WEBB Magazine feature: Moving Beyond the Myth of Selective College Admission

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By Christopher Michno

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BY THE NUMBERS

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The process of finding the right college is more often than not riddled with anxiety for both students and their families.

It is paradoxically both increasingly complex and more streamlined than ever. Technology allows students to simply add multiple colleges to the Common Application with a few clicks. And yet the convenience doesn’t reflect the intricate web of criteria that factor into applying to one college over another. Students and their families must still evaluate college profiles, plan school visits and prepare for tests, and all of this must be done while students continue to perform at the highest levels in their classes, athletics and organizations.

Further complicating the matter, students and parents sometimes share a perception that getting accepted to a highly selective school is of critical importance to a student’s future success and an indicator of their personal worth. The anxiety can be intensified even more by a hyper-competitive environment and students’ feelings of needing to live up to their own highest aspirations and a not-so-healthy desire to compare their results with those of their peers.

Photo of Claremont McKenna College by Elisa Ferrari.

oving Beyond the Myth of Selective College Admission

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Photo of recent Webb graduates now attending one of the five Claremont Colleges.

Shot on location at Scripps College.

Anthony Villalobos

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The numbers tell a story

of fierce competition for limited spots at the most selective schools. At Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford universities, the acceptance rate is solidly in single digits and has been for a number of years. And those rates have fallen significantly even within the last two to three years. At some of the other Ivy League schools, where acceptance rates were in the low double digits, they have now fallen below 10 percent.

According to Hector Martinez, Webb’s dean of college guidance, the competition for a limited number of spots at the most selective colleges and universities was not as keen 20 years ago. “Today, there are 20 schools that admit 10 percent of applicants or less. What I think is interesting is how quickly that shift happened,” Martinez observes. It was also true 20 years ago, he adds, that there weren’t any schools in that range, and just 10 years ago, only five schools were that selective.

Two decades ago, he says, everyone knew it was difficult to gain admission to those schools. “We didn’t take it for granted, but at least there was a reasonable chance that if you were a really excellent student, you might end up going to one. Your chances were between one in seven and one in five. Today, there is an anxiety about college admissions that is driven by the reality of a four in one hundred chance [at a school like Harvard, for example], and that feels very different.”

WEBB’S COLLEGE GUIDANCE FOCUS It is within this highly-charged terrain that Webb’s college guidance program defi nes its mission: to provide Webb families with a realistic strategic plan for navigating college admissions.

Martinez is a veteran of the admissions and college guidance world. He spent eight years at Pitzer College as an admissions counselor, and associate dean and director of admissions, followed by two years as the associate and co-director of college counseling at the Buckley School in Sherman Oaks, before joining The Webb Schools, where he has overseen college guidance, now as dean, for the past 21 years.

Martinez’s expertise in college guidance is recognized throughout the country, and he is frequently called on for that expertise by colleges and professional associations. His colleague, Anthony Shin, the associate director of college guidance and a Webb alumnus from the Class of 1999, is now in his seventh year in the guidance office.

Shin has seen the process fi rst-hand, both from his perspective as a student, and now from the other side of the desk. Before joining the college guidance office at Webb, he worked in a number of educational environments. He taught English literature at public high school after graduating from Claremont McKenna College in 2003, and at community college level after earning a master’s in English at Claremont Graduate University in 2008.

Significantly, Martinez and Shin spend a great deal of time visiting colleges, speaking with admissions officers, learning about campus environments and academic programs, and maintaining a base of knowledge that they continually update so they can effectively advise students and parents. These efforts are complemented by regular visits with Webb alumni who are studying throughout the country at various institutions to hear about their experiences in college.

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Anthony Villalobos is in his first year at Stanford University. Though he hasn’t declared a major, he’s narrowed it down to a choice between mechanical engineering with a focus in product design or structural engineering applied to finding solutions for sustainability. Expressing creativity is also important to him, and either major, he says, will help him develop the tools to work creatively within the field of engineering and to cultivate opportunities to be inventive and artistic.

At Stanford he has found a community that is inspired about learning and teaching, and where personal connections have been abundant. “What I’ve loved about my classes is that my professors are excited to get to know me on a personal level and that they teach what they are truly passionate about. During office hours I can have a real conversation with any of them and easily get to know them beyond just what they teach in class,” Villalobos says.

