How to get into a famous college (E)

0:00I was as shocked as you were when I heard the news. I couldn't believe that the Ivy League had changed their policies, and now Harvard and Princeton and the rest were going to accept students based on one single criteria, which is how tall they are. because, after all, it can be shown that throughout history, many of our leaders have been tall, that the average height of a Nobel Prize winner is three to four inches higher than the average height of that person's peers. Height? Really? Clearly, that has nothing to do with how you're going to do in college. Hey, it's Arav, And this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.

0:56Obviously, I'm kidding. This is the third and last of our three parts about my riffs on education. Your mileage will vary. Please take it with a grain of salt. But I'm here to help us think about some of these issues. I guess for students who are in high school and they're going to eventually sit an SAT, end of high school exam however that looks in different countries and systems um i guess students have the option of going on strike during those because they know those tests don't really prepare them for the real world but that's not realistic or necessarily helpful they could just be a cog and do it and that's also not very helpful so i'd love to hear you talk about if you're a high school mathematics teacher currently preparing your students to leave school which includes getting through those end of high school exams how would you talk about that with your students and in developing a posture in them that sure can like tick the boxes of the current system but also really subvert it themselves as students and yeah developing them a way of being that actually prepares them for solving the problems they care about in the world really love your work thanks mate obviously colleges are not shifting to accepting kids by height Height is fairly immutable.

2:12Height is something that you are born with the potential to have. And if you get decent nutrition, you're going to end up at the height you were born to attain. So clearly height is a ridiculous way to challenge students to level up. And also, there's plenty of data that we can find that shows that tall people, all other things being computed, aren't going to be better at college or life than non-tall people. And yet, and yet we have the SAT. The SAT, which is not based on how you are born, good, but can be gamed, not so good. An exam that you can work hard to get better at, significantly better at, 100, 200, 300 points regularly achieved, and an exam that more likely measures your preparation, your home culture, your vocabulary, not the emotional and attitudinal approaches that will help you do well at college, or even more important, at life.

3:23And yet there it is, at most institutions, the SAT. So this is a brief podcast about how to get into a famous college. let's say you decide or your parents decide that after everything you know about famous colleges, the upsides and the downsides, the distinction between a famous college and a good college, that you still want to get into a famous college. I'm going to share two ways that you can do that, one of which has broad application for life in general. The first thing to understand is that there is a ratchet that the colleges are competing against each other for. And the arbiter of that is surprisingly a defunct magazine called U.S.

4:08News and World Report. U.S. News and World Report used to be the third magazine after Time and Newsweek, every week, coming out with stuff that you now find on the internet in moments, not a week later. Their cash cow is an annual edition in which they rank the colleges? When it first came out, deans and college presidents were outraged. How dare colleges be ranked the way we rank football teams? And yet, bit by bit, they started to pay attention and worse, started to game their systems to move up the rankings. At first, it was probably ego, but then they found it wasn't just their ego. It was the ego of the parents that were pushing their kids to apply.

4:53And so it became a virtuous cycle. Virtuous in the sense that as they moved up the rankings, they got more money, they got more donations, they got more applause from alumni, they got, quote, better, unquote, applicants, so they could move further up the rankings. And now if you rank really high, all of a sudden, students who weren't going to consider you are banging on your door. Well, U.S. News has told the colleges how they rank them. So supposedly it's a fair algorithm. And colleges have looked really hard at what the methods are and tried to move up. One of them, for example, is what percentage of the students who apply get in.

5:38Well, if you're clever and you understand direct marketing, you realize that you can easily get more people to apply so you can reject them. I've seen this firsthand. The postcard arrives at the student's house for a school that student has never heard from. And all it says is, we'll let you apply for free. Click this box, mail back the card. Done. So hundreds, thousands, who knows how many people, for free, check the box on the postcard, mail it back, and promptly get rejected. Thus, raising the percentage that the school can report to U.S. News. But the driver of this, as you've already guessed, is the SAT score.

6:21The SAT score is at the heart of how the schools compete in public perception. That and football. 25 years ago, I met Stanley Kaplan, the man, Stanley Kaplan himself. And over the course of more than five years, persuaded him to let me make SAT prep books with his name on them. So this is partly my fault. But here's what we know. One way, the obvious way, the straight down the center way to get into a famous college is to raise your SAT scores. The best way to do that is to have smart verbal parents who talk a lot from the time you're really young. when you are surrounded by a family that expects you to do well on the SAT, when they are pushing you from an early age, when you are taking prep and more prep, when you're doing the work a little bit at a time, when you learn the 5 ,000 vocabulary words, a few at a time, drip by drip by drip, it has been shown again and again that your SAT scores go up.

