Monday, February 25, 2002

Robin Mamlet

"Examining the Evidence: Students With and Without Balance in their Lives"

MS. LEE: Please take your seats so we can get on with the program.

Well, I went to bed last night feeling quite holy, and I realized that the fact that I always feel that I am on the brink of chaos is a good thing.

But I'm sorry to tell you that I woke up this morning, and I was one of those dreadful people who had confused my will with God's will, and my will and God's will is that you will try to be on time for the sessions. It's really a help to our speakers. It's difficult when we get out of order, so to speak. So if you could just look at the program and try to follow it, it will be a big help to all of us.

Carol has some announcements to make.

MS. LANE: Is everybody listening very carefully? The winery tours this afternoon. There will be five motor coaches and one mini bus out there. If you have a yellow card in your folder, you get on the mini bus marked Rutherford Hill Winery. If you don't have a yellow card and have signed up for the winery tour, get on any one of the motor coaches. Everybody who signed up will get to a winery, but this is very highly structured. You can believe me. So there are no substitutions, no exchanges, and no refunds.

The buses will leave promptly at 1:00, so if you're not there, you will not go to the winery. The box lunches will be at the buses, and the buses will be down to the end of the driveway. So if you leave this room, the doorway to my left, at the end of the hallway, will take you out and you can't miss five motor coaches and one mini bus, so that's where you go. And you will pick up your lunch there and they will have ice chests with beverages on board every bus.

I have no idea which winery you will be going to, or, in fact, which ones I will be going to, so it's going to be quite a great mystery tour, but I think it will be a lot of fun.

We have an invitation from the Oxbow School here in Napa for anyone who would like to visit tomorrow afternoon during the free session. You do need to be there by 1:30, and you will have to get there on your own. I will put some material out in the front.

Some of you know the Oxbow School. It's a one semester co-educational boarding school for juniors and seniors with a focus on art particularly, but also an academic program. It just opened two or three years ago.

If you want to do that, just sign up, just so I can let them know how many people would like to come. I gather it's also an offsite visit for the NAIS conference. So if you don't want to make a trip back here, you can do that now. But I do need to let them know this afternoon how many people to expect.

Tomorrow morning the breakfast service will start at 7:30. Your breakout sessions, most of them, are downstairs in the small breakout rooms. The large group, the co-ed day schools, will just stay up here and eat in the Silverado ballroom. Just take a corner of that. Breakfast will again be served out on the Fairway Deck, and then you just have breakfast quickly, or you can take your food downstairs to the breakout sessions.

I think that's about all we can absorb this morning, so I will save time for the speaker. Thanks.

MS. LEE: Our first speaker, Robin Mamlet, is going to be introduced by Paul Chapman. Paul.

MR. CHAPMAN: Good morning. I want to welcome you all to California. I'll join that chorus. We have a beautiful day outside, don't we? And it's like this every day in California. Our speaker will certainly attest.

It's a real privilege and an honor to introduce to you Robin Mamlet, dean of admission and financial aid at Stanford University. Last night I was reflecting with Robin, trying to remember when I first met her. It goes back a number of years, because she and I have shared work in college admissions and day school work. I have spent some time at Reid College in the admissions office and then at University High School in San Francisco, and then moved to Head-Royce in Oakland, and somewhere in those early years Robin and I figure that we met.

She was clearly a kindred spirit, and I followed her work over the years with great interest.

Last spring when I was back at Stanford on a leave, I got a call from Jessie-Lea asking if I would contact Robin, and I was glad to do that and extend the invitation to join us.

Now, I explained in e-mail that the topic was balance, balance in our lives, and I was only slightly disturbed when I began to get e-mails from Robin on her vacation. But indeed, there's no one in a better position to talk with us this morning about the important issues that we and our high school kids face.

Let me tell you a little bit about Robin and her very, very impressive background. She is a graduate of Occidental in Los Angeles, where she received her bachelor of arts in English.

She began her career in admissions at her alma mater and then continued her work at Pomona College in Claremont from 1984 to 1987. From there she moved to New York, spent six years at Sarah Lawrence, where she was dean of admission and financial aid.

In 1993 she was offered the dean of admission position at Lawrenceville, in New Jersey. She served in that capacity until 1996, when she assumed the role of dean of admissions at Swarthmore in Pennsylvania. And then in October of 2000, Robin came back home to the west, where she again assumed her position as dean of admission at Stanford.

Robin is an active member of the College

Board and the National Association of College Admissions Counselors. She speaks regularly at national conferences, professional meetings, forums for guidance counselors, colloquia on the future of college admissions.

When she's not in the office she's tending to her family: Her husband, Charles Brown, her eight-year-old daughter, Chloe, and her 18-month-old son, Austin. And in fact, if you do the math, you realize that&emdash;we checked this out this morning&emdash;

Austin was born on September 1st and Robin was hired on October 1st and began in November. So that's quintessential balance.

Robin, we're just so pleased that you would take time at this moment, which we all know is such a busy, busy time for you in your work at the office, to come and speak with us to examine the evidence: Students with and without balance in their lives.

Would you all please join with me in welcoming Robin Mamlet.

