Francesca: This is Francesca from the Smart Growth Rocket Podcast by topclassedge.com. More people than ever are making big leap to their goals, carving their own paths, and being really successful in the process. And on this show, I talk to these bright, shiny successful professionals and entrepreneurs to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they’re taking advantage of, so we can all be happier and wealthier. All right everyone, so I am extremely excited because we have an amazing podcast here for you today. I would like to welcome Katelyn Clapper. Katelyn is a certified educational planner, and she’s going to be gracing us with her presence and telling us all about how the American College Admissions system slash process works from her own perspective. So, Katelyn, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself.
Katelyn: Thanks for the welcome, Francesca. Really happy to be with you today. I have been an independent educational consultant for almost 18 years and have had my own private practice for most of that time. Prior to that, I worked in college admissions and college administration work at three different Boston area colleges. But it’s my work and college admissions at the very beginning of my career that sort of brought me full circle and back to my work with students and also with other professionals.
I am a educator in our field. As you might be aware, I teach in a certificate program for educational consultants through the University of California Irvine and I’ve been doing that for about eight years as well. I am a Steve Antonoff. One of our leaders in our profession likes to refer to it absolutely, a passionate student of colleges.
I have throughout my career, visited over 350 unique college campuses in the US and in Canada, where I know many of your listeners are from. Additionally, revisited hundreds of those schools. So at this point, I’m up to more than 500 college visits in my lifetime, which is a lot. Your listeners can’t see where I’m sitting right now, but I know that you can see behind me. I have a magnet board that has just a fraction of my collection of magnets that I collect from all of my campuses.
I have over 300 magnets in my office, so it can be a little overwhelming for a video chat. So I only have one right behind my head, but I tried to represent every state and country that I’ve visited on the one board, just a lover of the college experience in sharing that enthusiasm with my students and my families.
Francesca: Amazing, so this is just out of curiosity, I love the magnets and it’s sparking a question already. Not that you’re playing favorites, but do you have a favorite top, even let’s say three campuses, just based on anything? Based on just the feel that you get, the campus, the architecture, anything?
Katelyn: So I get this question a lot and I absolutely refuse to answer it.
Francesca: You don’t wanna play favorite.
Katelyn: But you know what I say is people think I’m being disingenuous, but it’s genuinely the case that almost every college campus that I set foot on, I get excited about because I think of the perfect student fit for that campus. So it’s a favorite for this kind of a student or for this particular student.
I think, oh my goodness, this is perfect for this student. I don’t believe in the Cinderella Syndrome where there’s one perfect fit for every single student. I think there’s a huge variety of great fit options for all the students that we work with and everyone who’s looking for a college. I went to school at one of the most beautiful campuses in America, very small.
I went to the Women’s College Scripps College. It’s one of the Claremont Colleges Consortium in Southern California. It is just this beautiful postcard picture of Spanish architecture and orange trees. And in fact, I got married on my college campus, on a lawn that’s called Elm Tree Lawn, where we also graduated, as new college graduates ready to face the world.
Francesca: That’s so romantic. Have you ever been by chance to the University of Toronto, and I recall you mentioned that you’ve been to a couple of kids?
Katelyn: I have been to the University of Toronto. Yes.
Francesca: It’s very,
Katelyn: So that’s my weird quirky gift, Francesca, is that, you know, you’ve probably met students that can remember statistics about certain things. I know in the US there’s a huge obsession with sports statistics and players and that kind of thing. I just have this crazy visual memory of all the schools that I’ve been on. It’s actually one of the things that I really recommend to students when they tour colleges, is that they allow themselves to be truly immersed in the tour experience. You know, not on their phone, not taking notes. Believe it or not, I don’t think that that’s the best space for you to be when you’re visiting a college campus. But just to be totally immersed in that visual, auditory, physical experience of being on the campus. Because I know for myself, it works for me. I do not take pictures. I do not take notes while I’m on the tour. I might go back later and take pictures, but when I’m on the tour, I am just completely immersed in that experience.
You know, you wanna be in student mode when you visit the school, right? And you wanna make sure that you’ve taken scrupulous notes, but you can take those just as well afterwards, and any of the data pieces that you’re listening to, you can gather from the website, right? You’re gonna miss something if your head’s in a notebook or on your phone.
