Standing Out as a College Applicant | Interview with Sara Harberson

0:00:17.8Holistic admissions and Asian-American admissions

Jed Macosko: Hi, this is Dr. Jed Macosko, at Wake Forest University and Academic Influence. And today we have Sara Harberson, who has written an exciting new book called Soundbite. And I am just thrilled that this book is such a wonderful tool, written by an expert who has been Dean of Admissions at a great school. Our own Dean of Admissions at Wake Forest University knows you because he was at the same school that you were at, and he says to say hello. So we’re just thrilled to have you to speak to us today. And you know so much about the admissions process, I feel like you could really help students walk through it. So I was glad you’ve already done one interview about that process, and now I kinda wanna focus in on the bigger question about admissions.

So you’ve obviously been following things like the lawsuit between Harvard and Asian-American students and things like that. So tell us what you think about, for example, that case and the future of admissions.

Sara Harberson: Yeah. So I’ve been writing about Asian-Americans in the admissions process for years, one of my op-eds was in the LA Times several years ago, and talked about the underlying bias and discrimination that happens in a lot of elite admissions offices, and it really starts at the top and gets filtered down to even the admissions officers. Different standards for different folks, that’s what happens in college admissions, especially for a highly selective college that uses what we call holistic admissions, which means they’re gonna be looking at the whole student.

So all the pieces of the application, the transcript, test scores you’ve provided, recommendation letters, extracurriculars, essays, but the other piece about holistic admissions is they’re looking at the student’s culture and background and family situation, that all comes into play. And so I’ve been really outspoken about the bias that’s still going on today, against Asian-Americans, students with learning differences, Jewish students. There’s a whole list of students who’ve really had to work sometimes twice, three times, four times as hard just to stand out in an applicant pool or have a better shot of admissions.

I’m all for holistic admissions, that’s how I was trained. I spent 10 years in the admissions office at the University of Pennsylvania before becoming a Dean of Admissions myself. And I lived for holistic admissions, but I never want holistic admissions to keep certain students out of a college, and I think that’s what still goes on today, and I like to speak out about it as much as I can.

Jed: Well, this is a perfect opportunity for you to do so. People who are watching this program will certainly appreciate hearing from somebody who has written about it, thought about it, studied the actual statistics. So feel free to elaborate on where you see is the real problem and is there hope in the future that some of those problems will be resolved.

Sara: There’s always hope, and I always have hope. But when you are in a big admissions office like the one at Penn, and you’re reading easily tens of thousands of applications in a year, when you’re there for 10 years and you’re making decisions, you’re seeing hundreds of thousands of applications across your desk. You see that a college, especially a highly selective college, they want what they don’t have.

And so for example, if we use Asian-Americans, even though they are an under-represented group in our country, they are in many ways over-represented in an applicant pool, meaning that there is a pretty good, sizeable number of students who self-identify as Asian-American that are applying to highly selective colleges. And they have not always had a voice in the admissions office, if you looked at the stack of an admissions office at an elite college for decades, it was mostly white admissions officers, every single Dean of admission was a male, a white male for decades.

But over the last 10 years or so, 20 years, that’s beginning to change, and I think that is a big part of the hope that I see in this process.

Now, what you’ve got to do as a Dean of Admissions is you have to look at your staff and make sure it represents the type of student body that you want on that college campus. So it starts at the top, and it’s really nice to see that the old guard is changing in terms of the Deans of admission.

I remember when I became the Dean of admission at Franklin and Marshall College, I was the youngest Dean of Admissions in the country, and I was the only female Dean of Admissions that Franklin and Marshall had at that point. And if I looked around at my colleagues, I really didn’t have anyone to turn to, at that point when I got the job, I was only a mom of one child, now I’m a mom of three, but it was very difficult being a woman in that position. But things are changing, there’re more women, there are more Deans of admission of color, and a younger generation is beginning to take hold in admissions offices.

I think that the fact is that there needs to be training within an admissions office to make sure that discrimination does not happen in any way, because admissions officers really hold so much power in their hands. And the truth is if they meet a student, they probably forget the student, it comes down to that application that they see in front of them, and they’re only spending sometimes four or five minutes on an application.

So they hold a lot of power. You just need to make sure that you’re hiring the right people. You’re training them properly, and you’re making sure that bias is eliminated as much as possible. Because this still is a human process, but leadership comes from the top and trickles down to the staff.

And so it is my hope as these Deans begin to change and a new younger generation begin to take hold of these admissions offices and really see the admissions process differently, that we’re gonna see major changes in how students are selected moving forward.

Jed: That is a very hopeful picture that you paint. Now, you’ve probably looked at the different schools at the elite level. It seems that Caltech is one school where the fraction of Asian-Americans or students who identify as Asian-Americans is higher than some of the other elite schools. Can you comment on that? And how the future might look... Will the future at elite schools look more like Caltech or will Caltech look like more like the other schools. What do you see happening?

Sara: You do see that at certain colleges, I think the important thing is that we need families to have as much information at their fingertips as possible. So sometimes families will look at the percentage of, let’s say students of color that are represented in a freshman class at a college.

Students of color, that percentage, it usually includes African-Americans, Latinx, Asian-Americans, and a whole host of other students in that group. So it’s very difficult to actually pull out the Asian-Americans from that group, so it actually sometimes looks like a college is doing really well in terms of diversity and Asian-Americans.

But the thing that families don’t know is what was the acceptance rate for Asian-American students? What was the acceptance rate for men versus women? What was the acceptance rate for legacy versus non-legacy or recruited athlete versus non-recruited athlete? That’s information that families don’t know, they can find out the overall acceptance rate, and that may be Asian-Americans make up a certain percentage of the class.