MS. MAMLET: Good morning. It really is a pleasure to be here with you this morning. You're a

welcome diversion from the mountains of application files that await me in my office. I have taken to

calling them my "flat friends" because I see so much more of them than I do my real friends. And my husband tells me that when I start to call them my "flat family," that I'm in big trouble.

And while I joke about the mountains of applications that await me, they really are my joy. I adore them, the exceptional young people that sit on the shelf of my office waiting to be discovered. I was an English major in college and I firmly believe that application essays should be declared its own genre of literature.

I have long watched and admired this group, your group, from afar, and I'm somewhat nervous today. I do a lot of speaking, as Paul mentioned, but you're a bit of an august group, and the fact that these minutes appear sort of word for word is a bit daunting to me.

Shep Shanley, my really friendly colleague from Northwestern, assured me last night that if he has to speak to anyone, he'd like to speak with you, so I have high hopes. But still it's a bit intimidating.

It does mean a great deal to me to be able to talk with you and to share some thoughts and observations about a topic that I think we all care very much about, the well-being of our country's young women and the effect of the college application process on their psyches and on their lives.

I keep stopping to wonder how it is we possibly got ourselves here, or as the Very Reverend Alan Jones might say, "When did the continuity run out?"

When I was growing up and in high school in Santa Barbara, the pressure to take certain courses and engage in certain activities for the sake of college admissions did not exist, at least not for my friends nor for me. Community service was a far different concept and was certainly never noted on a high school transcript, and advanced placement courses were barely on the horizon. The common application was still fairly young. Independent counselors were a rare breed, and served primarily the troubled. And my parents would regularly have talks with me about the consequences of taking on too much, of overcommitment, of not making time in my life for family and friends, for daydreaming, or for simply being.

The hardest moments for me growing up came invariably when I had to choose which activities and

commitments to continue and which ones to let go, and my parents exerted a firm yet somewhat removed eye on both my schedule and stress level.

Once I graduated from college, some 20 years ago now, and went into college admissions, no one knew what the term "college admission" actually meant, and certainly no one thought of it as a career, least of all my parents. It's true. They kept waiting patiently, certain that after a few years of traipsing around the country talking with bright 17-year-olds about the value of a liberal education, I would come to my senses and get a real job. And they're still waiting.

And in the early 1980s, when I met a number of you and I would be at a dinner or a cocktail party and someone would ask what I do, I would always have to explain what college admission meant. Now when strangers ask me what I do, I often go to great lengths to avoid answering the question.

Ten years ago, when I would tell someone that I do college admissions, such a revelation would invariably lead to a conversation about which amazing neighbor or phenomenal cousin did not get into Williams or was wait-listed at Princeton, and the expression of such incredible injustice perpetrated against a deserving and talented young person always enlisted the sympathy of those clustered around the spinach dip, and I would always be very glad that I worked in a less selective institution, such as Sarah Lawrence.

Now the conversations around the spinach dip are rarely about why so-and-so did not get in or was only wait-listed at Stanford or Harvard. Instead, the conversation quickly moves to a fevered and often anguished series of questions about which nursery or middle or high school is best, about whether their daughter should add violin to the other three instruments she already studies, or whether their son really should take AP European history when he's already scored 5 on five other APs, and is most interested in taking "The novel as film."

People have absorbed the notion that admission to a dozen or three dozen of the nation's top colleges is rarely, if ever, a sure bet, no matter how strong the student. But they're still looking for the magic formula, the best way to maximize their chances or enhance the way that their child looks on a college application.

So a panel entitled "Examining the Evidence: Students With and Without Balance in their Lives" was a fascinating topic to me. I don't really believe that the evidence needs a great deal of examination, because I think, sadly, that it's quite clear that there's far more imbalance than balance.

So I ask what colleges can do about this, and what you as school heads and community leaders can do about this. And I'm going to start by talking about some things that I think are actually taking us in the wrong direction. Some of my comments may be a bit unpopular&emdash;I'm not sure&emdash; but I'm looking forward to seeing how they strike you and what kinds of comments you have and what kind of conversation we'll have together, because I think that once we understand why certain steps may, in fact, be taking us in the wrong direction, that we're perhaps closer to understanding in which way the right direction actually lies.

So in gathering my thoughts about this presentation, it's been nearly impossible not to consider some of higher education's other lightning-rod issues of the day, many of which center on college admission. The never-ending debate over affirmative action and whether such practices are fair or all right. The practice of early decision and early action and whether such programs discriminate against the less privileged or pressure bright students into closing off their options prematurely early, or contribute to the decline of a high school senior year.

The recent articles in The Wall Street Journal and other papers about the kinds of extra editing that many families are purchasing in order to give their students every possible advantage in the application process. The most recent debate over the SAT and the University of California's announcement just a few weeks ago now that they seek to scrap the test all together and create a new one. And all of these matters, every one of them, are to me a symptom rather than the underlying issue itself. Each one is about fairness or perceived fairness; right? That's really at the bottom of it. About anxiety over whether there will be a spot available at a top institution for each student who deserves one.

About&emdash;and this is where I start to grow increasingly uneasy&emdash;a sense of entitlement that stems from a certain starting point, a starting point that says, "I have done thus and such, and so I deserve a spot at my first-choice institution."

