Read the full transcript of Episode 29 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features higher education experts Jeff Selingo and Adam Weinberg. They join host Tim Fish for a candid conversation about the admissions race, life on campus, and what “college readiness” actually means. Jeff is a bestselling author whose most recent book, Who Gets In and Why, was named among the most notable books of 2020 by The New York Times. Adam is the 20th president of Denison University, and his tenure has focused on issues like affordability, curricular innovation, and closing the college-to-career gap.
Tim Fish: So much of our work in independent schools has historically been focused on the next step: Getting students ready for college. But what does it look like to truly get students ready for their next step? What do we need to do more of and what do we need to do less of? In this episode we’re going to take a look at college today, and where it’s headed for the next 10 years. And we’re going to think about what our K-12 schools can do to best prepare our students for their future.
To get at this important topic, I am excited to welcome two world-renowned experts on higher education. First up, Jeff Selingo has written about higher education for more than two decades and is a New York Times bestselling author of three books. His latest book, Who Gets In & Why: A Year Inside College Admissions, was published in September 2020 and was named among the 100 Notable Books of the year by The New York Times.
Jeff is a regular contributor to The Atlantic, and a special advisor for innovation and professor of practice at Arizona State University. He also co-hosts one of my absolute favorite podcasts, FutureU, with his friend, Michael Horn.
Also joining us today is Dr. Adam Weinberg, who is the 20th president of Denison University. He joined the University in 2013 and has focused the college on major issues facing higher education today, including curricular innovation, affordability, globalization, and closing the education to career gap.
Dr. Weinberg started his career at Colgate University, where he was a faculty member and vice president and dean of the college. Prior to joining Denison, Dr. Weinberg served as president and CEO of World Learning, where he led education programs in more than 70 countries.
Jeff and Adam, thank you so much for joining us on New View EDU.
Let's begin where all of our conversations for this podcast have begun: With the purpose of school. Adam, I'm curious what your thoughts are at this moment. What is the purpose of residential colleges and universities like Denison? Why should they exist?
What should be at the absolute center of the student experience, and how do you think college can be a truly transformational experience for young people?
Adam Weinberg: First, Tim, thanks for having us on today. It's fun to be here and it's always fun to have a chance to, to share ideas with Jeff. You know, I think one of the great strengths of the US higher education system is just the, the wide range of institutions that we have, right? So I'm not sure there's a single purpose. I think, I think we need to start by recognizing that lots of different people go to seek higher education at various points in life for all kinds of different reasons. But I think for the kinds of students who tend to gravitate towards residential colleges and universities, the purpose is really simple. We're here to help them launch their lives.
So I often say that what I want for the students who come to Denison is I want to unlock their potential to become the architects of their lives. And, and there's really two pieces to that. One is unlocking potential, that all the students who come to our campuses, they have passions that they don't have, they, they don't know they have, they have skills that aren't fully developed. Right. Our, our job as educators is really to help them tap into and develop that potential in all kinds of different ways. Part of it's about skills. Part of it's about passions and interests. Part of it's about values.
And I think the second part is to be the architects of their lives. You know, I hope that students who come to Denison are able to ask some big questions about what kind of life they wanna live, right? And then I hope Denison actually helps 'em develop the skills, the values, the habits, the networks, and the experiences to go out and architect those lives. So I said to our, our students when they arrived in August, that I want students to have a great four years at Denison, and I want them to be weepy at graduation because they've loved their four years on the hill and they've made good friends and found faculty mentors and they're sad to leave.
But I don't ever want to hear an alum say it was the best four years of their life. I want students to come back in 50 years when I will no longer be the president of Denison and say that my life turned out better than I ever could have imagined at age 17, because Denison helped unlock my potential to imagine a life that I never could have dreamed of otherwise, and then gave me what I needed to start creating that journey for myself.
Tim Fish: You know, I absolutely love that, this notion of launching your life. And that it isn't the best four—it's a great four years, but it's not the best four years of your life. That there are other great years that go beyond it.
Jeff Selingo: We hope there are better ones ahead.
Tim Fish: We hope there are better years. That's exactly right, Jeff. I'm curious, Adam, just to follow up on that for a second, like what do you think, Jeff, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this as well.
What are the key ingredients that you create in a campus environment that give the best potential to launch someone's life? You know, what needs to be in place, do you think?
Adam Weinberg: I think it's two, maybe three things. The first is great, life transforming education is deeply relational. It, it just is. And that's about first and foremost having the opportunity to connect with faculty members who will serve not just as great educators, but as real mentors. From my perspective, the single biggest predictor on whether higher education, a college experience will be life transforming, is does a student develop a, a deep enduring mentoring relationship with a faculty member or staff member?