But what they do teach, he says, is always incredible, and the passion they have for their subject is contagious. Villalobos finds himself caught up in their energy—even if the subject is not intrinsically interesting to him.

nthony and I also spend a lot of our time making sure The Webb Schools are known and appreciated for the excellent students we enroll to all the top colleges and universities. Part of our job is to make sure colleges know Webb as well as we know colleges,” Martinez says.

His first year has not been without its challenges, though. “I entered Stanford with the mentality that I could handle anything that was thrown at me, and that same idea was shared by a good number of my peers. However, several weeks into the quarter, I had to admit that I needed help if I was going to make it. Between practices for sports every night and admittedly too much socializing, I had less and less time to spend figuring out homework on my own,” he says. Right before midterms, he had an opportunity to talk with a few juniors, seniors and graduate students. They all said the same thing: to ask for help is not a defeat. Villalobos began signing up for free tutoring and joined study groups. He also started dropping in at professors’ office hours. “I’m thankful that I didn’t let my pride stop me any longer than it did,” he says.

Exchanges of information and relationship building with colleges also occur when admissions representatives visit Webb in the early fall. Colgate University’s vice president and dean of admission and fi nancial aid, Gary Ross, says that his on-campus meetings with the guidance office enable him to learn about and see fi rsthand new developments in Webb’s academic and co-curricular programs. He in turn discusses new developments at Colgate, thus allowing each campus to develop a nuanced picture of the other’s school.

“ Webb asked me to simply be a good person: to put others before myself, to act with compassion and empathy, and to be honest with both myself and others. To develop these behaviors takes conscious effort, but Webb provided the right environment and pillars of support to help me get there.”

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WHAT’S DRIVING SELECTIVITY? IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT THE NAME One might be tempted to think that falling admission rates can be accounted for by a growing population of high school graduates and a relatively fixed number of seats at schools.

But the vice president and dean for enrollment management at Lewis & Clark, Lisa Meyer, points out that the number of graduating high school seniors has been decreasing for the last few years. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there’s been a downward trend of fall enrollments at degree-granting post-secondary institutions since 2010.

And it’s going to continue through 2026. Meyer observes what’s on a lot of people’s minds: students are increasingly zeroing in on the top tier of selective schools.

So what’s happened at schools that aren’t hitting the 10-percent-or-less mark? Do the numbers mean they are offering an inferior education or providing an impoverished campus life, with an atrophied co-curricular environment or anemic leadership opportunities? Not even close, Martinez says.

“Education has been perceived as a commodity in different ways than it was 20 years ago,” Meyer says. “Most often, when I talked with families then, they were focused on how their student’s college education would open opportunities for them to learn new things and think in different ways and to take classes that weren’t available in high school, like anthropology or philosophy classes.”

But she notes a change in orientation now. “In the last decade, when I speak with families, more often what I hear is how will this education provide a job, what kind of job will that be, how is a diploma the key to career, instead of what ideals will students be learning,” she says.

The result, Meyer suggests, is that education has been commodified such that families evaluate it in terms of return on investment. This in turn explains how college rankings have grown so much in popularity: they offer a quantitative measure that is perceived as analytical and wholly objective—a way to sort out the “best” path.

I LOVE YOU: FINDING A FIT For better or worse, brands have come to dominate much of our lives, from the cars that we drive to the smart phones we hold in our hands and the clothes that we wear. There is a concern that brand consciousness is being imposed on education, too. But the focus that boils down the selection of a college to a reliable “brand” that will guarantee smooth sailing upon earning a degree is a distortion of education’s goals and the process of learning. In fact, the flexibility, creativity, and capacity to think across disciplines is at the heart of a liberal arts education, and many of the admissions officers interviewed for this article spoke directly to the importance of those ideals. Associate dean and director of admissions at the University of Southern California, Kirk Brennan, bluntly calls thinking about brand a mistake.

“For most students, selecting a college is one of the first big decisions they’ll make,” he says; better to worry less about what others might say, and instead think critically about what one needs out of the college experience.

The Webb Applicant We have worked with many Webb applicants over the years and have been really delighted when they choose to enroll.

Understanding the level of rigor that students manage when they’re at a school like Webb is taken into consideration as we make our admissions decisions—because we know that Webb students will engage in our classrooms, they will be valuable contributors and will be leaders on campus.

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It’s not just about the classroom experience at Webb. It’s also about the ideals and values of the Webb community. We know that when we enroll a student who went to Webb, we’re enrolling someone who will be the kind of valuable community member that we’re looking for.