About what happens to a generation of talented young people who sense that they may be denied the opportunity to have what they feel should rightfully be theirs, and about what they will do to get this, about what distortions will occur in their schools, in their extracurricular lives, in their family lives, so that they can have what they and their parents think they want and need, and what happens when only a very small handful of institutions, despite the richness of American higher education, are seen as tickets to the good life.

So we have a backdrop of incredible anxiety and angst. We have a perception that the chance to go to a Stanford is becoming increasingly essential, yet perhaps more than ever out of reach. We have the willingness of many families to spend whatever money is required so as to place themselves in the best possible position for admission to their first-choice school, and out of this emerge several phenomena that concern me greatly.

First, there's an exaggerated sense that everyone is engaged in a high-stakes game. Applicants and their families are trying to gain an advantage over the admission system, rather than to reflect honestly and seriously about who they are, what they value, how it is that they learn best, and therefore, what kind of college will best suit them.

And I think that the public perceives that colleges, too, are caught up in an unending and morally suspect game. That because (this line of reasoning goes) each top institution now wants to be the top&emdash;and I don't think this is true, by the way, but I think this is the way the line of reasoning runs&emdash;that because each of us wants to be the top, we're no longer selecting applicants out of a genuine response to each individual and their strengths, but always with an eye to how best to position ourselves in the U.S. News rankings, causing us to impose unfair systems of early decision and early action so that we can report artificially high yields to U.S. News, causing us to admit only students with stratospherically high SAT scores so we can report high scores to U.S. News, and causing young people to spend unprecedented amounts of time and money cramming for tests that will have really little to do with the kind of skills that they need to succeed in college.

And I think that when you buy this notion of admissions as a game, that the rules of the game to many mean that, as families, they have a responsibility to have their students package themselves, no matter what the cost, in order to present the applicant they think that the colleges want.

And of course, related to the issue of the game is the notion that this game is accompanied by tremendous unfairness that must be monitored vigilantly, that the practice of affirmative action unfairly penalizes majority students who have done everything right, and that the Stanfords of the world are increasingly inaccessible to regular folks.

I think that the phenomenon of the game carries with it sorry consequences. If we're all involved in a game, then the rules that must be followed are the rules of the game in which packaging oneself and spending tremendous amounts of money on various kinds of coaching, anywhere from a couple of hundred dollars to upwards of $30,000, are all simply what one does. And ultimately this means that the attention is all on getting in, and not on the importance of what happens at your institution, or at a Stanford, once students are actually there.

It distorts the lives of talented young people between the ages of 15 and 17, and increasingly younger and younger, and it diminishes significantly the value of what happens inside all of our institutions when people are there or once they reach our doors.

So my very first large concern is that this game that is more and more universally accepted is just the way things are, and is justifiable given the game that we universities are seen as playing.

And my second and related concern is that students and parents believe that if they work harder, take more classes, do more community service, start a business, win the Intel, discover a planet, never sleep at all, that they will get into the college of their choice.

And my third concern is that higher education leaders, in their frustration over this sad and destructive state, will rush to well-intentioned but misdirected solutions that will place us even further back from where we are now, which leads us to two of the issues I want to spend a little time on this morning: The public conversation about early program and where Stanford stands on this, and why we do what we do; and also where we are in the national conversation about standardized testing, and where Stanford stands on that.

I believe that each of these matters are intimately tied to the issue of balance and pressure in young people's lives. And I also believe that much of the current conversation about these issues is taking us in the wrong direction. I also have plenty to say about coaching, but in the interests of time, I'll leave that for the question-and-answer period.

So let me turn first to early decision. As you no doubt know, President Levin of Yale in early December called for the abandonment of early decision programs, adding fuel to a debate on the merits of early admission programs begun by writer James Fallows in the Atlantic Monthly September issue. How many of you have seen that? Okay. Good.

So for quick review, for those who haven't, the critics of early admission programs charged that such programs discriminate against students who do not have the resources to apply early and thus impede diversity; that they force students to make premature college choices about where to apply; that they encourage premature senioritis after students receive early college acceptances; that they subordinate student interest in favor of the institution's own self-interest, including yield management and work load balance; and that they exacerbate an already overwrought and frenzied process driven by the anxieties of parents and high-achieving students.

I think we all agree here that the pressure on talented high school seniors to gain admission to top colleges is at an unhealthy level. There's no question. I don't think that it follows that an abandonment of early admission programs would decrease this pressure. In fact, I'm going to suggest that it would exacerbate the pressure.

If early programs were dropped, the process at a national level would be characterized by far more uncertainty. Candidates would once again apply to twenty or so schools instead of the now more modest five to twelve. Institutions would offer admission to a greater number of overlap admits, resulting in heavy use of the wait list. Wait list activity would begin in the spring and the trickle-down to less selective institutions would continue through the summer, so that those weaker students who most need to know where they're going to go would be finding out where they would end up in college well into the middle or end of the summer, and so I think it would be far more stressful for students.

The year that Stanford added early decision, so too did Princeton and Yale. If you lump together the number of early admits to each of these three institutions alone and multiply that number by six, if you take our collective number of early admits and say that instead of applying to just one institution, each of those students would have applied to six, which is a fairly conservative math, I think, then collectively, these three institutions declutter the spring pipeline of over 10,000 applications; 10,000 applications that would be overlap applications.