So I think part of it starts with faculty relationships. It extends to relationships with peers, right? Being surrounded by peers who both challenge you and bring out the best in you, in all kinds of different ways. And then the second is experiences. It, it's going to a college where you don't watch other people in the science labs, but you get to do research. It's being at a college where you don't watch other people necessarily on the stage, but if you're interested in the arts, you have an opportunity to perform. It's not going to a place where you watch other people play athletics, but you get to do that. It's a place that has experiential education. So I, I think fundamentally, life transforming education is about the relational piece, and it's about the experiences.
Jeff Selingo: Tim, absolutely agree with, with Adam on that. And you know, we see from the data, for example, from Gallup, which over the years has interviewed people with bachelor's degrees about what led to their well-being later in life. And it's those two things that they did in college, when they had experiences, whether those were projects that lasted beyond a semester or internships or other hands-on learning.
And then the relationships that they had, that they had faculty members that encouraged them to achieve their dreams and that really helped them. And you know, I think a lot, what was lost during the pandemic, I, I talked to a lot of graduates the last couple of years, and particularly last year where they lost a couple, potentially a couple of years to the pandemic.
And that's one thing that I heard from a lot of graduates, is that they didn't get to know, particularly a faculty member, well. And we know from, again, from the research, particularly around high impact practices that allow students to remain in school and graduate and be really engaged in, in their learning, is if you get to know a faculty member in particular, especially outside of class, especially that first semester of your first year. And again, I just think of all those students who weren't on campus that first semester at so many colleges and universities around the country, that really is what equals success later on, in college and even after college.
Tim Fish: Yeah, I think back on my own experience as you're both speaking, and that was exactly what it was about. It was about being engaged in real projects with other students and those out of classroom experiences with faculty members. I happened to go to a really small college, and it, it was in that kind of messiness, right? The English professor who invites you to his house with eight other students to talk about a few poems. You know, those were the experiences in my early college years that I was like, that just made all the difference in sort of connecting and helping me see myself at the university.
Jeff Selingo: And Tim, I think just to add one thing to that, I, I think what's really important now is that colleges have the venues and the vehicles for allowing that to happen. I think over time, at least, you know, I sit now on a board of a, of a private college, my undergraduate alma mater, Ithaca College, and as I see college now 30 years later– and for good reason – we have created a lot of structures around, particularly student success and really made these places student-centered universities. But sometimes I, I feel like we've created too much structure in a way that we don't allow that messiness, that we don't allow those random encounters on campus or after class because people have to go to that next thing.
You know, we're all overscheduled. So much stuff is happening and people can't see us on video, but so much is happening on these devices that we carry around in our pockets. And that's one thing I do worry about is that we have to, and I think Adam has really been great at Denison in making some of this stuff intentional, but we also have to allow for those unintentional meetings between students and faculty members and others.
Adam Weinberg: I totally agree with that, Jeff. Like many liberal arts colleges, we have a lot of students who are around in the summer doing research with faculty. And so I went to our poster session the other day and was just asking students about their summer research and then asking them, you know, what, what made it impactful?
And of course, look, the opportunity to spend a summer doing original research with a faculty member is extraordinary, but that's not what they talk about. What they often talk about is what it means to spend a summer in a lab with a faculty member. And all those kinds of just conversations that emerge as you spend a lot of time together that aren't necessarily about biology or chemistry or sociology. They're, they're about life, right? Those are the kind of gestalt moments where a faculty member makes a comment that literally changes the course of somebody's life. It's the chance encounter with other students over the summers, you're, you're on campus and you're doing research with them, and you're just filling time. But it creates the space for, for kind of deep, meaningful sustained conversations to take place. A lot of this stuff is, is organic and we can increase the odds that it will happen, but really what we can do is create environments where it's more likely to happen than not.
Tim Fish: Yeah, it's, it's so funny that Jeff, you bring up that notion of too much structure, because I think you're spot on in that idea of the messiness. And one of the things I've noticed within independent schools is I think one of the things we do really well, generally, is we're sort of designed to climb into the messiness of kids' lives, right? We embrace that messiness, that we, often schools will talk about this notion of the whole child experience or teaching to the whole student, and I think that that is such an important part of this continuation into college as well. This idea of engaging with the whole individual as opposed to only in this sort of pre-career, designed programmatic structure.
You know, Jeff, I'm also curious about how that trickles into the admissions process. And you just wrote the book, Who Gets In and Why, in 2020. And I'm curious, what, what did you learn about that? Because one of the other things that I hear most often in our schools is this notion that we're not actually as much preparing, sometimes we think, students for college and beyond, but we're preparing them for the admissions process into college. Like that's actually what our job is. And I'm curious, what did you learn about what colleges are seeking and what, what folks can take away from your understanding of the process?
Jeff Selingo: And, and, and clearly especially, you know, more selective institutions like Denison and others that, that are really trying to decide between applicants. They're, they're looking for that difference. They're, they're, they cherish what is rare. And increasingly, to be honest with you, what is rare are those students who are not over-curated, over-programmed. I feel like, especially because of social media now, we have to curate our lives to be perfect. And we see this manifest itself in applications where, I, I tell this story often. I was at Emory sitting inside their admissions office for the book. And, and we were reading an application of a student. And I turned to the admissions officer and I said, Well, I, I, I think this is a mistake. I think we just read this application, you know, four or five applications ago. And realized it was a mirror image of that person four or five applications ago. And by the way, so was the next one. And five applications later.
