What Really Matters in College Admissions

In today’s episode, I discuss strategies for understanding a college’s evolving needs and how to guide students in presenting their best selves. Tune in for insights on navigating the complex college admissions landscape and making informed decisions.

Access the full recording of the webinar here

Access free resources and learn more about Sheila and her team at Signet Education at signeteducation.com or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheilaakbar/.

Transcript

Sheila Akbar: 0:00

How do we start to navigate that with some confidence, so that our students also have more confidence in themselves, in our guidance as parents, in that you know, at the end of the day, we all come through this with our relationships, our sanity intact, and some great college choices. Hey everybody, and welcome back to don't force it how to get into college without losing yourself in the process. I'm so excited to kick off a new season of the podcast, and today we're going to start with a replay of a webinar that I did last May on what really matters in college admissions. This is the question I get most from everybody I meet, from clients, from potential clients, from strangers. I meet on airplanes. This is what everybody wants to know. So I thought I would put down some answers for you. And obviously, since this is a replay of a webinar, there are slides that I'm talking about, I will make sure that the YouTube video of this webinar is linked in the show notes, so you could actually just go watch it. And hopefully it gives you a little confidence and gives you a framework to move through this process, move through high school with your kid with a clear sense of what really matters. And the short answer is, what matters is that you've got a great kid, and that you can embrace that and embrace their strengths and help those strengths lead their application process. So take a listen. I'll see you on the other side. Really excited to have you all here today to talk about what really matters in college admissions and selective college admissions. I know this is a hot topic. It's probably the question I get asked, I don't know, 2030, times a week, and I have an answer that I'm really excited to share with you all, and I will also start us off with some reflection questions. If you can tell me in just a few words what you think actually matters in college admissions, I hear all sorts of things, you know, and there's no one answer that encapsulate everything. But I know a lot of us come into this having some clear ideas or clear expectations of what we think matters in this process. How does that make you feel about your kids prospects for college? Are we feeling good? Are we feeling confident? I don't think you would be here if you all were, but hopefully we're somewhere along that spectrum. How do we how do we feel? We're worried, right? We're really worried. Where do we go? How are we going to survive this? Given that we're feeling that way, we think we know what matters. We're feeling like, oh gosh, we have no chance. How does that make you feel about yourself as a parent? I know I'm asking the real questions here, but here we are sharing our, you know, most vulnerable feelings that we're feeling defeated as parents lost. We don't know how to help our kids. We're stressed about their prospects for the future. We don't really know what matters, right? I want you to take some comfort in the fact that you're among a whole bunch of other people who feel the same way. You are not the only people feeling this way. You're not the only people with these questions, and I think the more we can confide in each other, the better off we will all be. And so with that spirit, today, I want to take you through what actually matters in college admissions, and how you can start to navigate those feelings, especially when you're feeling lost or lost at sea. How do we start to navigate that with some confidence, so that our students also have more confidence in themselves, in our guidance as parents, and that, you know, at the end of the day, we all come through this with our relationships, our sanity intact and some great college choices. Right? Want your kids to have all of the options so that they can grow into the people that they are meant to be, right? So that's what we're here to talk about today. I heard from a parent that I was talking to just a week or two ago, she said, in this process, it feels like you're everything or you're nothing, like if your kid is not the top of their class, winning all the awards, getting the highest scores and grades, then they've got no prospects. Why should they even bother? Right? Of course, I corrected her. That's not actually true, but that is how it feels, and that's definitely kind of the media narrative that's going on. I'm sure a lot of you are wondering, What chance does my kid actually have if this is what we're up against? And then many of us are probably also feeling like, Am I becoming one of those parents? Am I becoming. Mean, so you know, anxious and controlling and micromanaging that I'm going to be pushing my kid away by pushing them to do things that I think will be important for their college process. And that is a hard line to walk, let me tell you, and it is probably the reason, the biggest reason people seek out my advice is because they want to get through this without losing themselves or their kid in the process. So I'm going to get right into and tell you this is what we do. I call this the match pyramid. And colleges are looking for a match. They are not just looking for the best, right? Even though a college application asks for grades and extracurriculars and all of these sort of elements of a student's educational profile. They're not just looking for the people who are at the tippy top of each of those categories they are selecting. It's about a competition. It is a selection they are selecting