Francesca: I’m really excited to talk about this one. I know we had a slew of questions and who knows how many we’ll get to today, but I definitely wanted to ask about the admissions process. When an application lands on the admissions officer’s lab, or, well, not actually, but when they get one of those applications, I’d love to know what’s the process like from that stab?
Katelyn: So I always gave the copy at that when I began in college admissions several decades ago. We were still reading applications in a physical file. In many ways, the review process has not changed over the 30 years since I began in my career. But what has changed is the technology and the ability to review applications digitally for most colleges. And I will say that what I’m about to tell you, I have refreshed through my conversations with my colleagues and talking with admissions officers across the country at different types of colleges and universities.
I think one thing that’s important for students to understand is the length of time that’s devoted to an application. The National Association of College Admissions Counselor, which is called NACAC, does a survey every several years about any number of admission practices. In that survey, they try to average the amount of time that’s spent reviewing an application and nationwide across a very wide range of institutions, public, private, small, medium, large. The average amount of time to review an application is eight minutes. So on one end you might have a five minute review, and on the other end you might have a 20 minute review. And in many cases, there might be an additional review that goes on through a committee process.
At some colleges, every application goes through a committee process. After an initial review, there are some schools that will team up. In fact, most colleges these days have a double reader process. Either the two readers are actually sitting side by side, either in a virtual session or physically side by side. In many cases, at some schools, There will be what I refer to as sort of a triage reader, somebody who goes in and initially reviews the application and takes all the pertinent notes for a more senior reader to make the final decision.
There are a lot of different approaches to the review process, but fundamentally everybody’s looking at the same things, right? Particularly where you have some common application platforms. Most notably in the United States, we have the platform called, the common application, and there are certainly some state university systems that have their own platforms as well. Like most famously, the University of Texas and the University of California, also have application portals where they’re asking students to file through their own unique portal.
But most of those pieces of the review process are gonna be the same for the majority of college admissions officers. And they include a high school transcript, and that’s your grades. Admissions officers lean heavily on what’s called the high school profile, and that is a summary of the high school, which includes things like the percentage of seniors that go on to college, the average scores for the previous year’s senior class, the curriculum at that high school, and what the honors or advanced placement or International Baccalaureate system might look like in that high school, usually includes a summary of the grading system and how the GPA is calculated because in the US high schools have a pretty wide variety of GPA standards.
It’s important to understand that as an admissions officer, before you plunge into the actual transcript, is this a high school that has a GP out of a four point system, which is pretty standard internationally, or is it a five point system or a six point system or a 12 point system? I’ve actually seen that before. So that’s a pretty important piece to understand.
And then there’s usually some other details around the community where this high school’s located in a unique programs that students might be able to access through the high school? I’m not entirely sure because I’d never engaged in international admissions myself as a reader or as a counselor. Whether or not Canadian high schools can provide that kind of information to admissions officers. But one of the things that I tell my adult students, my students who are studying to be educational consultants, is that all American campuses have someone in their admissions office who is an international admissions specialist.
So it is their job to understand the high schools that they receive applications from internationally. And if there’s a profile to chase down, they chase it down. If it requires having a more in-depth conversation with the director of high school guidance in that international school, they will do that, or for the headmaster or whatever the case may be, if the school is unknown to them. And I will say, you have to take this on faith that admissions offices will take this added step to get to know your high school. But those are the two first critical pieces relative to academics.
And then there’s testing. We are living through very interesting times relative to testing because of covid, but we’re living through interesting times relative to the academic profile overall because of Covid, right? The official testing that many colleges will ask to be provided with. And in the case of international students, that might also, particularly where their first language is not English, might also include taking the tofu, and that is going to be on a case by case basis. It becomes incumbent on that international student to understand what those specific requirements are for each college.
And then this is where some of the things in the application might deviate a bit for international students who might be applying to other universities outside of US universities. And that is the application itself, which includes not just honors and information about their high school curriculum and what they’re taking in their final year in high school. Some information about their family, but also their activities. There is this emphasis on a, what’s called a holistic review in the United States admissions process. That includes the things that students have been involved in outside the academic realm. These activities might have an academic component to them, right? So it could be a speech club, it could be a science club, a robotics club. These are things that are tangentially academic, right?
Francesca: Yes.
