any of the other things one pictures when they fear the gauntlet of buying a new car.

But you will be able to roam the lot and sit in the cars, look at materials, and take test drives, all at your leisure and all without the hungry eyes of a salesman following you around the joint. Come and go as you like, stay as long or as little as you like. I’m almost tempted to go just to see if they garner a crowd or not. Even if they don’t, the pitch is certainly the hot topic of mid-August.

What would this look like at our schools? Do we throw out some pastries and coffee on a Sunday morning, unlock all the buildings and classrooms and labs, and then walk away? Maybe we staff some teachers around to answer questions but we promise prospective families nobody will be asking questions of them, not the least of which is their name and email address.

We have 115 CCT cameras on the 108 acres of Ridley. I foresee some sort of prep school version of “Sell This House”. We secretly record their reactions and commentary on the security cameras, play it back for all to see, and then run around trying to fix what we think were legitimate criticisms. And then invite them back.

Could be fun I suppose. But who has time for fun?

I was a vegan.

I’m fresh off a visit to see friends in San Francisco. If you haven’t been, that’s a city with an unmatched coffee culture, at least unmatched in North America. On Saturday, we went to the Saturday coffee place, which, for a non-coffee drinker like me, renders me clueless as to why it can’t also be the Monday to Friday coffee place. Or at least also the Sunday coffee place. (And yes we went somewhere else entirely different on Sunday.) See: aforementioned unmatched coffee culture.

Here’s the exchange between the barista and me:

Me: I’d like large non-fat latte and a small Pellegrino.
BD*: Would you like any pastry with that?
Me: No, thank you. Just the drinks.
BD: The pastries are amazing here. It’s what we’re known for.
Me: They look mighty good but I think we’re fine, thank you.
BD: Dude, I was a vegan before I worked here.

Stage direction: Cut to me walking away with a cinnamon roll dripping with caramel sauce and a blueberry muffin the size of a hubcap.

Now you might think I got snookered into some excellent salesmanship. And maybe I did but his hair that suggested the lack of shampoo and scissors, the tattoos running up and down his arms, the clothes fresh from the Salvation Army runways of Paris, and his quintessential vegan absence of any body fat or muscle (i.e. lanky) all seemed to validate his story. If it wasn’t true, he sure as heck looked the part. Welcome to San Francisco.

The brilliant guys at TargetX who advises colleges and universities on admissions always encourage tour guides to think, “Stories, not statistics. People, not programs.” BD could have told me how popular his pastries were or something about how supposedly healthy I’d find the blueberry muffin (program/statistics) but instead he made it personal, authentic, and he made the connection (people/stories). And I walked away with two seriously large pastries, both in size and price. Plus my drinks.

There’s got to be a lesson there somewhere.

*Barista Dude