7:28We know that certain ethnic groups and certain geographical locations do better on the SAT than others in general. Is it because of their genes? Of course not. It's because of their homes. It's because of the expectations and the culture around them. So, if your goal when you are in ninth grade or tenth grade, or if your goal when you've got kids is to get into a famous school, then you're just going to have to figure out, drip by drip, dollar by dollar, day by day, how to win at this door, how to go in the front door with the highest possible score. It's not fair. It's not right. It's not accurate.

8:15And it's a game. And so the advice that I would give the teacher who's trying to help his high school students with their end of year exams is to help them understand that they can enroll in playing a game. They don't have to, but they can because enrollment has to be voluntary. And if you enroll, you will play better and harder with better strategy. And that enrollment in the journey, not personalizing it, not saying, I can prove I'm smart, but simply saying, I can prove I can play this game, is one way to approach this challenge. As you've probably guessed, it's not my favorite way, and it's not the way that I made this podcast to recommend.

9:02The second way to do it, this works for college, this works for the job you might be looking for, is to realize that some colleges are restricted. They have to take people based on their SAT score and nothing else. Those schools are off your list. But for the rest of the schools, there's a second door. and that door is reserved for people who are interesting, have a special skill, or are coming from a special direction. When I was in college, I had breakfast three times a week with the head of admissions for the engineering school. We became good friends. It was fun. Me and Al would have breakfast and we would talk about his job and how he did his job and he understood that part of what he had to present to his bosses was a folder filled with applicants who had really solid scores.

9:57Not because they believed those scores actually indicated those people would be good at school. All it showed was that they cared enough to be good at the SAT. But it gave them bragging rights, and it was something he had to do. But there was also huge pressure on him to bring in the other kind of people, the people who would end up becoming extraordinary alumni, the people who would make the classroom more interesting, the people who were going to be people like us when the school wanted to brag that people like us do things like this. And there are several parts to how we create a life for ourselves where we become one of those people and how we tell that story to the institution.

10:39The first step is beginning in ninth grade, we need to teach our kids about non-teen activities, NTAs. What's an NTA? An NTA is not vice president of the student council, treasurer of the softball team. These are not NTAs. NTAs are, I flew to India and spent 10 weeks figuring out how to make enough money to fly home. An NTA is, I started a software consulting firm in my basement and my clients include IBM, Alcoa, and U.S. Steel. These are NTAs. These take advantage of the fact that teenagers are smart and have plenty of spare time. They take advantage of the fact that a teenager who's very goal-directed can figure out how to start a nonprofit that changes people's lives.

11:37A teenager who's very generous can figure out how to connect with others, how to organize, how to make change happen. That if we can do these NTAs, whether we are doing them with the community or whether we are doing them simply with ideas, these NTAs demonstrate really clearly that you're the kind of self-directed person who can get something done if you care about it. One method that you can use, if you're more comfortable with ideas than with people, is figure out areas where you want to do research. I went to high school with a guy named Vince, and Vince figured out how to do science fair experiments that were at a whole other level.

12:23He decided his passion was going to be working with sunflower plants. And the magic of this is no one can stop you. You don't need a lot of money. Sure, you need to have enough resources you don't have to work after school every single day. I get that. But for the teenager who's going to spend two or three hours a day on Instagram, this, the idea that you can grow sunflowers, inflict them with various pathogens, measure the outputs, which ones help them live and which one help them die, and then publish your results in a paper, there's nothing stopping you. This is the route that someone who is passionate about making change can take.

13:03Okay, so the second half of this process is to figure out how to let the university know that this is your path. Now, there's a version of this that I'm not a fan of because it can often involve brain damage, and there's a very long line out this door, and that is the version of being the star of the football team, figuring out how to be the best soccer player in your school. The problem with this is that the line is really long. Yes, it's true that as many as half the students at Harvard got in because they had a recommendation from one coach or another. And if you can get one, that's great. But the purpose of this rant is to point out that there are far more of these routes available than you might imagine.

13:53So here's the method. find someone at the university that you choose. You cannot do this with a large number. You don't have time who may have an overlap with the work that you're interested in. So for example, if you want to go to Tufts and you really like the idea of physics, find some professors in the physics department. And one thing we know about famous colleges is that the professors are supposed to spend most of their time doing research, writing books, publishing papers. So go find some of those books. Find some of those papers. If you are truly interested in their work, the next step is easy.

14:35Correspond with the professor about that work. Go deep into the work. Try to understand what they are trying to teach. Try to take it apart bit by bit. ask interesting questions. Keep the correspondence going only if it's not just useful for you, but because you're able to help the professor make connections. Have you read this paper? Have you seen this? You're capable of doing that when you're 16 or 17 years old. And then after a month of these correspondences, it is quite likely that you can say to that professor, I'm thinking of come to your university, do you know anyone in the admissions office?