Again, if they were all hitting at the same time, we would have to use the wait list a great deal because there's so much uncertainty about where these students would actually enroll.

So I think it's really important to remember that it's not that there are fewer places available at top schools because of early programs. We all have the same size classes. It's that there are fewer admit offers available. This is good for colleges, yes. But I think it's also very good for students and very good for schools. I believe that early admission programs can truly benefit students who have identified a clear first choice and are strongly qualified for their institution of choice. And for those who are not qualified, early admission programs give students time to readjust their sights and find a better match later in the regular admission cycle.

For the benefits of early admission programs to be realized, however, colleges and universities need to exercise this option responsibly. Stanford I think does exercise early admission in a manner that is responsible, appropriate, and beneficial to students both individually and collectively, and I say this to you at the risk of being seen as shilling for my school, because I genuinely think that we have the right approach.

Our program is EDMS binding, so there's a quid pro quo for those who use it. Early action, on

the other hand, attracts far greater numbers because there's no disincentive to using it and so it

clearly benefits the privileged who are in a position to marshal their efforts and get all their applications in early. We have an informal cap on the number of students whom we will admit early. No more than one-third of the class and roughly one quarter of our admission offers. So 75 percent of our admission offers are tendered through regular decision in the spring.

So I do believe that our administration as a program is restrained, and this leaves us the flexibility in the spring to respond appropriately to applicants who apply through regular review.

I think that the charge that early programs play to the privileged is a fair one, but the ultimate question to me is whether the existence of an early program diminishes the potential for diversity in a class. Stanford's diversity and specifically its commitment to socioeconomic and racial diversity has never been greater, no matter how you slice it. The charge that early programs lead to the decline of the senior year does not square with our data. Our records, both anecdotally and in terms of hard information&emdash;and I work for two engineers; the provost and the president are engineers, so they're constantly asking for data&emdash;

and our data shows clearly that those students who get into Stanford early feel liberated from the pressures of college applications early enough in their senior year so that they can truly pursue their intellectual passions more freely and more genuinely during the remainder of their senior year.

And of the half dozen or so letters that I sent out last spring to students who were enrolling at Stanford who somehow had let their grades fall after they had received their admission decision, of the half dozen that I sent out, only one went to an early decision admit.

And finally, Stanford takes great care to be certain that financial aid packages that ED applicants receive are every bit as attractive as those received by their regular admission counterparts.

It's illogical to me that the institutions that currently fill nearly half the class early are saying that the other option is to drop the program. An all-or-nothing approach leaves us either at our current unhealthy state, where programs are spinning out of control, or at a place where one admission deadline exists, as does the attending chaos that would ensue.

A much more reasonable solution is where Stanford already sits. And remember that I'm new, so I don't get credit for this policy, but I do think it's the right one.

You use early decision in a responsible and restrained fashion, responding to those students who are exceptionally well-suited for your institution, and for whom you are the clear first choice, and saving the vast majority of your seats for the spring, so that you have the flexibility to respond appropriately to the talent that emerges in February and in March.

I'm going to move on to some points on standardized testing, and then I'm going to give a few more comments and open this to discussion.

By now you probably all have heard of the recommendation from the faculty of the University of California that the system scrap the SAT exams and develop a new standardized test more closely aligned with the curriculum students are learning in California high schools. How many of you have been following this? I know you're much more geographically spread than California.

Okay. Well, I'm going to give you a few more background comments on this, then. The

recommendation stems from an ongoing concern that the SAT 1, or the current test of reasoning skills, is not a stronger predictor of a student's academic performance in the UC system than is the SAT 2, which is also known as the achievement test.

Also, it stems from a growing discomfort with the societal consequences of requiring the SAT, and a desire on the part of UC to play a more direct role in shaping California's K through 12 curriculum. UC now seeks to discard the SAT all together and in its place construct a new test that bears some similarities to the SAT as well as some important differences.

This test, like the SAT, would have two parts. First, a three-hour exam of core achievement, the language arts of reading and writing, including a writing sample, and mathematics. And second, two one-hour subject examinations in specific content areas within the subjects covered by the University's A through G requirements.

Similarities to the SAT include that the division of the exam is into two portions, a longer, more general exam, followed by shorter content-driven exams. And the seat time required of test-takers, like the SAT 1, the new first test would be three hours long, about the same, and like the SAT 2, the subject tests are one hour, although two would be required rather than the current three.

The differences from the SAT include a more direct linking of both portions of the test to California high school curricula, so that not only part 2 but also part 1 will be achievement-based. It seeks to, quote, "cover mastery of the fundamental disciplines needed for university-level work."

Other differences will include a public presentation or explanation that will focus on testing as measuring the mastery of material that can be learned through conventional high school study and through rigorous attention to one's course work over a sustained period of time, and a desire to eliminate that part of the SAT that is seen as seeking to measure ability rather than achievement.

I think that the effort is on trying to leave a notion of measuring nature and rather, instead, to focus on the more democratic ideal of mastery through individual will and hard work.

So what could be wrong with this approach? Why would I suggest that it is a rush to an ill-conceived solution to a complex problem and will result in worse, rather than improved, conditions for our young people?

