18th Annual College Admissions Panel! Hour 1

is our eighteenth annual college Admissions Panel. I think this is a critically important program for everyone who listens to Nightside, and I hope we've mentioned this and promoted this enough so that if you're a parent or a grand or betty at a student in high school thinking about applying to college.

You've had a legendary career from being a student and an athlete at Harvard and have worked in admissions there for I'm not going to say how many years, but it's been a few decades and you're a legendary person across the country. So thanks so much for coming back for year eighteen. Bill fitz Simmons, how are you tonight.

another great show. Because when you think about what's happened in over those eighteen years and how higher education has become much more critical in lots of different ways for people in America around the world, it also, at the same time, things that are happening not just at BC but at Harvard, but even on the newscast, you know, things that are happening in the state of Massachusetts with

community colleges and junior colleges. And it's always good for us to remember that about eighty percent of the students who go to college in the United States go to public universities. And it's also good just to remember that as you step back from it all, most of the rest of the world sees America's higher education institutions as the gold standard. So there's a lot for us to live up to. But there's an awful lot going on just in this state alone. That makes me very optimistic for the future.

to Harvard University. You're out finding people. How many states in your career in the last few years have you traveled to just basically tell people in different parts of the country about higher education and about Harvard University.

those talents might lead. We go out with four or five different travel groups every year around the United States and around the world, and you know, we hit over a two or three year period, we hit every state in the US. And you know, we're also doing a lot now virtually, so we're doing things with Zoom recruiting

across the country and around the world. And you know, when you think about you were speculator, and you and I are pretty much contemporaries, Dan as you know, both college goaltenders back in our days most successful.

about twenty percent of Hell grant recipients. There were very few students of color in my era, and today there are many. The idea is that there is talent everywhere, but honestly, opportunity is not possible. It's not there for a lot of people in the same degree as it is for others. So the whole idea is to make sure we get word out to talented students everywhere literally this country and other countries that they have an opportunity

to developed their talents. That's that's the idea, And they don't have to end up at one of our universities. But the whole idea, we hope is that they'll end up making the most of their own talents. But these places have changed.

for Boston College. We were founded back in eighteen sixty three and at the time were really charged with educating the sons of immigrants that were left a few educational opportunities at the time, and we were largely a regional institution for most of our history up until the early nineteen seventies when we were facing some pretty significant financial headwinds, and the leadership at the time, Father Monan and succeeded by Father Lay He had really put Boston College on

a course for growth regionally, but then nationally and internationally as well. We receive somewhere between thirty five and forty thousand applications a year. We're looking for an entering class of about twenty four hundred students, you know, and just as Bill said, you know, our task is really about how do we reach students wherever they are to help

them think about college as an option. As Bill said, not everyone will desire to go to college, but we hope that students are at least thinking about that as an option. And the reality is high schools across the country and around the world are not all the same, They're not all provided the same resources, and there are students that just don't have the wherewithal of their knowledge to really get out there and understand the opportunities that

are available to them. And so it's our job to make sure that as we get out in the road, we're not only visiting schools that routinely send us applicants each year, you know, feeder schools if you will, but that we're we're making sure that we're attending schools that are are opportunist, opportunistic schools for us, those where we see great potential but we just haven't seen the application

volume yet. We work really hard to get into both private and public high schools, to work with community based organizations that that really fill the gap around college counseling at at many underfunded public high schools where you know, if you look in the state of California, for example, there there are nine hundred students in a public high school to every one school counselor, and that school counselor

is not earmarked as a college counselor. There they're truancy officers, their academic advisors, their mental health counselors, and they also do a little bit of college counseling. And so community based organizations are an opportunity for colleges to pair up with nonprofits that are really filling that gap and providing

students with access to information about colleges. And you know, Bills Team and mine, you know, we're out there really trying to make sure that students understand that opportunity is there. And just like Harvard, you know, Boston College is also deeply committed to need based financial aid and making sure that every student who qualifies has the funds they need to be able to accept the offer of admission.

hesitate six one, seven, two, five, four ten thirty six seven, nine, three, one, ten thirty. Those are the two ways to get through. I'll try, We'll try to get to as many of you as possible, I promise, but you have to do your part in that style.

and then the other admissions will be out. They're still they're reading, reading, reading, It's a gargantuan, humongous, herculean task, and for them to take some time for us tonight, it's really very much appreciated. Back on Night's Side as we conduct our eighteenth annual college Admissions panel.

pre eminent schools here in the Boston area. But talking about other issues, So let me start off with again, assuming that the student is interested in going to college, and there are a lot of successful people who never apply to college. They get out in their own in their own business or in the military or whatever, and they're very successful people. How important would you say high school grades are? I know students focus on the Scholastic Aptitude test, whether it's the SAT or the ACT.