And, you know, they all wanna major in pre-med, and they all have, you know, 10 or 15 AP courses. And they just all do the same things because that's what we think colleges want. And at the end of the day, one of the things that I came away from the three institutions I sat in their admissions office is that they're really looking for students who still have room to grow. And they're really looking for, you know, going back to Carol Dweck's work, right? They're really looking for that growth mindset because they don't want students who have peaked in high school and are just going to show up on college campuses, go through the motions, show up in class, maybe participate in a few clubs, hang out in their residence halls, and then collect that diploma, you know, four years later.
They want students who are going to come to campus, maybe switch majors, take classes that they never thought they would take, participate in activities that they never thought they would participate in, and really kind of throw themselves into campus life. And that's really what they're trying to look for in the chances students took in high school, by taking courses that maybe were a little bit off the beaten path, or they're looking for that in the recommendation from a teacher who talks about a student in a different way, that's what they're looking for. And Tim, what's interesting to me is when I go out and I talk about this book to students and parents, you know, the first question I'll get is, Okay, well how do you show that growth mindset in an application?
Again, they want that formula because that's what they think that colleges want.
Adam Weinberg: Yeah. Jeff, I really agree. I suspect that you and I would both agree that if we could change one thing about education, it would be the college admissions process, right? And, and, and there's really, you know, among the many issues I'll point out too, one is we have so many incredible young people in high schools that have so many opportunities available to them, and they don't take advantage of them because they're worried about getting into college.
Jeff Selingo: They’re worried about college, yup.
Adam Weinberg: Right. And then the second is, students waste their opportunity to get into a college will be a great fit because they're so desperate to get into the best school they can get into. It just, it, it doesn't serve them or anybody particularly well.
Tim Fish: You know, it reminds me, when I used to do admissions when I worked in a school before joining NAIS. I'll never forget, there was a young girl, an eighth grader applying to ninth grade that I was interviewing, and she came from a school that was all about sort of what I would call buffing up kids, right? Like taking off any sort of sense that something's not perfect. And even down to the way kids would sit when they would come into my office, they would sit like they were told how to sit. It was crazy. And so I, I would always ask kids like, what do you wanna be when you grow up? And this, this young student says to me, I wanna be a general manager for an NFL team.
And I was like, Oh, wow! So we started talking about the Ravens, the offensive line, strategy, the whole thing. We spent the whole conversation on talking football. And then I would often call families at the end, the end of the day and just check in and see how their, you know, person who was touring for the day, how their day went.
And the mom said, "Oh my gosh," she was so upset. She was crying. She said she completely botched the interview with you. And my point was, she didn't at all, like she nailed it. Like we had this amazingly interesting conversation, but in her head she had been scripted. She has to talk about the book she's reading. She has to talk about how she likes Shakespeare. She has to talk about all the, and I, what she really wanted to talk about was the NFL. And I wonder, in the process, do you think we get those opportunities for students to show that side of themselves? Or does the admissions process kind of force them sometimes into all being that same person?
Jeff Selingo: No. And I think it does, and I think part of the problem is, and you know, I'm, I'm friends with the folks who run the Common App, I think that we've, we've turned this, this common application into something that students just fill in the blanks. I saw this so often in reporting the book, where students would just have one big Google doc and they wrote, you know, different essays in there and things like that, and they would just cut and paste into the different applications that they were applying to. And while they were applying to Denison, and they want to tell Denison a certain story and Emory a different story, they just basically treated all these institutions as the same. Because they were kind of interchangeable to them, because they were all selective colleges.
And, and, and not only goes on that side of the coin Tim, but I also think it goes on the other side. I was talking to a father recently who was telling us his daughter was in, you know, freshman year in high school. And, and it was like College Shirt Day. And you know, people wore different shirts to college and, and she wore her mother's alma mater, which was a very good school by the way, but not like the Ivies or something like that. Well, everybody wore like Ivy shirts and things like that. And she came home and she said, "Does this mean I need to go to one of those schools to be successful?" It's like just these, like, subtle messages that we send to people about what matters in college.
Adam Weinberg: And it starts early, right? The, the, those kind of subtle messages there. By seventh or eighth grade, kids are picking that up. What I worry about is we've become a, a liberal arts college that's super focused on launching our students quickly and successfully into careers. Right? So we've been paying a lot of attention in the last couple years to what are, what are some of the, what are some of the real attributes this generation's going to need to, to thrive in the, across their lives, but especially in terms of work? And, and among many I'll mention too, one is they have to know who they are and what they actually wanna do, right? And the second is they have to be resilient. And I think there's so much about the college application process that... forces is too strong a word. That, that shapes the high school experience of too many students, where they're not able to do either one of those, right? They're not able to ask who they want to be because they're too busy asking, What do I need to be to get into the college of my choice? And the second is, we're so worried that if they experience any bit of failure, they won't get into good college, that we're not giving them the space to learn that actually failure's the only way to develop the kind of resiliency you're going to need to be successful in life.