for match, right? They know that the better a student matches their academic profile and rigor, their particular values and philosophy about the world, their institutional priorities, the better off that student is going to be in their school. Right? That student is going to succeed academically and socially, and is going to also contribute something remarkable to their campus, right? And I know that these are fairly abstract turns. I'm going to break them down for you, and as we go through each one of these, I want you to kind of think about, where does your kid fall, and where are some gaps we might be able to fill, or how is this going to give you a new way to talk about the college process with your child? I also want to point out, before we start our kind of deep dive here, that you can't have any one layer of this pyramid without the others. There are some general priorities here, like academics is the broadest, strongest foundation you want to set for yourself, and then values, and then that sort of remarkable factor is like your edge, that's like the thing that they're really selecting for. But you can't have a remarkable factor and terrible grades. You can't not have a clear values match, but a really strong academic profile and expect to get selected right. These three things have to go together, and I'm hoping that this gives you some confidence that you don't have to choose between raising a good human and going to a good college or helping them get to a good college. And I'll talk more about that as we go. Some broad definitions. First, academics is, you know, how are they doing in school? Their grades, their test scores, their executive functions fall into this category, values. Who are they as a person? What is meaningful to them? What do they see as maybe their purpose, if they have one yet, you know, that's always changing, of course. And how do they treat other people? How do they show up as a person? And then that remarkable factor is like the thing that makes them special. And I will tell you this, and most parents don't believe me, but they already have it. You just don't know what it is. They may not know what it is, but it is already in their DNA. It is already a major part of their life. You just need someone with sort of a broader perspective to help you see what that is, so that you all can lean into it. This is not something you're going to go and invent out of whole cloth. Same with values, same with academics. You're not going to turn them into a straight A student if they are just not one, right? You can close the gap and help them get you know better academic skills and executive functions in place so that they can perform better. But you know, we can't turn students into something that they're not, and that's a message you might hear me say often in this presentation, we need to be thinking about the college process for the student that you actually have because we want them to be successful in college. We're not going to be choosing ideal colleges for an ideal student that has no bearing to the reality of your students, academic abilities or character or their interests, right? This won't work if we're trying to do it that way. All right, let's go and take our deep dive into academics. So you know, as I mentioned, this is how your student does in school. There are a couple of ways that colleges will assess academic ability in the application. They are looking at your overall GPA. They are looking at your grades in your most advanced classes, and they are looking at the rigor of your curriculum. If they require it or accept them, they will also look at test scores like the SAT or the ACT. To some extent, they're going to look at AP and IB and other types of scores, but those tend not to be as important as the SAT and the ACT. Again, if your college, the colleges that you're looking at, require them, there are still many that do not require testing, and there's. Some that are test blind, like the University of California system, and underlying those things is executive functions. This is kind of the functions of the brain that help you get things done. This is time management, organization, setting priorities, impulse control and things like that. If these are weak in a student, you may feel like they're not reaching their potential, or they're not putting in enough effort. You may call them lazy, but oftentimes what this is is that there is a set of skills that they have not fully developed yet or learned to accommodate, right? And we could talk more about executive functions if this is something that seems like it is relevant to your student. And it's certainly much more common after the pandemic that students didn't have a chance to really develop these executive functions, and so they tend to be a little weak. Kids don't know how to study, they're not organized, they're procrastinating. All of these things kind of fall into that category. And as you can kind of tell, if you have some challenges in executive functions that's going to show up in your academic performance. If you don't know how to study for a test, you probably won't do that well on a test, or maybe you could do better. And so executive function is not something they're explicitly measuring on the application form. They're not asking for a neuropsychological evaluation or anything like that, but they are indirectly measuring them by looking at your academic performance, and, of course, looking at your extracurriculars and how you manage all of that together. Now this is probably pretty obvious to all of you, so we start with the foundations, a lot of college admissions consulting companies or independent Educational Consultants. This is kind of where they step. Let's make sure the academics are really strong, and you're just doing the best you can in these areas. And then we're going to apply to the colleges. But I will show you that, that there's more to the puzzle than just these