We need to start with the data from the beginning, not what ends up happening at the end. And if we were to look at that, you would probably see the bias and a discrimination right there, you would see lower acceptance rates for certain groups.

What is the future? I think because we’re talking about it, I mean, I talk about bias and discrimination, I talk about coming from a regular background, and how those students are able to stand out in an applicant pool, the more we talk about it, the more we empower students to be proud of who they are, to self-identify, to write about their culture and background.

It really puts them in a powerful position, because then you’re basically telling the admissions officer, you self-identify as Asian-American. If you write about your Asian-American background, you’re basically telling that admissions officer, "Hey, I dare you to discriminate because my culture, my ethnicity, my background is all over this application."

So I love when students talk about their backgrounds, I love when they’re aware of who they are and they use it as a tool to make changes about themselves and changes about the admissions process.

Jed: That’s an interesting thought. It reminds me of the old movie, Clear and Present Danger with Harrison Ford, where he’s giving advice to some president or something. And there’s this opportunity for the president to say that they didn’t know that person. He says, "No, tell them, you know that person and he was a good friend." Even if there might be some conflict over identifying as that person’s friend. Same with your culture, maybe some people will be encouraged to say, "Oh, don’t tell them that you’re Asian-American," but you’re giving a "No go the other way." Just embrace it.

Sara: Go the other side.

Jed: That’s good advice. I like that.

Sara: The thing is, before the lawsuits happened, before there was a case against Harvard and a case against Yale, there were a lot of Asian and Asian-American students who were not self-identifying on their application because they had heard of the bias.

The problem with that is, if they were truly discriminated against in the admissions process, they had no leg to stand on, because they didn’t self-identify. So my entire career, I’ve been saying, "Make sure you self-identify who you are, make sure the admissions officer has an accurate representation of who you are." Number one, it protects you, number two, they are misrepresenting you in the admissions process, that’s the worst part. When an admissions officer doesn’t take the time to get to know a student or doesn’t really invest the time in an application, they will have an inaccurate sense of who you are.

And so it’s really important for students to make it clear, self-identify, put themselves out there, so that there’s never a question of the admissions officer didn’t get who I am, that’s my whole thing about soundbite, if you put what makes you super, super special all over that application, then you know that admissions officer is going to see what you see in yourself.

0:11:57.5Soundbite

Jed: And in your earlier interview, you say you tell your students that you’re advising not to pound that soundbite but to layer the soundbite with more and more interesting examples that all point back to that soundbite. And that sounded really good advice. Now, I don’t know if you watch ever Saturday Night Live, but when the Varsity Blues scandal broke, they did a little sketch on it, and I don’t know, did you see that sketch, ’cause I was gonna ask you how their portrayal of Asian-American students struck you.

Sara: Yeah, I think in many ways, comedy, it pulls some reality out of our lives and puts it on stage and turns about 5 million degrees. But in an admissions office, you have to remember, it’s very private, and I know Jeff Selingo wrote a book about observing admissions offices several different ones, but admissions officers and the staff, they act very differently when there’s a visitor in the room.

Jed: Absolutely.

Sara: It’s just not the same.

Jed: It’s gotta be different, but you were for 10 years at one of the elite colleges, so you have an insiders information, did you have to swear that you’d never tell what goes on? [chuckle]

Sara: No. We didn’t sign any confidentiality agreement, but you know a lot does go on. Remember with holistic admissions, you don’t have to give a family a reason why the student hasn’t been admitted, you say it’s a competitive process.

Jed: That’s right.

Sara: So it really creates an environment where you can pick one little thing out of an application and say that’s enough of a reason not to admit a student. And sometimes the conversations are really thoughtful in the admissions office, and sometimes they’re really crap, and they’re really raw, because these conversations aren’t gonna be recorded, there’s no video camera in there, it’s all very, very hush-hush. And colleges really don’t have to provide a whole lot of information, I’m doing a post today on my social media about the documentary that just came out, the Netflix one, Operation Varsity Blues and then...

Jed: Yes.

Sara: But in the post that I’m gonna be doing today on social media, it mentions the fact that a lot of colleges are no longer even providing admissions data on their website.

Stanford of all schools, announced I think back a few months before the scandal broke back in 2018, that they would not be releasing any admissions data. And they use the excuse that it’s gonna cause more stress among students, but the truth is, students need some data to be able to figure out if they’re competitive for a college, if they have a shot. If they should add that college to the college list.

It’s a really important consideration, and if they don’t have average test scores, if they don’t know what the acceptance rate is between the early round and the regular round, how do they know how to put together a college list, especially if they’re not getting good advice from their school or from their family?

0:15:22.1Why the switch?

Jed: Yeah, that is so true. Well, like I said, you’ve been on the inside, you’ve seen what happens. Is that one of the reasons why you’re not in there anymore, you’re now more of an author than a Dean of Admissions or?

Sara: The reason why I’m America’s college counselor is because I do not want only certain students to have the knowledge that I have. I wanna share it with as many students and parents as I can. I say in the book that I am the college counselor for all, not for a certain group, like well-connected or the wealthy. So everything that I do as America’s college counselor, every single day, I’m putting out information that can be helpful to families.

I also think that when you own your own business, when you are an author, when you write a weekly blog, literally like almost every single week of the year, you’re able to put information out that can be so helpful to so many families. As a Dean of Admissions, I answer to the president of the college, I answer to the Board of Trustees, I didn’t answer to the people who really matter, and those are the students who are applying.