We hope as you go through the process, if you're not so lucky to be in a school that is offering absolute top academic opportunities, there are things available and for example, in con academy sort of free free test prep, but also free ideas on how to study different subjects as you're going through high school. So let's start with that, and I want I turn the next step having to do with standardized tests, probably over to you Grant.

standardized test has changed a lot in recent years. I think over the last thirty or forty years, there have been a small number of colleges that have offered test optional admission plan that tended to grow a bit through the two thousands, the twenty tens, but really when the pandemic hit in twenty twenty, in the next cycle, after the pandemic hit, many colleges and universities realized that test centers were closed and students really didn't have access to

take advantage of testing. If a student could take an exam, they were doing so under duress, right if the student behind them was coughing, they were wondering, you know, might they get sick next? And so I think there was a huge shift coming out of the pandemic where the vast majority of colleges, even those that had not previously been test optional, moved into that environment. And then once the pandemic subsided, and you know, we moved into a

different state. Things have begun to evolve again, right, And there are some schools that have re implemented testing, others that you know, still remain test optional. But what test scores have done is they've allowed colleges and universities to understand student performance in context, both nationally and globally. Where high school curriculums can vary so widely, it can be difficult sometimes to really understand a student's strength and potential,

and test scores can do that. There is a predictive element to them. Boston College is an institution that remains test optional, though this year we have added a recommendation to students that if they have scores, we're recommending that they submit them because they again do provide some additional context, an additional opportunity for us to advocate for a student. And honestly, during the test optional time that we went through, there were a lot of students that really struggled with

whether to submit scores. They looked at a mid fifty percent range that a school might provide and they said, well, I'm in the middle fifty percent of that range, right, And so there were students opting not to submit scores when they were scoring in the ninety seventh or ninety eighth percentile nationally, but in their mind, if they weren't above that fifty percent range, they weren't competitive. And that's

really not how we make decisions. Test scores are when they're used, they're one factor of many that provide again, another data element for us to make informed decisions.

And as far as I'm concerned, we can go phone calls for as long as you want to keep the phones ringing six one set, well, not the entire night, that's for sure, But the gentlemen have committed to an hour, and if the phone calls persist, I think we might be able to convince Steven a little longer. Six one, seven, two, five, four, ten, thirty six one seven, nine, three one ten thirty. My name is Dan Ray. I'm just a host of the show.

I'm I'm learning and continue to learn. Every time that we've had one of these college admissions panels, there are a whole bunch of topics that I have questions on. Don't rely upon me to ask you a question, though, because I might just not think of it, and you're thinking of it right now.

ninety four. Boston College gave me a chance in life. I'm first generation college and you know, not having parents who went to college. I don't know what I did on my application to have BC accept me. I can tell you that if I had to apply today, with my SAT scores and my grades, I highly doubt BC would accept me as a student. My question is I hear a lot from parents where their kid is a valedatorian,

a fludatorian. They've got exceptional grades like four point six GPAs, and they discovered the cure for cancer, and they have like remarkable resumes, but they don't get into the colleges that they want to get into. So for a parent like me, I encourage my kids to excel, but I also don't want to kill themselves either getting the grades and the scores. How do you all look at an application?

Do you look at it holistically? Is it in their essays? Like, what do you guys you know, really look at I mean, I know greeves and SATs are important, but let's say, for example, that they do well in school, but their SATs are alton on the weak side no matter how many times they take it. You know, is there is there a strategy? Is there a recipe for how you look at the application?

And you mentioned holistic admission and absolutely both our institutions. I certainly can let Bill talk about how things work at Harvard, but you know, at Boston College where we're starting with the transcripts, and as we talked about in the last segment, if students submit scores, we're going to look at those as well. But the reality is that at the most selective institutions, there's a difference between being being qualified and being competitive, right, And most of our

applicants are qualified, right. They could come to our institutions and do very well and graduate and be quite successful in life. But I've always explained that it's the applicant pool, not the admission office, that sets our selectivity, right. And if students elect to enter the field of a highly selective admission process, they're taking on a bit of risk.

And you know, we are going to be doing our best to make sure that as we craft our class, we're bringing forward students from a wide range of backgrounds. You mentioned being a first generation college student, you know that was given a chance. And I think both of our institutions are really proud of the work that we continue to do at providing an opportunity for access to

students whose families didn't have that opportunity before them. We're proud members of an organization on this quest Bridge, which is a national nonprofit that works to match first generation and low income students with top universities, and we enroll over one hundred students a year through that program. And so we're balancing opportunities like that with going after students that might come from schools that do have really strong

track records of sending students to universities like ours. But you know, there isn't a formula. We're looking at after those objective criteria very much, how that student has engaged in their community, their school community, their local community, how they may have wrote about areas of interest or backgrounds or experiences that they've had that we believe would enrich our communities as we're bringing them into to Boston College. So I wish I could tell you there was a formula,

but there isn't. Our decisions are made after really close consideration of both objective and subjective criteria.

ways that we wanted to head off to college. I was lucky enough to have one sibling go to Yale who knew another one go to stone Hill, and yet another to Boston College, and we all had great experiences. I think the way to think about it, especially over to say the fifty year period, is that one of the great success stories, among other things over fifty years in college admissions, is the fact that so many women now are applying to college, which was not the case before.

