Jason Coady, LL’13, Teacher & Student Leadership Programs Coordinator, The Hill School (PA)
We’ve all seen it. Whether you’re in your first year of teaching or your fortieth, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The student who insists on taking five AP courses as a junior even though he earned B’s in standard level courses as a sophomore. The student who signs up for every club, runs for every position, and volunteers for every committee even though most of them don’t interest her. The student who gets rejected from a college – probably an Ivy – and spends two days at home to recover from the disappointment and emotional distress.
We have all, at one time or another, been that student’s teacher, coach, dorm parent, or adviser. We have all lived the ups and downs with that student, doing our best to support him and working with her parents to help them understand the reality of the situation, all the while thinking to ourselves that none of this is healthy, none of this makes sense, and none of this is actually helping the student make the best use of his high school years or do the things she wants to do. Fortunately, we are not alone.
Everything that we have seen, college counselors have seen, too, only ten times as often. Spurred by college counselors and college admissions officers, Harvard University’s Making Caring Common Project tackled the question of rising pressures in college admissions. The result was Turning the Tide: Inspiring Concern for Others and the Common Good through College Admissions, a report endorsed by 175 colleges and universities that recommended changes to address the concerns the college counselors – and by extension all of us – had about the anxieties families were feeling and the confusion they were experiencing around the college admissions process.
Turning the Tide was published in February 2016. A few months later, and completely coincidentally, I was appointed as our first Student Leadership Programs Coordinator. I was asked to address the challenges of students who were overcommitting themselves, students who didn’t feel like they had any opportunities to lead, and students who had an ambiguous understanding of what it meant to lead. After a few months of talking with students and getting a birds-eye view of the resources and capacities we had to teach students about leadership, I found myself in a conversation with a college counselor where we put two and two together: the problems we were both seeing were exactly the problems Turning the Tide was created to address.
Think back to the students I described, the ones who tried to load up on AP courses and the ones who pursued as many extracurricular activities as possible. We realized that this wasn’t two separate problems but two manifestations of one big problem: students were thinking about their lives in discrete chunks, not as aspects of a single whole. They would sign up for courses without thinking about their athletics. They would pursue leadership positions without thinking about their academics.
Turning the Tide acknowledged this as well, recommending “redefining achievement in ways that both level the playing field for economically diverse students and reduce excessive achievement pressure.” In explaining this recommendation, the report noted that, “[College] applications should state plainly that students should feel no pressure to report more than two or three substantive extracurricular activities and should discourage students from reporting activities that have not been meaningful to them.” It also noted that, “Admissions offices should convey to students that simply taking large numbers of AP or IB courses per year is often not as valuable as sustained achievement in a limited number of areas.”
For the last two years, we have held a goal-setting session with our sophomore class. All the sophomores and their advisers gather for a conversation about what the students want the last two years of their high school careers to look like. We begin by asking the students to think about their goals, which can vary from short-term (make the varsity soccer team as a junior) to long-term (become a doctor) and from school-related (have a 4.0 GPA) to personal (spend more time with friends). Once the goals are set, we ask the students to list all the things they have done and want to do in our co-curricular program, our extracurricular activities, and our classrooms. We also ask them about outside commitments, like travel soccer and Boy Scouts, and about their summer activities, like SAT prep and summer jobs.
With their goals stated and their plans laid out, we ask them to take a step back and look at the whole picture. They think about which classes and activities will help them reach their goals and which will stand in their way. They consider where they’ll spend their time and whether they’ll have enough of it. They revise their goals and plans, and at the end of the process they have a road map for the next two years. We all know it might change, of course, but for most of these students, this is the first time they’ve ever set goals, tried to align what they want to achieve with what they want to do, and looked at their whole lives to see how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together.
In just our second year of doing this, we are already seeing significant changes in our school culture around leadership and involvement. Our students are thinking carefully about what they want to do. They are developing the ability to set goals and pursue them, to prioritize their interests, and to say “no” to opportunities. In short, they are developing the skills and mindsets that will make them the next generation of leaders we all hope they will be.
Do all these changes mean that we are suddenly seeing record numbers of students admitted to Harvard? Of course not. Do all these changes mean that our students are happier, healthier, and more aware of who they are when they apply to college? Absolutely.
Our approach is a work in progress, and while it’s working for us it won’t necessarily work for other schools. The steps we took, though, will help schools define their own paths. To that end, we encourage any school struggling with these issues to consider doing the following:
1. Talk with current student leaders about their whole lives. Find out what’s working for them and what isn’t in their entire lives, not just in their leadership roles. Hearing and retelling their stories will help students and faculty understand the challenges they are facing.
2. Read Turning the Tide. The entire report is quite long, but the Executive Summary is more than enough to paint a picture of what colleges are starting to emphasize in admissions.
3. Work with your college counseling office. Too often, faculty see the college process as an anonymous enemy that drives students to make irrational decisions, but Turning the Tide can make that college process your ally. That’s why it’s critical to teach students to improve their decision making skills. Students and parents are going to focus on college no matter what you do, so partner with your college counselors to deliver a unified message that resonates with students and promotes your vision of leadership development.
Jason Coady is in his nineteenth year of teaching, the last fourteen of which have been at The Hill School in Pottstown, PA. As with any independent school teacher, he wears many hats, including mathematics instructor, dormitory head, Director of Community Service, and Student Leadership Programs Coordinator. The focus of this article is drawn from a presentation he gave at the NAIS Annual Conference in March 2018 with Ellen Deitrich, Director of College Counseling at The Hill School, and Debra Johns, Associate Director of Admissions at Yale University.