foundational pieces. And before I do that, I want to show you some of the ways that this is measured. So I'm going to show the actual form that high school counselors fill out when they are supporting their students applying to college. This is part of a common application. You can google common application, school report counselor form, and you will find this form. It's not a secret to anybody, but this is one of those things that your student doesn't actually see or fill out themselves, so you may not be as aware of it. And some of this information is just sort of general information about the school itself, right? What kind of school are we talking about? What's the setting? What kind of courses are offered? Is there a block schedule and things like that? Then they're asking, do you rank your students? And how do you rank your students? And they do actually say, what is the students rank, right? So if a school ranks, they're gonna, they're gonna ask for that. Then there's some information about how they calculate a GPA, what the school considers passing. And then again, the students cumulative GPA. And then down here is where I really want to draw your attention. They're asking about the curriculum that the student has taken, the classes that the student has chosen to take. How do they compare to other students who are on the college track? You know, is this demanding? Very demanding, most demanding. How much is your student pushing themselves? So in conjunction with looking at a transcript and the grades that your student has earned in their classes, they are trying to assess how hard are these classes and how do they compare, maybe, to other schools curriculum. And so this can be a really important part of the context that college admissions officer is considering when they're evaluating your specific student. And a general rule is they want to see students taking the hardest classes that they can do well in and this is how they can tell that. This is how they compare apples to apples across different school districts and even educational systems like IB or maybe the Cambridge system versus the US system. So here's your proof. This is what they're looking at, and this is how they do it. All right, let's move on to values. So values has become a really kind of popular buzzword in sort of the corporate world. Everybody's got to have their core values. And we had significant take values really seriously. They are not just like words on the wall. They are how we interact with clients, interact with students, interact with each other. They really determine even our messaging that we use in our marketing and our website. We we don't use fear, right? We are very strength based, very value based, and we want that to show up everywhere we are, and just like that, you want your student to have a sense of what their core values are, and make sure that they're living them. And of course, we're talking about teenagers, and how are you gonna have a conversation with them about values? It can be, you know, uncomfortably earnest. They may not be ready. To discuss this with you, but I do find that younger generations are much more in touch with their sort of principles and where they draw boundaries, and that is part and parcel of values conversation. Who are you as a person? What kind of behavior standards do you hold yourself to? What do you admire in other people that you look up to or that you're friends with. What's a deal breaker for you, if somebody is this way or isn't this way, is that somebody you're going to hang out with or not hang out with, or respect? And this is important to colleges, as I said, because they want to make sure that a student has a real sense of belonging on their campus, right? So they're selecting for people who really match whatever it is that the school's philosophy is, you know, we can talk about Georgetown, for example, talks a lot about diversity and inclusivity and service to others. We understand what their values are, and students who have demonstrated those values in their lives, through their interactions with their peers, with their teachers, through wherever they're spending their time outside of school, their extracurriculars, they are demonstrating what their values are. So we want students to reflect on where does their time go and what's meaningful to them, and crystallize them into a set of values then they can use to evaluate, are they a match for the school, or is the school a match for them? Right? And this is not about saying, oh, Georgetown values this thing, so I'm going to go out and be this way, right? These things are judged over a long period of time with you know, students have to show up with a lot of consistency. So these have to be authentic, true values to themselves. But the way colleges look at these is they're looking at the extracurriculars. Where is a student choosing to spend their time? You know, we live in a world where everybody is over scheduled, so if a student is dedicating time to something, it must be meaningful to them. What are those things? And what does that say about what the student's priorities and values are? A student's essays are a chance for a student to talk about some of those values, they'll tell stories about when they made a decision about something, or they had to resolve a conflict, or they got really motivated about something, and they grew in some particular way. And those are really all value stories. So that's, you know, one of the big places that colleges will look but the other place, sort of like this form that I just showed you is in the teacher recommendations, right? And now, teacher recommendations consist of two main parts, the first part of the teacher recommendation, it hasn't changed much in, you know, 20 some years, but they are rating the student using the series of checkboxes on various qualities. And there's really only one around academics. All the rest are kind of