15:16Because let's be fair, the number of people who have truly demonstrated the intellectual generosity that you just have, who have the chops to keep up and end of the conversation like that, is tiny. And when that professor forwards the email to the admissions person, what do you think is going to happen to your application? So it's not guaranteed to work, but neither is all that SAT nonsense. What we know is that the journey is worth it. It is worth it to become the kind of kid who organizes something in high school, who builds projects that might not work and does them without the normal club or sports organization helping you become a cog in the system.

16:03I hope you can see that this is all fitting together. It turns out when we ask what is school for, it's not that much of a leap to say, it's to help kids become self-directed, generous individuals who easily do non-teen activities, who are able to navigate the adult world without being filled with fear, intent on following every single bureaucratic precept just because a superstition put it in their way. That what we get to do as parents is figure out how to create that environment so our kids eagerly become people like this. And as folks who are looking for a job, as folks who are trying to find an organization where they can make a difference, the same math is true.

16:56That when you show up and say, here's my resume, basically you've just shared your SAT score instead of with the admissions office, with the HR people. And the HR people are charged with filling the slots with the cheapest competent people they can find. On the other hand, if you build a body of work, if your body of work is irresistible, if it's generous, if it's remarkable, if your body of work actually changes things, they will call you. They will call you because there are some jobs where they need somebody who is the best JavaScript programmer in the world, where they need somebody who has broken the bounds of what can be done in typography, where they need somebody who has organized one effective nonprofit after another.

17:45We have so many degrees of freedom available to us. And too often, we let the prevailing power structure of the culture say, nope, I have to do well on the SAT instead. So is there a guarantee you're going to get into a famous college? No, of course not. But what I would say is you might find the school that deserves you, the school that sees you for who you want to become, the school that is open and eager for you to go down that path, not because they have a really good football team or because they have some Nobel Prize winners or because they figured out how to game the U.S. News and World Report rankings, but because they're going to give you the freedom to become who you want to become and the support to get there.

18:35That if we talk to an adult who had a great college experience, it's super unlikely that they will talk about the hours they spent in the classroom. And way more likely, they will talk about what they did with their freedom their freedom to connect, their freedom to see, their freedom to lead. Because that is why we spend a quarter of a million dollars in four years of our life working our way through a private institution. Because in that safe space, we get a chance to act in ways that scare us, that create positive value for the people around us. And then when we leave, we are ready to walk into the world, not as a cog, but as a leader.

19:50Tons of great questions from last time. One of them inspired this particular episode. Next week, we'll be back with non-education topics, but I'll still answer your questions if you've got some. If you've got a question, please visit akimbo.link. That's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K. And press the appropriate button. Okay, I'm going to start with an apology about my lack of clarity. I heard from plenty of people. Hello, Seth. This is Chris from Croydon. In your last podcast, you said there's zero value in memorizing anything ever again, and I'm not really sure I agree with this. Hi, Seth. This is Fran in New York.

20:33I have a question about your episode on what's school for. Did you say that there is no need to memorize? Yes, I did not speak clearly on this. In fact, I was wrong. I am not conflating two things, but it is easy to conflate those two things. Learning something by heart and memorizing it. Learning it by heart is how you ride a bicycle. Learning it by heart is how you get great at the piano, where we are not sitting there and simply reading the instructions, but where we are able to act and move forward because of things we intuitively know. And so, yes, you have to memorize the score. And yes, there are plenty of things that having them at our fingertips instantly, knowing it by heart for the rest of our lives is super beneficial.

21:23I did not mean to throw that under the bus. When I say there's no need to memorize, I mean there's no need to memorize so that you can do well on the test next week and then forget it. Because life is an open book test. And teaching kids to get good at open book tests is harder for the bureaucratic teacher. It's a much harder test to write. But that's how life actually works. So yeah, I'm in favor of learning things by heart. Just not crazy about memorizing. Hi, Seth. It's Donna from Newfoundland and Labrador in Eastern Canada. I want to thank you for your work, especially for making so much of it open and available to everyone.

22:07As a system leader in K-12 education, I use your work a lot when leading professional learning. And in fact, I've probably seen your Stop Stealing Dreams talk over 100 times because I try so often to engage parents and teachers and students in that very question. What is school for? But I'm rarely successful in getting people to talk about it. I bought This Is Marketing because I know that leadership in schools involves creating a compelling case for change. So my question for you is, how do you market your question? How do you create the conditions that draw people into the critical conversation about the purpose of school?