First, I'm troubled by the urge to remove reasoning components from our standardized tests. The ability to thrive at Stanford rests on more than the ability to excel in a demanding high school curriculum. It requires imagination and creativity, the ability to handle both ambiguity and nuance, the ability to move both within and between the theoretical and the practical, and strong developed reasoning skills, the very things that your schools teach. And it is this last, the acquisition of the ability to employ strong developed reasoning skills, that the SAT 1 at least purports to measure. It seeks to assess some important intellectual capacities that can be learned and improved upon over time and developed, one would hope, through rigorous high school course work and through a great deal of reading, writing, and thinking. It's different from the mastery of certain subjects. And it has everything to do with the capacity to engage fully in a liberal education, to learn how to learn, to ask the important questions, to innovate.

Now, does the SAT 1 do all this perfectly? Of course not. But it's the best instrument we have

and I would like to see us push that instrument further rather than abandon that which it seeks to do. So I believe that the ability to acquire knowledge and apply constructs represents only a part of the necessary skill set for success at a university of Stanford's rigor. And so I see this move by the University of California as a troubling step backward.

Second, this move will impose yet more tests on a weary and resentful public. UC is saying that the testing organizations they will engage&emdash; which incidentally are the college board and ETS along with the ACT&emdash;that these organizations will produce equivalency tables so that non-UC institutions can convert scores from the new test to the SAT. UC states quite definitively that, "Thus California students will not be required to take additional tests in order to apply to non-UC institutions."

My president and I were a bit surprised to see this statement, since we had not yet had the chance to approve the exam that UC will ostensibly create. Be that as it may, it's illogical to me that an exam that omits the testing of developed reasoning skills can in any way be equivalent to a test based specifically on those skills.

Third, an achievement-based exam signals to our state's brightest young people that the ultimate goal of education is not thinking and reasoning, but mastery of facts and concepts, and this is not the message that I want our bright young people to receive.

So I don't believe the creation by UC of a new test will decrease the stress load or demand of standardized testing, but instead add significantly to that stress. And the creation of a new SAT does nothing to get at the core issues that are troubling so many about the nature of the college application process today, or solve the problem that there are simply too many exceptional students for the too few spots at the publicly perceived best institutions.

So where does this leave Stanford with regard to our own testing requirements? We don't currently plan to alter our requirement of SAT 1 or the strong recommendation that students take three SAT 2s, but will watch the UC conversation with great interest. I think that UC is hoping that, being in California, they will be on the forefront of what will become a national move, the West Coast leading the way, and so the rest of the nation will follow and move to this new core test that is based on achievement rather than on, quote, "ability." So I think that those of you outside of California should probably stay tuned.

Are there conversations that are happening on a national level that I think are headed in the right direction? There are. The conversations that Harvard is having about advanced placement is one that I noted with great interest. Have you all read about this? It's been in the papers lately. Harvard has moved to grant credit only for a score of 5 on the AP. And I was fascinated to see this. We at Stanford are having a very similar conversation, and we had no idea that Harvard, too, was talking about this. And likewise, the recent findings from the National Science Foundation have been a welcome addition to this conversation. How many of you have seen that study? It's an NSF study. It's available on the Internet, and basically they're saying that the combined educational value of a high school AP curriculum and college course work is compromised when high schools teach to what they see as a purchased and prescribed curriculum aimed at preparing students to excel on a single AP exam.

Stanford faculty believe that the AP limits the flexibility of high school teachers at the very strongest schools and diminishes the opportunities for creativity and intellectual aspiration that we believe are critical to successful college preparation.

It's fascinating to me to watch this conversation among the Stanford faculty unfold. It began from some comments and concerns that I shared with my faculty admission committee this fall, and it's absolutely been picked up and carried by the faculty themselves, many of whom have teenagers in our local schools, and who are deeply distressed over what they observe of their children's lives and their children's friends' lives.

What other conversations are needed? Well, I can think of a good number, but they are tough ones. At the college level specifically, I think first we must resist the seduction of easy solutions that play well publicly and, in fact, make things worse. I believe that both the ED and SAT conversations are examples of this.

Two, I think we have to be much more proactive in talking about why we do what we do.

Third, I think we have to recognize, name, and talk publicly about the underlying anxieties that are fueling the college admission frenzy.

Fourth, I think we have to model for the public a noncompetitive, nongaming relationship with our peers. I think we haven't been very good at that.

And fifth, I think that we have to genuinely reach out to our peers to work together to solve what can be solved and to engage in a tough discussion about the complexities of those issues for which there are no ready answers.

What is it that I think that we need to do, that those of you at the school level need to do? I think that the schools that have got it right&emdash;and there are a number of you&emdash;are those who are talking more about what is right for each individual student, about what high school program and set of commitments will help each young woman thrive and move toward the realization of her potential. They are the schools who, as the Reverend might say, challenge parents and students on the reality that they see reflected back at them

and on whether that reality truly represents truth for that individual student and family. They're the schools that have been brave enough to buck parental pressure on things like the AP, for example. Fieldston and Brearley spring immediately to mind, but there are a number of others. And they have firmly held onto an at times unpopular and almost hierarchical notion that the school leaders are those who are calling the shots, not the overanxious parents.