values, intellectual promise, quality of writing. Maybe that's an academic one, but creative thought, productive discussion. Faculty respect disciplined habits. This is where those executive functions come back in. So if your student is struggling with having discipline habits, that's a place you might want to invest some time and energy in helping them build those maturity, motivation, leadership, integrity, reaction to setbacks. You know integrity is not saying you have to have this specific value integrity is how much a student lives in alignment with their values. That's integrity, right? Concern for Others, I think is a really great one too. Because you know, how a student interacts with their peers in the classroom, in the hallway, is something that teachers will remark on, and if they can show up, you know, living their values all day, every day, teachers are going to notice this and it will make it into their recommendation. So that's really the way you go about this. And I show you this to again, highlight that point that you don't have to choose between raising a good human and getting into a good college. Convey your family values to your student, help them understand their values for themselves, and they will show up as a self aware, mature person with a lot of integrity, and that will show up in their recommendations. And of course, that will also help them in the college process. And what I love about the way we do this work, and it's the reason, you know, I do this work, day in and day out, is because there's these twin goals that I think are both really important. And you know, I know all of us are here to talk about what really matters in college admissions. But think about it. This is your last set of years with your teenager. They are going off to college, you know, living on their own, making choices for themselves as a young adult, and you want to make sure you are setting them up for success in life, not just getting them into a college, right? So following this sort of strategy, this framework, allows you to do that and feel confident you're sending your kid off, ready for that next stage of their life. Not just well they got in. Let's hope everything goes well. After they get in, right? They're ready for the opportunities that await them. And also by filtering the colleges that you apply to, and eventually the college that you select to enroll at, by the values fit and by all these other fits, you know your student is going to be successful there. It's not just, let's get into the best brand name we can and hope for the best, right? It's, let's find the place where our student is really going to thrive and find their people and get set up for the next step in their life. All right? The third element of our match pyramid is the remarkable factor. Now this is where a student's talents, interests, natural strengths, like I said, they already have this. You may not know what it is, but all of those things match what the college is looking for. So it's like the final piece of the puzzle, right? They can have the academic foundation, they can have the values fit, but if they don't have this thing that a college is actually looking for, the institutional priorities we were talking about earlier, they likely won't get selected, right? And when we're talking about the most selective colleges, they're getting, you know, 60,000 applications. If we look at like the UCs, they're getting over 100,000 applications for their the spots in their school. And most of these schools can fill their classes a couple times over with valedictorians and students who have scores in the 99th percentile, and you know, all of these things. So it's not enough to make sure you have the academics or the scores or even the values this thing is the thing that means this student is a great match for this school, right? And I mentioned that finances sometimes plays into this match. If you are applying to a need aware college, they may look at how much financial aid you need, and does that mean you are a match for our school. So keep that in mind as well. And let me tell you how you can tell not necessarily what your students remarkable factor is, but what a college's institutional priorities are. Now, there are lots of ways to get a sense of this, and they don't just come out and say it that's a little unfortunate, but we can, you know, keep advocating for more transparency from their side. But there are things that you can look at to help you understand what their priorities are. And these priorities range right, like they may want to be building a new major out. They may have started a new center for something, and then they need, you know, scholars and students to come in and populate it. They may need a new bassoon player, because everybody has graduated from the school orchestra, or they have recruitment goals for an athletic team, right? The seniors are graduating. We need a new kicker, or whatever it may be. And so those are different sorts of pieces that you can look at, especially if that's one of your students, talents or interests. But what I've got here are just a couple of headlines from a few different colleges. And if you just go to a college website, there's always, like, a news feed on it. I encourage you to look at that as you're researching these colleges to you know, check if they're a fit for your student, because you can tell a lot from what they are touting and where they are investing their money. I'll talk to you about Carnegie Mellon here. Now, Carnegie Mellon, I think, stereotypically, is seen as a very rigorous stem focused school. They also have a different academic unit for different types of subjects, so there is a School of Computer Science, there's a school of arts and humanities, the other sciences are in another school. So there are these sort of siloed institutions within the overall college. It really gives the impression of not only just being this rigorous stem