Tim Fish: Yeah. You know, I would say one of the most consistent themes to sort of lay on top of that, that we are seeing in our schools is, you know, we're worried about young people. We're worried about their mental health and their well-being. Adam, you just wrote a fascinating article, op-ed in Hechinger Report, and I love the way you talked about the fact that we should start reframing this topic of well-being, move it from being a problem with our students, to start looking at it as a problem with the historical moment in which our students live. You know, and I'm so curious about what you all are doing at Denison and how you see, what you're noticing with students, and how you're all thinking about this challenge.
Adam Weinberg: Yeah, so I think we're doing, we're doing a couple things I'm really excited about. One is, you know, we're kind of normalizing stress and anxiety and kind of saying to our students, Look, A) you're at a pretty rigorous place that's going to push you hard, and B) you live in a historical moment where regardless of what you're reading or consuming in terms of media, you're being bombarded with lots of, you know, lots of negative messages about climate change and you know, inflation, war in Europe, so if you're not feeling a little bit of stress and anxiety, you're probably not paying attention to what's going on around you. So that's okay.
But the second thing we're saying, I think is more important, is that while none of us have complete control over our health, we have more than we think. And so we're asking our students as part of a liberal arts education to actually develop the skills and habits of well-being. So part of it is there's just foundational things, right? If you don't eat, if you don't sleep, if you don't exercise, if you don't do those foundational, if those aren't foundational habits, you're, you're probably not likely to be physically or mentally healthy. You gotta do those. But the second is we have to help this generation develop better habits when it relates to technology and especially social media, both in terms of how they consume and how much time they spend. But then the last is, there are actually tools and techniques we can develop to learn to, to, to manage stress, right?
And so while there's no panaceas in life, I actually think mindfulness as kind of a broad bucket of things is super important, and it means different things for different people. But students should figure out what it means for them. It, it can be yoga, meditation, it can be hiking or outdoor activities, but, but folks who haven't been paying attention to the Mind and Life Institute and the research they've been doing really should. So we're really taking seriously the notion that we want our students, as part of a liberal arts education, to develop the skills and habits, to have the emotional resiliency and emotional agility to actually be able to thrive in a world that is stressful, in a world that is chaotic, in a world that is going to challenge them.
Tim Fish: I love that notion of just the foundational items, right? Because as, as you talk about in the article, like if you don’t have those things, your likelihood to not be well mentally, physically, and everything else, it goes up dramatically. The other piece I like so much in your article is that you mentioned like, it's not about removing all stress, all challenge. You know, one of the pieces of research I talk about a lot on this podcast is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's work around flow.
In flow, you're engaging with very complex material and you're challenging yourself. You feel that. That's part of what creates that state of flow, and you're not suggesting that we don't have challenging environments.
Adam Weinberg: I'm actually saying just the opposite. I totally agree that if, if we really want to, to help our students develop the resiliency and the confidence, the self-reliance they're going to need to, to thrive in their personal and professional lives, they have to be in environments that are going to push them. Right. It, it's, we learn by learning to do hard things. The other thing I often say to our students is, once you get over your fear of failure, and your fear of embarrassment, life gets a lot easier. Right? So I think, like, one of the great things about residential college is you get to learn all this stuff in a safe, supportive place.
But we, we push our students hard. We, we, you know, I said to our new students on the, when they showed up in August, that I'd seen a lot of their admissions apps and so I knew for some of our students, this would be the first time they would face significant failure, whether it's struggling in a class or not making an athletic team. And that I was super excited for them, because learning to, you know, Denison's a great place to learn the tools you need to turn failure, short term failure, into a necessary step and part of your journey to succeed.
Jeff Selingo: You know, Tim, two things that I think about in spending time with students, particularly for the book, about their purpose for going to college was around this idea of purpose and belonging. And I think that for many students today, they're lacking in one or both when they get to, to college. They don't quite know why they're there except that, you know, it was like the next step in life. And maybe they know why they're at that particular college, but they don't know what they're supposed to be doing there. And sometimes it takes them quite a long time to figure out that, that purpose. And I think that's why we're seeing lower rates of engagement across higher education, but largely now lower rates of retention at, at many colleges, because students are just saying, "If I don't know why I'm here, I'm not going to stay."
And then second is this sense of, of belonging. And again, I think coming out of high school and applying to college, if students are applying to the colleges that someone else is telling them to apply to, or applying to a certain set of colleges because they're the most selective, but not because it's the right fit for them socially or academically, when they get there, they're not going to find their place. You know, they're not going to find their people. I, I think, often to my own, You know, first year experience and, and I struggled in the first couple of months of college. I tell students this all the time. You know, most of my high school didn't go to college. Most who went to college went locally. And I, you know, I only went two and a half hours away, but, but outta state and I, I showed up and you know, I was really with students that I, I didn't really understand their lived experiences. They didn't understand my lived experiences. And it was only when I found the student newspaper, where I eventually became a writer and editor, and that became my cohort. And then that cohort, of course, through the network effects, expanded my cohort to other schools, to other activities, to other people. But it was finding that core group that really helped me find my sense of, of belonging.