How can we best help you with this? Let us know. Those of us in college admission are dying to help you with this.

And now we come to the portion of this session that I have been eagerly awaiting, a general conversation about this topic and questions, concerns, and comments from the floor. I'm most eager to hear your thoughts and I thank you very much for listening so patiently to mine.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: It seems to me that one of the simplest things that you could do would be to get together with about the top 25, 50 universities and just refuse to give information to U.S. News & World Report.

MS. MAMLET: I do want to say something about that, because I'd like to think that would

work, but you know, we all report our information publicly to a database that is available on the

Internet. The organization's name escapes me right now, but legally, we all report a great deal of information and so U.S. News doesn't need it from us to do what they do. And in fact, every time an institution doesn't, they just go get this other information and they infer the different answers to the questions they have that aren't directly answered.

I do think there is a part of the U.S. News that we should absolutely refuse to do. The part that makes me most uncomfortable is a questionnaire that goes to college presidents, provosts and deans of admission all around the country and asks us to rank one another on our reputation. And that just seems ludicrous to me. So I think that is one definitely we should stop doing. Didn't U.S. News try to do something and you all said no? How did you do that?

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: The same way we do to anxious parents. We said no.

MS. MAMLET: Your information is not public. Ours is public.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Why?

MS. MAMLET: Well, many of us receive federal funding. It's a big part of who we are. Even private institutions like Stanford receive a tremendous amount of our funding from federal and state governments and agencies. It's not an option.

MR. BREWSTER: Could I ask you a question that would take us out of the tendency to spin in deeper and deeper to the details of this sort of thing?

You know, looking around the room, we see the age of the people who are here and recognize that in many ways, all through time, the older generation looks at the younger and says, "Oh, heavens. Look what they're doing."

What interests me is how much of what you have described in the way of parents' and students' struggles and intensity and demand for personal achievement, beginning in utero with music, is only the flip side of what we have created as a society and an international culture; namely, one of significant competition. And the shape of what we've created I think many of us have not looked at often carefully.

We just discussed earlier The New York Times article about girls' nastiness in the middle school, and yet we have all of us been looking at ways to authorize much more competitive behavior for women as an entirely acceptable part of life.

And so to what extent are we simply looking at behaviors that are really there anyway? That kids have always been competitive; now they're more authorized to be this way in a culture which is in some ways demanding it. So we're in some senses getting exactly what we asked for. That's what I'm curious about.

MS. MAMLET: Is there any reaction to that?

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: I have a different question, if you didn't have something you wanted to say in response to that.

Going back to the early admissions process, you talked about it as an early admissions dynamic, and only near the end did you distinguish between early decision and early action and you discounted early action as not incurring enough disincentive for multiple applications.

But I'd like you to think about a third choice. Let's call it early choice. Because early action allows a student to delay a final decision prematurely, allows the student to compare financially aid packages from different universities, not just between the early and the regular within one university. And if all that's wrong with early action is that there's not a disincentive to apply to many schools, can't we have an early choice program that says you can only apply to two or three, and wouldn't that be better than what we now have?

MS. MAMLET: Yes, some of the early action schools basically are doing just that. At Georgetown and Harvard, for example, you can apply to two or three of them; is that right? Something like that. There's much conversation right now at the national level with the college admission organization ethics committee about whether or not you can legally do that, whether you can stipulate that the number of schools you would apply early action to would be limited.

So I think that's something we could entertain definitely outside of the current paradigm.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Good morning. My question goes back to the concept you talked about getting in, and with APs, I'm distressed in my own school about getting the students who are requiring themselves to take AP courses in order to meet the plateau that you all are setting in the most

selective schools, and not allowing students to take good choices of electives that we also offer in our schools, because the perception is that you all discount those things and unless the student has certain APs and a certain number of APs, and they don't have the hook, if you will&emdash;you know, the water polo player, the national merit scholar, that kind of hook&emdash;the chances of getting in are dramatically reduced.

And what are we going to do about this? Because you really are driving choices for our young people at a time when they should be exploring and deliberating themselves in the curricula that we can offer within our school, and you know, you just don't give weight to that.

MS. MAMLET: I hope you all don't boo me off the stage, but I actually don't quite agree with that, in that I think that what we are saying is that you are setting what is the most challenging curriculum at your school, and that we want you to be doing that, and for those of you who are saying that the most challenging curriculum is AP courses, I think you're going to see increasingly the Stanfords and the Harvards saying that "We're a little uncomfortable with this."

What we want to see is that our students, your students, are taking the most challenging curriculum that they can, but we want you to define that. And especially for the schools in this room, where you have such incredible resources, you have incredible faculty, I think what many of us are feeling is that you can offer stronger courses sometimes outside of the AP boundaries and that we really hope that you will start doing more and more of this.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: But you acknowledge that.

MS. MAMLET: Yes, Stanford is coming out with a public statement. It's wending its way through our university. It has to go to another committee after our committee, and then it goes to the faculty senate, and finally we'll have something. But we are drafting something, yes.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: I have one comment and one question. My comment really follows on the gentleman on the other side and I'm wondering, there's a little bit of a disingenuousness, it seems to me, when you say that we set the curriculum, a strong curriculum, and yet when college representatives come to our campus, or when our students go to your campus for interviews, what typically happens is the first thing they learn is that they should have taken six APs, they should be in calculus BC, and so all of our very best efforts to tell a student that she should simply continue with her math at the pace that she is taking and perhaps take only two or three APs at most really kind of goes down the tubes.