As I said initially, and one of the reasons it is a bit more difficult to get into college now. Is a good thing in the sense that people from many different backgrounds who might not previous generations have applied to college are now applying. And the other really great thing, and you can see it right here in the Boston area, is that there are so many great choices, public and private.

We sometimes forget that. You know, we are living on what the world calls the America's college town, and this is a you know, there are forty five institutions of higher education in the immediate area, and if you look even beyond the institutions of higher education, this area is the best in the world right now. If anyone interested in the applied life sciences. When you look at higher education, you look at the hospitals, look at the research possibilities.

This is an amazing place to go to college. And the fact is that seventy percent of Americans will end up going to college within fifty miles of their homes. That's been for quite a while, and most ninety percent will go within five hundred miles of their home. So there are so many great possibilities. And the way we make our choices is that we look at as Grant suggested, we look at the entire person. We call the whole person,

and we'll look at academic accomplishments. We'll look also at extracurricular accomplishments, things that you do to help around the home, things that you might do in work possibilities, as we did in the gas station and store, and we lived right across the street, so we had plenty of opportunity

to do that. But we're also trying to figure out of all these you know, mostly fully qualified students who apply, who might make the biggest contribution to the fellow classmates into the faculty during college, and then what kind of contribution they'll make to the world later on and you know, this is there about fifty of us and it's a one person, one vote, and we put everything up on a screen for everybody to see and discuss and then vote.

But I think we do exactly what you would do if you go back and even just think about your own high school and you could admit a relatively small number of students from your high school to spend four years together in an educational environment. Whom would you choose? Where you just take the ones with the highest test scores and grades. Probably not, although you'd factor that those those variables in, but you'd look way beyond that. And I think that's what colleges do, and that's really what

a great private sector organization will do as well. Look at everything, look at all the talents.

into Columbia for graduate school and moving on. And I worked on Wall Street. I was an investigative reporter. I'm now a doctor of vacupuncture with my own practice, and BC gave me the foundation to really realize what I wanted to be. So I am living proof that if you give someone a chance to excel, chances are they'll do it. I had the right tools and I'm forever grateful for that.

here in the city. I dedicated at least two hundred hours a year of non billable pro bowl work for underserved folks. And as I'm sure the Kale knows, community college is now free in Massachusetts. And I have two part question. The first part of the question is how much outreach do each of your institutions do respect to

drawing from the community college pool. And the other question I have is and it's a concern that I have seems to me that community colleges are becoming more and more trade schools and not focusing on liberal acts and creating thinkers. There seem to be designed. It seems that their mission has become to help people get you know, respectable jobs, but not move on to the next step, to go to go to for your school, to get a higher degree.

spaces available for transfers. But I will tell you whenever we see good possibility of you know, whether it's bunker Hill Community College or Roxbury CC or any of the others around and about, they would certainly get a lot

of attention in our pool. It's a even on the newscast coming in tonight, your your point was made, you know, that there's been a great, great thing that's happened this year this you know, twenty percent increase in students going, you know, to community colleges in state, and that's got to be good long term for the health of the state in terms of developing the full talents of the people in the state in a way perhaps that's never been done before.

as almost a means to an end. And I think you're right that we're losing the opportunity to really educate students about the value of the liberal arts, to be free thinkers, to be problem solvers, to deal with ambiguity, all the things that a strong liberal arts education that students might find at our institutions and so many other places, I think is a critical part of education. We at BC are really trying to also help students that might

be thinking about a two year path. We just opened last year on the former campus of Pine Manor College that is now the Brookline Campus at BC, a two year residential associates degree program. We know one of the challenges with many students at community colleges is the completion rate as students are commuting from home and are distracted

in different places. We're bringing in over one hundred students a year, first generation students from backgrounds that where students need significant financial aid to explore this idea of a two year associate's degree that could give them multiple paths. They could go into the workforce after two years, or they could continue on at Boston College or at another

four year institution to complete a bachelor's degree. So we're trying to be part of the solution, trying to help students that might be thinking about two year associates degrees in a different way, not just think of them as a track for employment, but to think about a four year degree as well.

It is absolutely the true that you have a much better chance of making a lot more money, just to put it bluntly, if you graduate from a four year institution than if you don't, and that has been proven time and again with studies of Georgetown, all kinds of different places over the past few years. And yet there's this somehow urban legend out there that this is not true, that you'd be better off not going to college, and

so on. I mean, one of the things that too that people use is a way to discourage people from going to college. In a funny way, they talk about debt. We haven't required loans for our financial aid. Students are fifty five percent on need based aid. They are not required to take out loans at all. They graduate debt free after the four years. So this is a whole different thing. This urban legend that somehow going to college won't pay off seems to have particularly affected men in

the United States versus women. So in any case, all I'm saying is that we want people to think of college, going to college as a way to become better citizens, citizen leaders, better human beings, better informed about how to live your life, all those other things. But if you do go to college and graduate, you do have a much better chance of economic success than otherwise, just spite what you might hear or on on different social media.