Adam Weinberg: Yeah, Jeff, I really agree with that. And you know, unlike the college admissions process that you and I are probably not likely to solve–
Jeff Selingo: Or change.
Adam Weinberg: Or change. Right? But what you just said is right, and, and you know, you think about things we actually could do that would make a real measurable difference across higher ed. One is encouraging more students to take time off between high school and college, and come back when you're really ready. And, and parents will often ask, Well, what should they do in the gap? Sometimes just working would be great. Right. You learn a lot about yourself, a lot about other people, pick up some good skills.
But the other is, if colleges took much more seriously that we need to onboard students with a lot more thoughtfulness. And that doesn't mean extending August orientation by a day. I really mean taking seriously the notion that the first year is–
Jeff Selingo: A different experience.
Adam Weinberg: Yeah. And I think, you know, when I think about when we went to college, the difference now among many is there's so many opportunities on every college campus. There's so many people there to support you, but unless you've been to college four times, it's, you often don't even know those resources and opportunities exist on your campus until you're a junior or senior. And, and I just think with a lot more intentionality, with a lot more thoughtfulness, we can make the pathways easier so that a greater percentage of our students hit those on-ramps quicker and more effectively.
Jeff Selingo: I, I, I really love that, Adam, because in, in essence, the first semester of freshman year looks like any other semester, and, and I understand. We, we only have so much time. We have overloaded, in my opinion, the undergraduate curriculum. I don't understand why 120 credits is like a magic to the bachelor's degree. And maybe if we rethink the degree and things like that, we could open up a little bit more time and slow that, especially that first, critical first semester down a little bit so that it, we're just not off running to the degree.
Adam Weinberg: Yeah, I totally agree with that.
Tim Fish: Yeah, I love picking up on this because as we think to the future and we think to where higher ed might be headed, one of my all time favorite podcasts, Jeff, is FutureU.
Jeff Selingo: I wonder who co-hosts that?
Tim Fish: I listen to it all the time, and it gives me such a sense of sort of what's happening in higher ed today. And you recently did an episode on higher ed Innovations, things to watch in 22, 23, which I, I loved that episode. And it got me thinking about the next five to sort of 10 years. You know, Adam, I know that Denison is an incredibly innovative university, is being recognized more and more as an innovation leader in, in higher ed.
I'm curious what the two of you think might be coming our way. What innovations do you think that you're really excited about? Maybe over the next five or six years, and we'll start thinking about how can our schools prepare students to enter into that world. But I'm curious, where's it all headed?
Adam Weinberg: Jeff should start with this one cause he's, I love listening to Jeff talk about this.
Jeff Selingo: If I knew where it was headed, I wouldn't be sitting here right now. I would probably be making a lot of money on Wall Street for investors. But I, I think there is going to be a serious reexamination of the legacy degree as it stands today. And that doesn't mean that places like Denison or any other college that offers a traditional four year residential full-time experience are going anywhere, there will always be a market for that.
But increasingly, you know, I love, for example, what Lori Carrell, the president or chancellor at the University of Minnesota at Rochester is doing, right. They're, they're right in the backyard of Mayo. They've created essentially a two and a half year degree in association with Google in the Mayo Clinic, in, in, in healthcare. It's really hands-on. It's shorter, it utilizes the summers. And it's, you know, it's all skill. It's a very much skills based, like it's the thing, thinking outside the box around that four year traditional degree, I think is, is critically important.
And I think that, you know, skills and hands-on experience—not to shortchange the liberal arts, because I think that foundational experience is critical—but the more that we can add on, because that's where I think a lot of this is going in that employers, and Adam knows this from talking, you know, I think Denison does a great job in terms of onboarding students into the, into the job market. And he knows as well as I think a lot of college leaders, right now, that skills are incredible. Are, are, are incredible for, you know, those who are hiring college students. It's not that they don't want degrees, but they want degrees with skills. And those institutions that are able to graduate students with real skills and, and I think then it becomes a problem, well, how do you fit that into the undergraduate curriculum? I think it really requires a, a rethinking of what that undergraduate curriculum looks like. How do we reuse the summers or how do we use the summers in different ways, and something that Randy Bass talks a lot about at Georgetown is how do we use co-curricular activities where we know, by the way, on our athletic fields and in our clubs, that students are learning a lot of skills by the way, that we never give them actual academic credit for, nor do we enable them in any way on their transcripts to show what they've learned in that.