I wonder if it would be helpful for deans of admissions to say to their representatives to ask questions about, "What courses did you take which actually made you think or that you love the most?" rather than asking about how many APs were taken.

MS. MAMLET: I think that's a very good point.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: And my question is, you were talking about the early decision process and the fact that this is helpful because it makes students relaxed, and I wonder how many of your early decision applicants are actually rejected as compared to wait-listed, so they're kind of on tenterhooks for the rest of the year anyway?

MS. MAMLET: I actually want to respond to the first part of your comment about college representatives coming to visit and saying, "Well, you should have been taking six APs," and I would definitely acknowledge that one of the downsides of college admission is having young people who sometimes are overeager and don't always hear the nuance that we want them to.

I think that we work very hard so that that's not the case, but I think there's still some examples of that. I will say that what I think people mean to be saying is however your school defines "most challenging" is how we will value it. And if you are defining "most challenging" as AP only, then that's what we will do. We are following your lead. And if you are defining most challenging as this certain subset of courses and APs are either among them or not included at all, we will take that.

Also, I think that there is an important distinction to be made between students who aren't taking the most challenging set of courses because either they don't have the fire power or they don't have the motivation, and students who are, but "most challenging" is reflected in a number of ways, not simply AP.

The students in the first category are not going to be successful candidates at the most selective institutions. For the students in the second category, I think what we're saying is, we really would like to see you taking the ownership, that you have tremendous flexibility in that, and that the schools that have done it are schools that are not hurt at all in our admission process.

On the ED question, Stanford defers very, very few early decision candidates. We deny the vast majority. We deny about 30 percent of those who apply early decision, and we defer really just a handful every year. We accept in regular decision about 15 percent of our defers, which is higher than our regular admit rate.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Good morning. There's been a national debate about scholar athletes and the disproportionate number of players that they take in the D1, D2, and D3 programs. Last week Dick Nesbitt, Williams College, came out and said that they were actually reducing the number of athlete slots in their freshman class from 72 to 64, 65. Do you see this particular move on the part of the NASCAC schools as becoming a more national issue?

MS. MAMLET: You know, this is a subject that is near and dear to my heart, having been at

Swarthmore where, as I was leaving, the decision was announced to drop football, and it was a very publicly fraught announcement, because the former board chair was the outgoing president of the National Football League and resigned from Swarthmore board over this decision.

Being at Swarthmore, I was uncomfortable with the contortions that the college needed to go to in order to field the breadth of athletics programs that it had.

Just to give you some hard numbers about this, Swarthmore had just under 1400 students, so pretty much half are men, half are women. To field the football program, where you have 60 students suit up, you need to have 12 and a half percent of your entering men playing football. That leads to, again, some distortions that I, as admission head, did not feel were healthy ultimately for the institution. I think that the book that Bill Bowen came out with, The Game of Life, really is a very valuable one in suggesting that institutions look very carefully at the kinds of truths that they feel are there that aren't necessarily true, like&emdash;what are some of these, Dulaney? We were just talking about them last night. Like leadership and

diversity. That football programs increase an institution's diversity. If you looked at Swarthmore's football program, it didn't increase diversity at all. It was actually one of the more homogenous groups on campus.

So I think there were a number of things that at Swarthmore led me to feel that Division 3 was not doing it right, that more and more a Division 3, exactly the place where you would hope that students could walk on, could play&emdash;that having a football team meant that students who just had a real interest in football, but perhaps weren't talented, could walk on and play, and that's why you would have a football program. In fact, that wasn't the case. Even at an unspectacularly successful place like Swarthmore in athletics, it didn't mean that students, sort of the not terribly talented athlete, would have any chance to play.

So I left Swarthmore feeling that this was a really useful conversation, and very helpful, and also growingly concerned about&emdash;talk about lack of balance&emdash;the growing specialization that young people face as athletes, where they're really pushed very young to pick one sport and train at it all year and that that's not fun, and that's also not teaching the kinds of things that we so value that sports teach.

At Stanford, where we do Division 1A athletics in a big way, I actually see it very differently. And I think at Stanford we have the luxury in that we're a universe of one, really, and so we're able to have a really strong, highly competitive athletics program and fill it with students who are strong athletes and also strong students. But I think that nationally, especially at the NASCAC institutions and the division 3 institutions, I think it's really an important conversation to have.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Good morning. I am founding a high school just over the ridge in

Sonoma County, Sonoma Academy, and it's actually the first independent secondary school in all of Sonoma and Napa Counties, so we have a clean slate. And of course, we will develop a college counseling program that is coherent with our mission, but I'm wondering what you would suggest as the two or three most important core values, as we create that college counseling program, that will be in touch with the

outside world, that will prepare our students to go everywhere and of course, go to, as you probably

know, the University of California schools, as well.