Katelyn: It could also be summer programs that have an academic focus that students have sought out. It could be independent research. I’ve had a worked for the student once, Francesca, who filed for a patent. So, you know, these are things that are not exclusive of the academic realm, but they also can include things like athletics and artistic pursuits. But again, those artistic pursuits can also have an overlap with academics, right.
What an admissions officer is looking for, I believe in the variety of activities is commitment to an activity, an institution, a group, whatever it is. So commitment, time, some level of initiative that doesn’t necessarily need to be the president of the club or the lead in the play or the captain of the team. Something that the student owned and took a risk with. I would say the more selective the admissions process, the higher the expectations become.
And then finally there is the essay component. This can be a very different experience for international students who might be asked for other universities to write to their specific academic interests. How they’ve nurtured them in high school and what they intend to pursue in college. But for the US admissions process, that essay is really encouraged to be about a completely different type of topic. And, one of the things that we, in our practice, advise our students to consider as we brainstorm with them on their topics for the main college essay is what are the other questions that the college might be asking you? These are called supplement questions.
So there’s the main college essay, what we typically refer to as the personal statement or primary common app essay or or whatever. For most of the students applying to US colleges, it’s an essay of 500 to 650 words, and that’s the range. We encourage students even before they begin brainstorming to consider what those other essays might be. I would say that the most common essay that our students encounter is a supplement essay from the college or university asking why are you interested in our college, or what makes us a good fit. And/or why are you interested in studying what you want to study? So this is gonna be familiar for international students, for students coming from Canada, having to write to their academic interests. So if you’re already going to have to write to your academic interests, you don’t want that main personal statement to be about your academic interest.
Francesca: Okay.
Katelyn: Right. You wanna choose a topic that reveals something that we can’t see in any other part of your application or that we can only get a whiff of. And the other piece of that’s really critical to rounding out that holistic review, which I haven’t mentioned I should have mentioned in the academic portion actually, are your recommendations. So students are asked to submit a recommendation from their high school counselor or academic advisor in the case of an international student and from a teacher. So that’s gonna give us even more information about how does the student participate in their community? What are they like in the classroom? It’s going to give a bit more hints about their personality.
I often say to students, you know, you are asking your math teacher and your chemistry teacher to provide a recommendation. We’re gonna have a really strong sense of who you are as a STEM student, but as it turns out, you also love your music. Can you talk about your music or you know, something else? It’s not always appropriate. It doesn’t always work, but that’s some of the guidance that I give my students as they’re considering their topic. But that’s the piece that can be really different I think, for an international student is they approach the American application process. And the essay process.
So they feel like it has to be formal. They feel like it has to, you know, really impress the reader with their academic knowledge. And that’s not necessarily the case. Those are the components of the review process. And I say that typically an admissions officer’s gonna spend roughly half their time, whether it’s five minutes or 10 minutes, reviewing the academic components, and the other half of the time reviewing the personal components. Really, the voice of the student through their essay. What do we know about the student from their recommendations and where have they chosen to spend their time outside of academics?
Francesca: So you probably get this question a lot, and I’m probably the millionth person to ask, but at least in the American admissions process, are the academic portions more important, or maybe is that weighted more heavily compared to the personal portions?
Katelyn: This is where as an applicant, you will never know.
Francesca: You’ll never know, okay.
Katelyn: Because at the end of the day, what I’ve just described to you is an inherently very personal and individualized process, right? So you don’t have any control as an applicant over who your reader will be. They could be a first time reader as I was at the age of 22. Or they could be a very experienced reader who’s been in admissions their entire career. You could have multiple readers with varied experiences. What you’ve chosen to write about could really resonate with one reader and not another. You have to sort of accept that there are pieces of this process that are out of your control, number one, but at a certain level, if you do not have the academic profile to get to the table, as I like to say, some of these other pieces may not come into play. And the degree to which they will come into play or might even balance out some blips in the academic profile is what other pieces do you bring in your background and in your profile that might help this university to round out the diversity of their class? And when I say diversity, I mean diversity in all ways.
Francesca: Okay.
Katelyn: Not just racial, not just citizenship, gender, you know, religion, but socioeconomics, choice in activities, gifts in certain areas. I’ve worked with students who are incredibly talented in activities that aren’t necessarily ones that are sponsored by a college. I worked with an olympic level fencer, who was looking at universities that might not necessarily have a fencing team, but she had a private fencing coach, so she was able to work within her own network to support her fencing. But certainly there were some schools that were very interested in her because of the fencing. Right. And likewise, you know, The students that have these individual passions that are really inspiring.