Adam Weinberg: Yeah, I, you know, I, I don't, I don't think COVID created any new trends, but I think it accelerated existing trends, and trends are a lot like water. The faster they move, the deeper they cut, and the more they cut in unexpected ways. And so I think there's three trends that will shape the next 10, 15 years. In, in, in many ways, they're all good for students. One is just choice rules. Students already do and will continue to have way more choice in what they study, how they study it, who they study it from. And I think Jeff is right. There'll be four year degrees and three year degrees. I think some of the most interesting work is actually going on at some of the larger institutions around even eight month kinds of programs that launch kids, young people quickly, who need that. The range of things you can now major in study on a college campus, right? You can do it online, you can do it in a classroom, you can do it hybrid and high flexibility and everyone between. So one's just going to be a lot more choice that students have on how they, how they have access to higher ed.
The second's going to be technology. It just infuses everything we do. I mean, Denison is a fully residential liberal arts college. But even for us, a lot more of the student experience is shaped in good ways by technology. So I'll give you one example. The textbook that should have died 80 years ago is finally dying. And what's replacing it are interactive learning platforms that just work better and they're cheaper. And they're more adaptable to what a faculty member's trying to do.
And then I think the third is going to be just access and affordability. There's going to be tremendous pressure, good pressure, on colleges and universities to make sure that we get students through whatever program they started, with as little debt as possible, and then launched into their lives. I, I see all those, the increase in choice, the, the way technology's infusing what we do so we can do it more effectively, and then the third is pressure on us to get affordability and access better. Those are all really good.
Tim Fish: Yeah. Do you think there's going to be more choice? You know, I was talking to my daughter who's a senior in college the other day. And she was talking about this semester and how she said, she said, look, I'm going to take these two courses that she needs to finish before she graduates that are interesting to her, but not part of her major area of study. She said, "I'm going to do them online because I want to give myself," she happens to be studying graphic design. She said, "I wanna give myself a lot more sort of in-person time to be in the studio space with the professors. So I'm going to, I'm going to free myself up to do this other experience in this other way." I'm wondering, do you see that kind of choice also? The sort of where I take the classes, how I engage with them, that flexibility coming and, and is that part of what we should be thinking about in K-12 or in high school experiences? Having students experience more modalities of classroom experiences is something I've, I've been curious about.
Jeff Selingo: Yeah, so I, I, I, I think so, Tim, I, but I think there's, there's two issues at play. And one is how far does choice go? I think Gene Block as a, a FutureU listener, you'll remember, we, we went to UCLA as part of our campus tour, and we interviewed Gene Block, who's the chancellor of UCLA.
And one of the things he's concerned about is that, You know, students are coming there and they say, they look through the course catalog and they say, I want to take this course and I want to take it on Monday in person, and I want to take it Wednesday online and, and Friday online or whatever. Right. You know, they want to pick and choose how they take it and—
Tim Fish:—They want everything to be offered in-person and online.
Jeff Selingo: Exactly. And they want that flexibility to choose when they take it and where. And as he said, that's, even with the resources of UCLA, that's impossible. Now, could you do it, like I know Arizona State does and a lot of other universities, where some courses are offered online and in person, and you get to choose maybe at the beginning of the semester. So you have a little bit more flexibility there. So I think it's depending on how far.
And then the second piece, going back to student success, is that I don't think most, particularly at 18, 19, 20, most of us, to be honest with you, even now at 50, I don't even quite understand how best I learn all the time. Sometimes I don't think students necessarily make the best choice for their, for their own learning, right? They make it for their convenience. So some students might learn better in that particular course in person, rather than online, but they're picking an online course cuz it's more convenient for them.
So I think this is where advising comes in and helping students understand—and maybe this is where there's a role for K through 12, because I think every student should graduate from high school understanding what kind of learner they are. So that when they do go to college, they're making those better choices. You know, am I a better visual learner? You know, how do I read, do I, you know, where should I, should I do online? Should I do hybrid, whatever it might be, so that when they get to college, they're making those choices in, in a better way.
Adam Weinberg: I think about all the time that high schools spend helping students figure out where they're going to go and how to get in. But then how little time we actually spend helping students figure out how to hit the on-ramps once you get there to take full advantage of it. Right? I just, it's, it's not a problem of, of opportunities, but there's just a huge mismatch between all the amazing things that one can do on a college campus and the information people have when they actually arrive on how to take advantage of it.
Jeff Selingo: I, I love that, Tim, because we just talked earlier about kind of redesigning maybe the first year of college or at least the first semester. I also think we should redesign the second semester of senior year of high school. Because by then, most students maybe have decided at least where they're going to college, and we spend so little time preparing them for that big life transition.
Tim Fish: Yeah. You know, one of my favorite parts about McDonough School, where I spent 18 years before coming to NAIS, one of the things that we had was a five day boarding program for about a hundred students. And one of the things we offered was something I affectionately called "term on," where if a student said, "My senior year, I just want, I'm swimming, practices start at 6:00 AM, I'm just going to live at school for the winter term."