22:50What advice do you have to help system leaders in education like me engage others in that conversation that we so desperately need? Thanks for listening. In the last 30 years, what has happened to the quality of Texas high school football? If the high school football team in, say, Odessa, Texas, played the 1990 team or the 1980 team, what would be the final score? I'm just guessing here, but I think it would probably be 75 to zero. We've gotten much, much better at building high school football teams. How did that happen? Was it the principal's idea? The head of the school board? I think it was the parents' idea.

23:39I think it was a ratchet, a cultural ratchet of persistent pushing on the part of parents and neighbors. And it was an easy, straightforward path from, we have a pretty good football team. We need a really good football team. Why would we want to go down that path? Well, that gets to the heart of how we're going to have this conversation with parents about changing school and about what it's for. Because every parent I know wants their kid to do well, even better than they did. Parents want to open doors. They want to support their kids. They want their kids to be healthy and happy and successful.

24:22And if they believe that the way to have that happen is for them to do well on standardized tests, then we're going to build the equivalent of the Odessa football program. to do well on standardized tests. So we have to go up and up and uphill on this conversation. We can't just say standardized tests don't matter because that implies that our dreams don't matter. As long as we see that there is a connection between how well a kid does on the third grade test and how good a high school they get into, if that's one of the things in the system, and how famous a college they get into, which then leads to whether or not they get into a certain law school, which then increases or decreases the chances they're going to clerk for a certain judge, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

25:13Well, of course, when we're talking about their eight-year-olds, they are fraught with uncertainty and anxiety because you're not talking about eight-year-olds. You're talking about Supreme Court justices. It's a whole different conversation. So I think what we're talking about here is in the playground. When we're keeping score, what are we keeping score of? When we look at how those kids are dressed, how they behave with one another, what's the dominant paradigm? And who is modeling what the paradigm ought to be? So is it okay that a two-year-old gets a note from the preschool sent home to his parents and say, your son didn't do very well at the school photo day.

26:04Well, no, I don't think it's okay because school photo day is simply a stand-in, a stand-in for performing when asked to perform, a stand-in for here's one of the first concrete souvenirs of what your kid is going through and this kid isn't able to sit still for it. Yeah, I don't think that's important. Do you think that's important? Where was the note that said, yesterday, your son stood down and let a different kid play with a toy? Where was the note that said, we were drawing something, and your son drew something that took our breath away? That's what's missing. What's missing is, what do we say when we talk to ourselves?

26:50Because the enlightened parent, the passionate parent, understands that there are many games to be played here. You can play a game that leads to winning at the SAT, but you can play a different game if you choose. So I am so thrilled when I hear about a teacher who's trying to change the system. But the system took 100 years to build. It's going to take more than a month to change. And we do that by modeling and rewarding, by creating and releasing tension, by spreading ideas that resonate with the worldview of the people we're seeking to serve. Hello, Seth. This is Haim Mizrahi from Las Vegas.

27:32My question about the last episode, Stop Stealing Dreams, is this. Can you talk us through how you prepared for that talk that you gave? Did you just go up on stage and riff, or was there a process that you followed? Thank you. I thought we'd end with a lighter question here. so thanks for this. No, I didn't just get up on stage and riff. Sometimes I get up on stage and riff. Every once in a while, I will do a podcast where I riff. But Stop Stealing Dreams, which I gave exactly one time, probably took two months of work, three or four hours a day working on it. And the idea, the way I do this is I find a dot and then I find another dot.

28:19I work very hard not to collect too many dots, but I got to have some dots. And once I have some dots, I say, is there a connection between them? Who invented the standardized test, I ask, because I know that's going to be part of what I want to talk about. Well, once I discover that, that leads me to another dot and then another dot. And so for me, every once in a while, I randomly bump into something I didn't know about. But more often, I start with a tiny random flicker and go find dots that I think are worth connecting. The goal then in the talk, much easier with slides than without, is to put up a picture that reminds me either of the dot or the verb that connects this dot to the next dot, and tell a story about it.

29:11Dot, dot, dot, done. And I am super aware that I am not complete. But I also know that even a Caro book on Robert Moses coming in at hundreds and hundreds, nearly a thousand pages, is also not complete. We always pick our dots, always. No one ever experiences life as you have. The only person who saw every single performance Jerry Garcia did was Jerry Garcia.

29:45Amazing grace, how sweet the sound. And so we pick the dots, and I go in doing it knowingly. I add a little bit of hyperbole, I brush aside inconvenient truths, and voila, an assertion is made. Is my assertion bulletproof? Of course not. That's not my job. My job is to help people who haven't seen the dots before see the dots the way I'm seeing the dots and then draw their own conclusions. So I have no doubt that I am wrong about a lot of things. But I'm hopefully interesting enough to make people think it through. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.