The student that I mentioned who applied for a patent had been involved in a science competition and had developed a aerodynamic design, I believe it was for a car around the side mirrors. So always humbled by the students that I work with, and I often tell them they’re way smarter than I am. It just really runs the gamut and I think what I’ve been speaking to, in the last few minutes sounds geared towards very selective college admissions, and I’m sensitive to that because I think there are unique and talented students across the full spectrum of universities and colleges in our country. And you don’t necessarily need to be a straight A student to find a fabulous fit in a rigorous college environment and thrive. And at the end of the day, that’s what you should be looking for. You should be looking for a place where you’re not treading water, trying to, you know, just keep your head up where you can really rise to the top, be supported, find great friends, build connections, and build your confidence to go out and tackle the world.
Francesca: That’s it. I love that. I love that so much. From the Canadian perspective, we have these different vernacular where, for example, in Canada, or at least the system that I’m familiar with, colleges are one thing, universities are a different thing. Here, it’s more or less understood that colleges are more vocational, and whereas universities might be more, I guess, academic or it might result in a degree that might help you with, let’s say if you wanna go down medicine or if you want to pursue law engineering, or maybe more what might be considered an academic route. I’m just kind of curious about the vernacular, the differences there.
Katelyn: But you do have private and public universities in Canada?
Francesca: That exists.
Katelyn: Right? So your listeners probably have a sense of how public universities are underwritten by tax revenue and usually can support lower tuition for students to attend. Making an education more accessible, right?
Francesca: Right.
Katelyn: To a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds that extends to the United States as well. Except that our public universities are sponsored by each individual state in the country. That in-state tuition benefit is extended to the students that are residents of that state. If you are a student from out of state or out of country, you will pay an out-of-state tuition, which is, you know, depending on where you’re coming from, anywhere from 50% or more of the in-state tuition rate.
That’s the public university system in the smallest nutshell I can come up with, as opposed to the private university system, which is probably not too different than it exists in Canada, where tuition is the same for everyone who applies and can be very comparable to what you might pay as an out-of-state student at a public university. So there’s a cost differential, certainly between private and public. But it’s very interesting to think about the words college and university, because I think even in the US there’s a misunderstanding about the use of college and university.
Generally speaking, a college is focused on providing undergraduate education only. So in the US that’s a Bachelor of Arts or a bachelor’s of science. A University is a institution that provides master’s in PhD level degrees as well. However, there’s some anomalies like Boston College, which is a university. So Boston College is the name of a mid-size university outside Boston, like its neighbor Boston University. They’re both universities. There are also universities that have famous colleges. So for example, Harvard University is home to Harvard College. Harvard College is the undergraduate unit of Harvard University.
Francesca: I see. Yes.
Katelyn: Within large universities in the US, there are often smaller colleges or schools that students will apply to specifically. So I used to work at Boston University and within Boston University there is the College of General Studies. There is the College of Communication. There’s the Questrom School of Management. There’s the College of Engineering, and there’s the College of Liberal Arts. There’s also the School for Fine Arts. There is a school for hospitality managed the Sergeant College of Allied Health Professions. I’m sure I’m missing a few. There’s a new partnership with Wheelock College for Education as an applicant to Boston University. A student would be applying to a specific college. Within the university and that college, because it’s within a larger university system, is most likely to provide undergraduate degrees, graduate degrees, PhDs. You are a student at Boston University within a smaller college. Another vernacular challenge for students coming from out of the US and that is the reference to departments and majors.
Francesca: Yes.
Katelyn: I think that they’re often called programs of study or,
Francesca: Pretty much,
Katelyn: A program and people in the US or people say, what? What’s a program?
Francesca: You don’t have programs?
Katelyn: That’s something you get when you go to a theater show program. The playbill, you know, so within the US, individual disciplines are called the majors, or you have a major that’s housed within a department. So I studied art history in college. My major was art history and I had a minor in economics. So I took a certain number of courses to qualify for the minor, and I took a certain number of courses to qualify for the major. They were both housed in different departments, but I went to a small liberal arts college that only granted bachelor’s degrees. So I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in art history. I went to one of the smallest women’s colleges in the country at the time. I graduated with a class of 120 women, and I went on to work for one of the largest private universities in the country representing Boston University. So it was a very big shift in my conception of an undergraduate education, you know. That’s maybe a topic for another podcast.