institution, but also that it's not very interdisciplinary. There's not a lot of collaboration or creativity. But one of the things Carnegie Mellon actually, really does have amazing strengths in is in the arts, right theater and actual, like an art school. And what they just announced this was like, within the last month, they just broke ground on this new building, and I can't remember how many millions of dollars they spent on it, but it's a lot of money. And the real headline here is that it's going to bring together science, technology and art in one building. And this not only goes to kind of counteract that maybe prevailing narrative of like a STEM school with this very rigid and separated with a center that is meant to be extremely interdisciplinary and collaborative, but it's also telling us they need students who are interdisciplinary and collaborative, right? So if your student, I've had lots of students like this, like, how do I choose? I love poetry, but I'm also a bio major. What do I do with this? You know, those students have a great home here in at Carnegie Mellon, and maybe. Have been overlooked because of what they previously thought about the school, but this also helps them know, Oh, I gotta tell them this story about how I did this creative project and I collaborated with, you know, all of these technologists, or whatever it was. It helps you understand how to position yourself for that college. Now, you might not do that in your main college essay. But most of these colleges do have smaller supplemental essays where you can start to speak very specifically to what you have gage their priorities to be. I'll just speak very briefly about the Colby and Muhlenberg headlines here. These are two small liberal arts colleges that most people don't think you go to to study hard science or technology, but Colby just received a gift to build up computational and data science, right? So they are going to be looking for students who definitely overlooked Colby. If they were looking for a CS degree or data science degree, Colby was not where they were looking. But now this is a real opportunity for students. And the Muhlenberg headline, I actually included some of the article here too, because it shows you that when they invest in projects like this, it's not just about, you know, improving their campus and reducing their carbon footprint. They're getting opportunities for their students to do internships and site visits. They're going to have a classroom in this renewable energy project, so that's a really amazing hands on way for students to learn, right? So they're investing in this area, and they're giving new opportunities to students. So that might be really interesting to a student who otherwise would never have considered Muhlenberg College to go and study renewable energy. All right? I hope that gives you a sense of what I'm talking about here when we're talking about the match, right? And now what the thing to do is to think about, how do you take this information back to your student? What do you do with it? I've showed you that these are the three things, these three big buckets that colleges look at and are selecting for. But what does that mean now? Right? And I think that we kind of take these three steps, and this actually maybe should have been a circular diagram, because we're going to do it over and over and over again. The first place we focus, like our little cat here, we look in the mirror and we reflect, who am I? What are my values? What are my strengths? What are the moments I'm really proud of? What are the things that I'm really interested in, whether I think it's special or not, or I'm maybe embarrassed that I love this thing this much? What are those things? Because, like I said, students don't often know how amazing they are. They always are, and it takes somebody with a perspective like mine or the people on my team, where we've worked with 1000s of students, we've read 1000s of applications. We really understand what's different about your student against everybody else. And you and your student, you see each other all the time. You might not know that they're that special, or you may have you know some other frame of reference, of comparison. So we help them reflect in sort of a safe space without judgment, to really get to know themselves and not shy away from that, because that is really a big part of just adolescence in general, trying to figure out who you are and who you want to be, and how do you get yourself on that path right? So that's where it starts discover yourself. And that does take time, and I'll give you a timeline in the minute. Then we do this thing we call run the pyramid, which really is about taking what we learned in that discovery and applying it to the match framework of saying, Okay, where are we academically? Do we feel like we could be a little stronger with this academic skill or this executive function, are there things that you can already see? Oh, that's not me at my full potential for this part of the pyramid, right? Just really honest self assessment. Then the values. Where are your values, right now? Where do we not have clarity? Do we have? We captured a value for the significant parts of your life. And then, of course, the top of our triangle, what's remarkable about you? And it's really, you know, one of the joys of my work is to get a student to see how remarkable they are and really start to believe in themselves in a new way. It's really fantastic. But as we run this pyramid, we're always noting, hey, we could get better at this, or maybe we change that, or maybe there's a book I can read that will help me get clear on this value or delve deeper into this subject that I think might be my remarkable factor, and that's what we call bridging the gaps, right? And this is not a mad scramble to turn themselves into something they're not. It is not, you know, rescue miss it in or laying a fake layer over top of