— LISA MEYER VICE PRESIDENT AND DEAN OF ENROLLMENT, LEWIS & CLARK

“... education has been commodified...”

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Lengyi Zhang

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As a sophomore at Columbia University, Lengyi Zhang is thinking broadly about education and culture. When she was at Webb, she expected to focus on the social sciences in college, perhaps majoring in anthropology or sociology. In her first year at Columbia, she took a mix of humanities and social science courses and began to reevaluate her direction. At the suggestion of a friend Zhang tried a couple of philosophy classes and found that she really liked it.

Thus far, she has read ancient Greek philosophers like Plato, Socrates and Aristotle, and more recent European philosphers like Descartes, Kant and Hegel. This spring she will have the opportunity to read Immanuel Kant in greater depth.

Her studies have prompted reflection. “Columbia has a core curriculum in which you read a lot of Western texts in literature and philosophy. When I think back on my years in China, I think that most Chinese students don’t have the opportunity to participate in classrooms and think about those philosophical questions,” she says. “I’m not saying it’s necessary for them to do so, or that if they don’t, it’s means their education is somehow lacking or inferior. But I think it is at least a good experiment to bring this kind of education model to China.”

Over the summer, Zhang joined a group of Columbia students who did just that. “We held summer camps in China so Chinese students could have classes in the humanities, which is something they don’t usually get exposed to in school,” she says. She was also able to return to her hometown to start a similar summer camp while she taught classes at other locations.

For the future, she has a general idea of engaging in entrepreneurship in China after graduating, though she’s not sure what the focus would be. She is also considering graduate school in political economy.

“The thing that influenced me the most at Webb was probably my US history class. It helped me understand American culture better. At the same time, it helped me understand how we examine history, how we reflect on ourselves, and to actively engage with history and try to find answers to contemporary issues that can be informed by history. I think it’s a very important mindset that I employ every day at Columbia.”

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tudents need to look deeper than the raw data,” Brennan says. “They need to talk to people about their experience and [try to] understand what it would look like. It’s pretty rare that the data published on websites or analyzed by US News-styled rankings are going to tell that story clearly. It behooves a student to dig in and explore more critically what that experience looks like.”

Brennan’s cautionary note echoes some of the caveats issued

by Frank Bruni in his 2015 book on selective admissions, Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be. Of the many pull-backthe-curtain moments, in which Bruni interviews current and former admissions professionals to get their candid insights, perhaps one of the most succinct is Condoleeza Rice’s observation that the popular US News rankings serve only to artificially limit student’s horizons. She notes that there are many excellent schools outside of the narrow foursome of Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford. And Rice notes that her own path to success as Secretary of State wasn’t a straight line. She began studying international relations only after she accepted that she would never become a great concert pianist and chanced upon an international relations course that excited her. Bruni’s message, while penned over the summer of 2014, rings just as true today: students are best served by looking widely and considering options outside of the narrow top tier elite colleges that have become coveted emblems of success.

So how do students identify the right college for them?

Meyer likens the admissions process to a courtship. Like thinking about a marriage, or the idea of entering into a partnership, it requires a lengthy and sober process of deliberation that needs to accompany or complement the feelings of giddy anticipation, love and infatuation if the partnership is to survive and be meaningful. “It’s a multilayered, complex, amorphous proposition, as anyone who has ever been married knows. And it’s really hard to narrow it down to something where you just know is the right or the wrong choice,” she says.

WEBB GUIDANCE: A UNIQUELY CUSTOMIZED PROCESS The college guidance process at Webb begins early. Martinez and Shin meet with each class twice a term to talk about college planning. Starting in January of junior year, it is tailored to meet the needs of each student as Martinez and Shin begin working closely with every junior individually.

In the fi rst meeting, “we do an extensive interview to get to know them. We ask a lot of questions about their experience at Webb, their background and family, their aspirations, and their hopes and dreams. It is also an ice-breaker to make sure students feel comfortable with the counseling staff,” Martinez says. The idea is to begin forming a nuanced understanding of the student.

Additional meetings take place over the course of the semester, both as a class, and individually, and “by the end of junior year, we know them pretty well—well enough to be able to match them up with colleges,” Martinez says. “When they go off for the summer break, they have an assignment to write a rough draft of their college essay and to visit some of the colleges we’ve discussed in our meetings in the spring and recommended that they consider.”