And their parents were like, "Yes! You know, I don't have to get them here at 5:30." But the other sort of often unintended benefit of that was that you got this kind of 15-week period where you learned how to live in a room with someone else. And how to sort of go to the dining hall, and how to manage some study time, and how to sort of balance everything. And you went home every weekend. I used to always say to families like, maybe they won't board for a whole year, or certainly not for four years, but that one term option or two terms might be incredibly impactful. And I wonder about, are there other ways that we, and in our schools, could create experiences in that junior and senior year that really do help students start preparing for what more, what the full college experience will be like?
Adam Weinberg: Yeah, I think one thing that we could be and should be doing with students during their junior, senior years, at least level setting expectations so they don't arrive at college assuming that everything's going to be perfect and they're going to be happy all the time. Helping them understand that college is hard. Everything about it is hard. You know, living away from your parents for the first time will be, is hard for many students. Living in a first year residential hall with people who are like you, but people who are not like you, who see the world really differently. Faculty who expect a lot from you and will be very generous with their comments on your early papers and exams, right?
For the first time, trying out for an athletic team or play and not making it. So having to really learn to manage your time, having had a really structured high school experience. So I think helping students understand that, that those struggles are normal. They're part of the process by design. And it's those moments that are going to be some of the most valuable of your first year. And don't make the mistake when you're, have that moment of unhappiness, that moment of not sure you can make it, of looking around and assuming that everybody else is doing great and you're not.
So I just think, you know, really helping students understand what college is, what it's going to be like, and understanding that some of the things that they experience that may be hard are actually really good and positive, and they'll look back on them.
Jeff Selingo: Totally agree with that, Tim. I, I think so often, especially during the admissions process, you know, we get in, it's that golden ticket, we're all done, right? And couldn't we spend that time now talking about, okay, now what? Right. How, what is college going to be like? How should you do college? Right? I, I, I talk so often in my, in my last book, right? It's not where you go, it's how you go. Well, why can't we spend more of that time, again, particularly in senior year, when to be perfectly blunt, I just think there's a lot of wasted time in high schools. Spend that time about not only how to do college, but how to do life, right? For those students who may not be going right onto college.
Right. There's so much more we could be doing at that time that doesn't, we don't have to pack the curriculum with other stuff at that point.
Adam Weinberg: Hey, Tim, I'll give you a concrete example. One, one of the things we've noticed. And, and by the way, I don't mean just Denison, but I think, I think a lot of college presidents would agree with this, is a greater percentage of students showing up who were just used to making sure that everything they say is not controversial. Because there, there's just too much risk in high school of saying something that your classmates or whoever's going to take offense to. So you can't, we can't be a liberal arts college unless people feel, understand that liberal arts college is about a place where there is no orthodoxy. Where we challenge views, we use reason, and rationality to—intellectual debate becomes super important.
So this year we took a half a day of our first year orientation program and we partnered with Braver Angels and we did a parliamentary debate with all of our first year students to just get them used to the fact that you are in a college with people who have views like yours and people who have views not like yours. And part of the fun and thrill and importance of being here is stating your views, hearing the views of others, debating those views, and allowing ideas to clash into each other in ways where everybody learns from each other.
Tim Fish: I absolutely love that, and it gets this notion of, one of the things that I'm hearing more and more from school heads today is around this notion of a very polarized environment. And in that polarized environment, Adam, folks are just going into their turtle shells. And they’re triple filtering everything before they say it.
And I think that certainly we wanna be conscious of others and conscious of their experience, but this idea of engaging in the debate of ideas is something that I think we've become, many of our schools have become more tentative about. And I agree with you. I think it's absolutely at the center of the kind of preparation we need.
I was working with a school in St. Louis the other day, and in between my work with the school and going out to dinner with some great people from the school, I went for a run on the campus of St. Louis University, which was, which was just a great experience, lovely campus experience. And one of the things that struck me just jogging down the path as folks were going to dinner and other places, was how incredibly diverse the community was. How global it was. And it said to me, you know, this is something that is so central to our schools and something that's so important. But one of the things I also thought about is that as we prepare our students for their next step, we have to understand how to prepare them to be in a global society of ideas and people and experiences and languages and backgrounds.
Are you, how are you seeing that and what is Denison doing to, to really help students think about that?
Adam Weinberg: Yeah, I totally agree that like when I, when I think about the difference between residential colleges now and what they were like when, when I went to one in the eighties, they've just become remarkably diverse in every way, shape, or form, right? So you, you, you arrive at a place like Denison, but it could be one of lots of different institutions and students literally come from every part of the country and 40, 50, 60 countries and beyond, right? So these are incredible communities where, where, where people bring a wide range of life experiences and views and perspectives and so much learning can take place. But only if we're willing to share our, our views with each other and really are open to kind of hearing and listening to each other.