whoever they are, as you can see my image here, this girl, even though she's walking through a jungle on a pretty slim little bridge there, she looks really. Confident and she's excited about what's on the other side of that bridge, right? And that's the kind of posture we want to take here. We may not be able to close all of the gaps, and in those cases, especially if you're in the stage where you're starting to evaluate colleges for your college list, if that gap is not closeable, like this, college is really looking for an average 3.9 GPA, and your students down in the twos, we can't, you know, change history and close that gap. We can shorten it, right? And, of course, we want to do everything we can, but this is really helpful for students to, you know, do a self assessment, see where they are in the present moment, and look at where they want to be, and start to put plans in place to close those gaps, right? And then every so often, we're going to do this all over again, right? Usually every three months, we're kind of doing this with students, where we're reflecting. Are these still our values? Are these still our priorities? Are these still your interests? Are we still doing good on our academics, at least at what we expected? And are there other gaps that we can close? Right? So rinse and repeat is the name of the game here. We also want to think about what is your role here. Now, of course, you parents play such an important role in this, but you can't do too much, especially as we are trying to get these young teenagers to turn into adults, we have to know kind of when to step in and when to hold back, when to let them try something on their own, when to let them ask us for help, instead of swooping in and giving the help that we think that they need. So my recommendation here is you can hold the framework that they have to engage in the growth, right? They have to do the reflection. You may sit with them and brainstorm. Hey, you know, I remember this thing happened, and it seems to me, one of your core values might be this, perfectly fine. You can't say here's a list of your core values. I thought about it. You don't have to do any work. Okay? This is about engaging them in the process, giving them some ownership of the process of developing themselves into who they're going to be. And again, I want to say you don't have to choose between raising a good human and getting into a good college. You may have some work to do to figure out what good means in terms of good college, but the goal here is to help your kid, you know, navigate high school successfully and get to the right place for them, to launch them into their adulthood and career and broader lives. Okay, I promised you a timeline. This is how we proceed through things at cignet when we get the great joy of working with a student as young as ninth grade. You can see ninth and 10th grade are really about laying the groundwork. We are thinking about meaningful goals, understanding your course, progression, learning to reflect, exploring things and really just kind of plotting, what are we? What are we trying to achieve here? And bringing them along in this process, all the while we're also helping them kind of adjust the high school, navigate their academics, making sure that their academic skills are where they need to be, so that we can start to focus on this next layer as we round the corner here between 10th and 11th grade. This is when we start to think about, Okay, what's your testing strategy? We like to do diagnostic tests and review them and say, okay, SAT or ACT or no test. And that really informs the building of the college list, which is what we do in the fall of 11th grade. And we are starting to think about, you know, where, where are the other places you can demonstrate your leadership and all of that so that they're in the best position to apply to the colleges that end up on that list. And then we start to think about, okay, what's the story that we want to tell once we have our list, what are the values of these colleges? And what stories can you tell that demonstrate those values. And if there are a couple of common values across all those colleges, which hopefully there are, that might be a great topic for your main essay. And then as we get between the summer of 11th and 12th grade, we're writing all of those essays and preparing all of the materials so that we can review, Polish, proofread and submit. And then after that, we're thinking about, Okay, what else do we need to do to prepare for the college transition? Because, of course, college is just the beginning of the journey. It's not the end, right? So we want to keep that in perspective and make sure that they're able to use the kind of framework and reflection and experimentation and iteration process that we've just taken them through and continue applying it as they move through college and into their adult life. Okay? Well, as I close out this episode, I do want to mention that we have created a much longer, more detailed version of this presentation and turned it into a course that you can buy directly from our website. So check the show notes for how to do that. I actually think official launch might be next week, but I'm teasing it. I'm told that that's a thing that I'm supposed to do. So check that out. Certainly some of the content will be familiar, but like I said, it does go into a lot more detail. It provides a lot of free resources. And an opportunity to do a discounted session with me next week. I've got my friend Don McMillan coming to the podcast to talk about the work he and his team do and helping students choose high schools and apply to independent schools. And this month is going to be full of goodies for you as we ease back into the school year. I can't believe summer's already over, but I'm right here with you, and we'll get through this together. All right, everybody. Thanks so much. We'll talk to you next week.