When students return for senior retreat, Martinez and Shin pick up the discussion again and meet individually with students to discuss what to expect over senior year. Martinez says, “It’s a chance to reflect on their summer and talk about how they have changed. We learn if there are any new developments we should know about before we help design their fi nal [college] list.”

Early in the fall semester, they work with each senior to create a customized list of colleges that match a student’s profile and interests. Once the preliminary college list is in place, the guidance staff meet a number of times with individual students and their families to talk about the process. They review the student’s profile, which reflects a broad range of measures, like academic performance, leadership, co-curricular activities, athletics and college entrance test scores and work to further refi ne the college list and plan how best to meet college goals.

Jordan E. McClure

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USC undergraduate Jordan McClure is a pre-med track, business major who is specializing in entrepreneurship and is taking a minor in occupational science and therapy. If that sounds like a lot, it is. McClure says, “I am studying multiple fields and taking on multiple subjects, and I am in love with the challenge and constant change.” It’s a love that fuels her passion “to learn about anything that interests” her while she is working on her degree and completing required courses.

One of the subjects she is interested in is African and African American history. “I take courses on slave law and the criminal justice system, courses focusing on black love and dynamics between black families and communities. I even took a course on the creation of hip-hop and all it means to my people,” she says. Her law class, “Law, Slavery, and Race,” has allowed her to learn about the evolution of laws through the periods of slavery, reconstruction and Jim Crow to the present day.

Since arriving at USC, perhaps the most important thing she has learned is that she can do anything she puts her mind to. She is formulating plans to eventually run for president of the Black Student Association. Parallel to her studies, she runs her own businesses. McClure is a personal trainer and has her own training company called Bougie Bodies Fitness. “I train girls in Los Angeles and the Inland Empire and offer meal plans, group and private sessions and indoor/outdoor workouts. That keeps me pretty busy as I do that while I’m going to school,” McClure says. During the fall semester, she also landed an internship with AEG in the global outreach department, working next to the Staples Center. She says, “USC is a dream come true for me and I’ll forever be grateful to Webb for preparing me to get here.”

“Webb definitely pushed me to my limits. I will always be thankful for the academic rigor and intensity Webb provided since I was a freshman.

I used to hate it to be honest, but now that I am attending USC I often find myself calling on some of those skills to help me manage the rigor of USC academics.”

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Big vs. small How a big place breaks down into small chunks should really be the way we look at size. Size is not necessarily an indicator that it is a place where it’s easy to fall through the cracks.

At a smaller place where there are few cracks, it is harder to slip through them. There are certainly more seams to slip through in a big place, but the extent to which the community is watching for that is the real indicator of how someone can fall through cracks.

To me this is about how an institution deals with their size with respect to service to students. It’s about resources that are put towards making that experience as personal as possible.

“...we make sure their profile and the college profiles connect...”

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—Kirk Brennan DIRECTOR OF ADMISSION UNIVERSIT Y OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

Admissions representatives from more than 100 colleges and universities visit Webb to conduct group information sessions with seniors from Sept. 1 through Nov. 15. Colgate’s Ross says meeting with the guidance staff prior to his session with the seniors prepares him to know something of the students he’ll be talking to. And conversely, the students are prepared. “Their questions really get to the deeper levels of what Colgate is about. They are the types of questions that require on both the student’s part and my part thoughtful conversation,” he says.

DEFINING SUCCESS Colleges are divided into three categories: likely schools, target schools and reach schools. “In the middle are the schools where the student is likely to get admitted: the student’s profile and the school’s admitted student profiles match up,” Martinez says.

“One of the benefits of schools like Webb is that we have the staff and the resources to customize the college application process so that students are maximizing their chances to be admitted to those three ranges of schools, no matter what their individual profile may be. We make sure their profile and the college profiles connect, and that there is overlap with our student and the kinds of students being admitted to the institutions on the student’s list,” Martinez says. “There’s no crystal ball, but we’re not just guessing at it, we’re basing it on real data.”

Throughout the process, the guidance staff works with families to help manage the anxiety that inevitably creeps in. “It can range from the nervousness that comes from not knowing how to answer a question on the Common App to full blown panic mode that happens when students come rushing into the office or send a panicked email in the middle of the night about not being able to submit something or not knowing how to fill something out. Usually it’s not as big of a problem as they thought it was. It’s the fi rst time they’re seeing it, and it’s the kind of anxiety that comes from the culmination of four years of hard work. And for us, on this end, we’ve seen it 100 times, and we’re able to help them get around it,” says Shin.