Francesca: Or another day. Yeah. Honestly, it’s super vernacular.
Katelyn: What? Yeah, and also just what can you hope to get out of a liberal arts education versus the university? What are things to consider in terms of your learning style and you know, what suits you? Because there are just so many choices in the US to consider.
Francesca: Even the term liberal arts college or liberal arts university, if that exists there. That’s not something that we commonly say in Canada. For example, I’ve never heard anybody say, I want to apply to a liberal arts college or a liberal arts university. That doesn’t really exist.
Katelyn: Well, and you know what? There’s also a lot of misnomers within the US about what a liberal arts college means. You’ll encounter people who say you think a liberal arts college is liberal and it’s political leanings.
Francesca: But it’s not.
Katelyn: It’s not, not at all. The liberal arts are defined as the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences.
Francesca: Like chemistry, biology, physics.
Katelyn: Absolutely.
Francesca: That’s a liberal arts.
Katelyn: Yes. So within the science areas, at a liberal arts college, you can find math, chemistry, physics, biology. You can find subsets of the sciences, computer science. You can find, my daughter went to a liberal arts college and studied geology. Within the social sciences, you can find history in political science and economics and statistics and sociology. And then within the humanities, you can find literature and religion, art, history, the arts, all fashion, you know, dance, music, visual arts, theater.
So most liberal arts colleges have more than 60 majors available to their students. They might not have as finely detailed sub majors, oftentimes, like I might need a student, for example, who wants to study criminal justice, and you will find that you can take criminal justice courses within a sociology department, but a liberal arts college might not have a criminal justice major. So there can be some really limited thinking around the liberal arts if you don’t really understand what it means. But if you wanted to study biology, you would be applying to the College of Liberal Arts.
Francesca: That kind of blows my mind a little bit. Cause I, in my mind, liberal arts is, you know, arts, drama, and music.
Katelyn: No. But you know what, Francesca, that’s not unique to the Canadian perspective. I encounter that all the time in the US. You know, if you’re not exposed to it and you got a more professionally oriented education, not even a technically oriented one.
Francesca: Right.
Katelyn: But professionally one through, let’s say, business education, engineering, then you might not really understand what that means. But I will tell you that in most US institutions, even if you are choosing a pre-professional tract, like the ones that I just mentioned, the university is going to ask you to also fulfill certain general education requirements within the College of Liberal Arts.
Francesca: Right. Okay. So some other courses maybe to round out the education.
Katelyn: Yes. To round out the education.
Francesca: Okay yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. We could honestly go on, but I think, maybe time is up for today at least. I’d love to invite you back if you’re open to it.
Katelyn: Absolutely.
Francesca: But just as a last little note, where can we find either more information about this process or anything else that we talked about today that you might be interested in plugging, I guess.
Katelyn: I am a member of a number of professional organizations that send students towards, you know, hiring educational consultants and finding out more about the college process itself. But one of the ones that I mentioned at the very top of the hour is the National Association of College Admissions Counselors, which in its very nature sounds like it’s only, you know, geared towards folks who are in college admissions, either on the high school guidance side or independent side, or on the college side, which is true. However, NACAC has wonderful resources for students to begin the college search process on their own, and also information for international students who want sort of a primer on understanding the American college system. So that is where I would send students, you know, as a resource to begin a process. There’s some excellent student guides available on the NACAC site, NACACNET.org. So N A C A C N E T.org.
Francesca: Katelyn, thank you so much. That was nacacnet.org for anyone who’s interested. I’ll have all of the information, of course, in the description as usual, as well as a little more information about Katelyn in case you want to get to know her a little bit better. And again, thank you so much, Katelyn, for your time today. It was wonderful meeting you and having you speak to all of us.
Katelyn: You’re welcome. Thanks so much for having me.
Francesca: Thanks for listening to Smart Growth Rocket. If you feel like you’re enjoying these podcasts and that you’re benefiting, I would absolutely love your support. Feel free to share, like, comment, or continue listening wherever it is that you listen to podcasts. Until next time to your success.