The $50 Sweatshirt Acquisition Tour
Lessons learned from the college admissions gauntlet in the Class of 2025
I just bought a closet full of $50 sweatshirts, all for the privilege of spending the equivalent of a small country’s GDP in tuition the next four years. Like other parents of seniors in the high school Class of ‘25 – the biggest in American history, thanks to the recession baby bust that followed their births in 2007 – I have fresh lessons from the college admissions gauntlet.
What vs. Where is the first decision. Those are the two approaches of organizing a college search and I’m convinced “what” is the superior option.
For years, I’ve done a quiz with our teenagers and their visiting friends on summer nights on our back porch – the kids just call it “the college game.” After a beer or two for me, and usually ice cream for them, I ask a battery of binary questions and then suggest a group of colleges that match their preferences. Each kid gets a turn on the hot seat, debating my recommendations, going as slow as a lazy evening-killer should.
We play it all in good fun, but after the live fire version with our daughter picking a real school, I think the college game works. My top recommendation years ago for my daughter’s best friend – Georgia Tech – is where she will enroll, on scholarship, after a search that spanned the best schools in the Eastern United States. Another friend is bound for Indiana, a top rec on my list for him.
The game works because it starts with what the kids want, generically, absent brand names or reputation. It recognizes that sometimes desires conflict, and those conflicts must be resolved or subsumed.
It may be that when kids are barefoot, sun-burned, and mentally removed from their school environment, it’s exactly the right time to engage directly and stoke the thought process on the bigger things in life.
Some of the questions in our game are cheeky, and for laughs, but most force them to expose their instincts. The more general the question, the better they are at answering it with confidence. A few:
Do you want to know your professors personally or be able to fade into the crowd?
Do you dislike warm weather more or cold?
Are big-time sports and tailgates really important or only somewhat important? (Newsflash: it’s at least somewhat important to ALL of them in this generation, which is why enrollments are exploding at places like Texas A & M and Alabama.)
Is it better if family is close enough to drive, or an airplane flight away?
Is it more important to be pushed academically or stretched socially?
Do you want to dive deep into one subject or sample a lot?
Better to have friends who share your passions or a group with disparate interests?
When I hear perpendicular answers, I pit them against each other.
Once my daughter got into her real search, she adapted it to these big questions we’d been asking for fun on the back porch. As a junior she declared she wanted a college small enough to enable relationships with professors, and one in what she called “an authentic or significant place.” She wanted warm weather, but kept a few cold schools on her list as a hedge.
As a senior, she decided finding a college that produced two or more musicals a year was important – a complicator given her small liberal arts model. It takes a lot of people interested in Sondheim to stage musicals and that mostly means a big university or a conservatory.
We started school visits slowly, with one the summer before junior year and three that fall. Spring of junior year brought three more trips – for a total of seven campuses in the first 12 months of looking. A lot? Maybe, but I recommend doing even more first visits in the junior rather than senior year.
We did not factor the number of senior-year weekends we’d chew up making return visits to the campuses she liked most, including trips back to audition for scholarships - or that we’d keep digging deeper down the list for new schools as her discernment advanced. (We never got to one school high on her list, and we had to scramble to make a trip this April that proved critical.)
She spent a full week on one of her prospective campuses at a camp in the summer between junior and senior years, and that helped her picture her future and think more strategically. That was her idea, and it was a good one.
Including both schools with competitive admissions and some that were not too competitive was my idea, and also a good one. Seeing a campus one is certain to get into, and seeing the good in it, can take the jitters out of the process. There are 2,700 colleges in America and almost every kid can get into 2,400 of them, or more. Everyone has good choices. I’m glad we started easy - and in our case, one less competitive school survived all the way to my daughter’s last decision.
Taking a lot of visits also taught us how to maximize them. At one of the easier schools, the admissions office happily set us up with the faculty chair of the music program that interested her, and he was glad to not only spend a candid half-hour talking career prospects with her, but to walk her into a songwriting class unannounced. At the end of that class, she said “if this is what college is, I can’t wait.”
We took that lesson to every other school – opening a dialogue directly with professors, bypassing the admissions staff if necessary. These conversations helped discern if the departments were a fit, something she couldn’t learn from the marketing material or recruiters.
We also utilized an idea from Ron Lieber’s great book, The Price You Pay for College. It’s the Common Data Set, the spreadsheet each school compiles each year for the ratings services, buried at an unlisted link in any school’s the digital basement. Only one school we considered made it easy to find, but it’s always discoverable via a search for the term “common data set.”
It’s a wealth of un-spun statistics available on every college. It tells you which admissions factors each specific college values, and which it doesn’t. The deviations between schools’ priorities surprised us.
Especially since we were looking at small schools, it was helpful to find out how many students get “merit” aid (though it should be labeled “discounting” in most cases), and what amount is normal. Finding first-year retention rates, geographic diversity, and how many people even submit test scores made it easier to critically read the slick material.
Similarly helpful was our discovery of university-designated institutional peer groups and strategic plans.
In my day job, I make strategic plans for clients, so I appreciate the intentionality of that process. The college she eventually chose – Denison University in Granville, Ohio – had a strategic plan that popped with innovation. Digging further, we found their prior plan from a decade ago. It explained most of what they’re executing now – and a good bit of it is different from what their competitors are doing. As a parent, nothing in our search mattered more to me than finding the “why” of Denison’s ambitions
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For my daughter, getting off the tour and spending a few hours in her department of choice answered all the questions the paperwork couldn’t. By her 18th visit to her 14th campus, she knew exactly what she wanted to ask and had the confidence to do so.
By focusing on what was generically important to her, and keeping her list longitudinally deep within a latitudinally narrow type of school, she was able to constantly re-weight her variable factors:
authentic place
weather
proximity to extended family
net cost
academic seriousness of peers
performing arts offerings
warmth/vibes on campus
potential to excel individually
abundance of musicals
Her choice in the end had some vibes involved – as it should – but by starting with the generic “whats” she’d answered on the back porch, the “where” came from an analytical decision, with trade-offs she could accept. The last sweatshirt she bought on the tour stuck – and she knew exactly why.
Tomorrow, May 1, is the enrollment deadline for the fall semester for most incoming freshmen. By some estimates, 1.4 million families will be making the big decision and forking over the dormitory deposit in the next day, unless they’ve already done so. To next year’s class, good luck with the sweatshirt tour - it’ll be easier than you think.