Jordan P. Burns

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Finding the right fit has been a somewhat circuitous route for Jordan Burns. The UC Berkeley master’s student earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Vassar College in 2016. Early on, he says, economics seemed to be a science that was focused on “improving policy and making sure that government was working for everybody.” But along the way, he began to feel that a piece of the puzzle was missing for him.

The further into his major he got, the more he sensed that the majority of his fellow students were more interested in the financial rewards associated with working for a big bank or trading on Wall Street—and “that wasn’t really why I started studying economics,” he says.

He decided that instead he wanted to do something that would have a more direct impact on society. As he considered his skill set in relation to his interests, values, and motivations, his love of physics and chemistry became the obvious choice. Through his junior and senior years, he started taking more chemistry, math and physics classes. After graduating from Vassar, he took another two years of math, physics, and materials science and engineering courses, while he was working in research labs at Berkeley.

Burns is currently completing coursework in the graduate materials science & engineering program and working on independent research that will be part of his doctoral dissertation. His research focuses on developing cobalt-free cathode materials for the batteries found in consumer electronics. “A very large portion of the world’s cobalt is mined in Democratic Republic of Congo and refined in China, and there’s a lot of political insecurity around this material,” Burns notes. He works in the lab of his research advisor, Kristin Persson, where the focus is almost exclusively on clean energy.

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The Liberal Arts: An Interdisciplinary Curriculum Those great aha moments come when you think about what you learned in your art class and what you learned in your political science class, and all of a sudden you understand those liminal spaces, the overlap between those two areas, and you go, “Oh, I get it. This is why this happens.” Those are the big discovery moments for most of us. The Liberal Arts encourages us to think in those ways, which I think is really important in school, it’s really important as you go into your career, and it’s a really important part of living life.

—Lisa Meyer VICE PRESIDENT AND DEAN OF ENROLLMENT LEWIS & CLARK

The Liberal Arts: How to Write, Read, Listen and Speak If they do their job in the classroom, when they graduate, they will have enhanced their ability to apply strong critical thinking skills to the various types of complex problems that they face in any area or profession they choose to pursue.

They’re also going to learn how to communicate effectively, both orally and in writing. It doesn’t matter if someone is a math major or if they are majoring in a discipline that they don’t associate with a whole lot of writing-related responsibilities. Our students are going to be put in a position where they have to demonstrate real competency in their ability to communicate effectively both orally and in writing, no matter what academic program they choose to follow.

—Gary Ross VICE PRESIDENT AND DEAN OF ADMISSION AND FINANCIAL AID COLGATE UNIVERSIT Y

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TAYLOR STOCKDALE – HEAD OF SCHOOLS

Webb’s curriculum

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is more than just hands-on learning. It’s about students applying their knowledge, solving real problems and doing projects, so that the application of their knowledge is at the forefront of the learning process. And that is very much in synch with not only where higher education is going but also, of course, the direction of the work force that our students will be walking into.

They’re going to be asked to solve problems using critical thinking skills and their collaboration skills.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

oughly 80 percent of students on average end up at one of their top choice colleges at Webb. Top choice is defined by a number of factors. The typical student has 10 collegeson their list. Three or four of those are reaches, at least three to four are target schools, and at least another three are the most likely schools. The average student is admitted to five or six schools of those, which means 80 percent are getting into one of their top reach schools,” says Martinez.

This thread goes much further back than the new curriculum. Many of our alumni go on to create their own companies or even to spark a new industry, synthesize big data, challenge conventional wisdom or come up with a new concept. And I think that’s a different kind of learning. It’s really about application.

It’s challenging enough to educate students for a world that we understand, but it’s even more challenging to educate students for a world we can’t even envision.

Instead of focusing on memorizing content, we focus on the skills for continual learning.

But, he adds, there’s more to it than looking at just the Ivies or Ivy-like colleges. It’s important to include a range of schools. “Everyone has to identify places where they have a really good shot at getting admitted, not just the ones that are hard to get into,” he says. “Even a most likely school can deny or waitlist a top student because they’re going to second guess the student and bet that the student is unlikely to enroll.”

The complexity of the dance between applicant and institution and the variety of ways it can be interpreted underscores why their role is so critically important.

Ultimately, Martinez says, “We are here to help students strategize and to advocate for them. We work with our students to maximize their chances of being admitted to all their colleges, especially their top choices.” And it works.

“...80 percent are getting into one of their reach schools...”