And part of what I want our students to understand is that life is way more interesting when you actually spend time on a Friday and Saturday night talking to somebody who sees the world differently from you. That's part of the, not just part of what's important in terms of learning, but part of the fun of, of being on campus. But boy, those kinds of, of arts of democracy, arts of listening, civil discourse, debate, this generation hasn't, that hasn't been role modeled for them by others. But what we're finding is our students are hungry for it. They really want it. And so when we create just a little bit of space they quickly gravitate towards us.
We, we started, our students started a debate society a year ago and just said, "Anybody who wants, come on a Wednesday night and we're going to debate really controversial ideas, but we're going to do it in a way that is constructive and interesting and fun. And we're going to learn and listen." They had a hundred students show up, right? Just give you a sense for this generation wants it, they haven't gotten it growing up. And I think colleges need to step into that space.
Tim Fish: Yeah, we had a conversation on this podcast with Eric Liu, the, the president of Citizen University and talking about this notion of what it means to really be a citizen and how you can practice those skills. And you know, this whole notion where he sort of has these, these citizen events where there's, there's a bit of tradition and there's ideas exchanged and real dialogue. I think more and more of that kind of work could be so incredibly important.
Jeff, I'm also wondering what you think about where we can, where our schools, K-12 schools could go in helping to fully prepare our students for the, really the wide diversity of higher ed experiences that they may encounter as their next step.
Jeff Selingo: I, I just want to key off something that Adam said because I, you know, I, my, my background is as a journalist and, and one of the, the saddest moments I have right now is, is the death of, of, of local journalism and, and facts essentially, right? Because debates are set on, on some sort of commonly defined set of facts and now everybody basically gets to make up whatever they wanna make up about what's happening in society.
And I, I really think that we need to focus on, on two things in K through 12 that I think would better prepare students for college. One is around kind of, you know, news literacy, because I think that, and this is a little bit different than, you know, civics and civic engagement because I know there's a lot of focus in high school around that. This is a little bit different than that. This is more around news literacy, the ability to really, you know, read sources and understand them differently. Again, also different from research methods, which again, I understand is, is taught in a lot of social science courses, for example, in high school.
And the second is something that Adam brought up around kind of social media, because I think part of engaging around kind of the toughest issues that we're facing right now is doing it in person, face to face. I think so many, I, I, I realize this in so many debates, I get in, in with people on Twitter or on LinkedIn or Facebook. It's, it's so much easier to get into that debate when I'm not facing that person. And, and really starting to put down our devices a little bit and engaging face to face, because that is the power of the college campus.
And who knows where the future of work is going? Who knows if it's going to be a lot more virtual and people won't be in offices together? But this may be our last chance, or one of our last chances, where we have a community of people, similar in age, together in one place. And, and we should be preparing them, K through 12 and higher ed, for that moment afterwards, where they are going to be in communities, at school board meetings, in in, in community associations, and volunteer organizations. And they're going to have to have these very tough debates and they're going to have to do it in person using those facts.
Adam Weinberg: Yeah. I mean the essence of democracy is public work, right? It's what happens when people come together in their communities and they work with people they know, people they don't know, people they like, and probably most importantly people they don't like, to do the work it takes to build and sustain healthy communities. If you buy that notion of democracy, which I do, one could argue that college campuses and maybe first year residential halls, may be our greatest untapped, untapped laboratories for helping the next generation develop the arts of, of democracy and the commitment to it.
Tim Fish: I absolutely love that. As we start to think about tying our conversation up, I'm curious what you both hope for higher ed over the next 10 years or so.
Jeff Selingo: I'll, I'll let Adam go second on this one. I think really at the end of the day it has to become more affordable and be seen as more affordable. I think a lot of colleges are doing a really good job right now at, at placing their, you know, their limited resources where it matters most. The problem is they don't have enough resources, and the needs are just getting bigger.
You know, I think of how I was able to go to a private residential college on the salary of a high school teacher and a high school teacher's aide. And, and I wonder, if I were a student today coming from that same family, would I necessarily see that as, as possible? And that to me, is where I think we need to do our, our greatest, greatest work.
Adam Weinberg: Yeah, I, I agree with that, and I would expand it just a little bit. I think access and affordability has to be at the top. And we have to do better. We just do. The second is, is retention and graduation. It's, it's not just about getting people in and making it affordable, but making sure that they actually finish whatever degree program they started. And the third is launch, making sure that we got you in, we get you through with as little debt as possible. You graduate and then we launch you quickly and successfully into a life and into a career.
Tim Fish: That's outstanding. Adam and Jeff, this has been a great conversation. It's given, I think, our listeners great perspective on the current state of higher ed and, and I think a very optimistic view in many ways. I mean, and there's things we're working on, there's hard work to be done, but the, but the transformative power of what happens on a campus is still very present and alive, and I think can be, can be leveraged even more to help students prepare for their future. It's, it is the skills, as you said, Jeff, and it is about the experiences and it is about the knowledge that students gain, but it is also in that messiness, to tie back to the beginning, where it really all comes together. The messiness of the, of the campus, the engagement, this sort of tying in with other people.
This has been, I just wanna say thank you for spending some time with us today, and thanks for this conversation.