MS. MAMLET: Well, let me start by saying that I could never be a college counselor. It's just an incredibly demanding position, and I really admire those who do it. And in terms of two or three&emdash;the long answer is, I would look at some of the places that I think do it incredibly well, and I think there are a number in the Bay Area and also nationally.

The short answer is that I think that in terms of core values, it's always hard to continue doing what is right for each student versus what you may feel pushed to do because of parental aspirations. And at least my sense is that that is sort of the abiding conflict.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: I think the invisible elephant in the room may be the delusion&emdash;no insult to Stanford&emdash;that a certain number of colleges and universities actually offer a much better experience than others. And so we have this frenetic chase to get into schools that may not, in fact, do something more profound for young people. I have been amused to a certain extent by my own observation that even among our own schools, certainly among colleges and universities, a great many people collect those who are most likely to achieve at a high level and then applaud themselves if they do exactly what they were predicted to do. That doesn't necessarily mean that anything worthwhile happened during the process.

So my question to you, which I mean with respect and affection, is: Do you believe that Stanford offers a profoundly better experience than the other institutions where you were, or the place where you got your own degree?

MS. MAMLET: Oh. No. I don't. I believe that Stanford offers a profoundly better experience for certain students than the places where I have been before; certainly a profoundly better experience for some students than Occidental, where I went to college. And I also believe that Occidental offers a profoundly better experience than Stanford for others.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: I'd like to make a comment in support of what you said earlier about the Internet information being available. There are 850,000 nonprofits in the United States. Every one of the nonprofits that makes more than $25,000 has to file a 990. That 990 has on it the top five

salaries, who gets what scholarships, their names, your trustees. It goes on ad nauseam. It's a 32-page report. It's something that all heads need to check out because you can go back and have that information deleted in some cases. The organization's name is Guidestar.com. So I urge you to have your business manager, preferably you, check that out. So the information is there. We all have to do it.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: If Stanford believes that balance is an extraordinarily important concept, then as you return to your office and go through your flat friends, would you describe for us what qualities, what courses, what kind of profile would leap out to you that would indicate that you're willing to bring in that balanced individual into the student body that will be both a credit to the institution and a credit to the educational institutions that have sent them on to you?

MS. MAMLET: Sure. Thank you for that question, actually. I think that there are several different kinds of balance, and we saw that yesterday evening in the comments of the Reverend.

And so I think that the kind of balance I do not

mean, that I have not interpreted this title as

suggesting, is going back to that whole concept of the well-rounded student versus the angular student.

I think that lots of times that's what balance means to people, and if we say we're looking for balance, then families think that we mean, "Go out and have something to put in every category on the admission application."

And that's not it. And let me tell you a few more things that I think balance is not. I do not think that balance equates with busyness. I think that there are students who are incredibly busy, and I watch them now that I'm of a certain age and my friends are, and so I can watch their children in high school and they pull out their Palm Pilots and day planners in order to make dates with one another, and you hear them talking about, "Can we get together this night?" "No, I have to go do this." "No, I have got that."

And so I don't think it's this incredible busyness that just spins and spins.

I'm going to diverge for one second, but in the current issue of The New Yorker, the anniversary issue that just came out, on the back page there's this cartoon that actually won the caption contest. They had this cartoon and you get to supply the caption. Have you all seen this? This cartoon shows this car just spinning in a circle, emitting sounds and little explosions, and these two guys are sitting back sort of towards the garage and they say, "At what point does this become our problem?"

And that's sort of what I feel like watching our young people, in that I think that in the field things go in waves; right? And I think that a number of us were saying, "We're kind of concerned but it's not our problem"; right? "We're just going to pull off the very best students or the strongest or the ones who are still seeming intact, and we're not going to worry ourselves tremendously over what the consequences are in the messages we send out."

And I think what you're seeing right now is a shift, and I think it's at the beginning of the shift, but I think a number of us are very concerned about the consequences of the messages that we send out.

Now, having said that, I'm still very concerned when I describe what it is that we're looking for. And I'm going to tell you, but the students who jump out at Stanford are certainly the students who have been very successful in high school, who have taken the most challenging courses, however you have defined that, and who write beautifully and have glowing recommendations and have achieved some level of commitment to something in their life that is more significant than they are alone. Right?

So if you talk about extracurricular activities, why do we care what a student does with their time? It's not to see who is president of the most things or has joined the most clubs or has started a business or all the things that students often feel they need to do. It is simply for three reasons. We look to it for three reasons. First, we're looking for those students who bring an extraordinary level of talent, who at Stanford are going to be our Olympic-level athletes or our all-star musicians, and that is a very, very small percentage of the students we admit. It's a very small percent of our class.

And then other than that, for the 90 percent of our students who don't fall into that category, we are looking at what they do outside the classroom for two reasons. One is, we want to see that they can make a commitment to something that is larger than they are. And two is that we want our community to be an interesting place.

But that's it. We are not looking to get students who have just sort of done some of everything or who are excelling at a certain level but not a national level. We're really look for something that starts from them and grows out of them and sometimes is manifested in excellence.

Aside from the extracurricular activities, what we're really after at Stanford&emdash;and remember, our admit rate is 12 percent. The reality is, we have an incredible number of applications from students that we'd love to have and we have to pick some of those. So what we're looking for&emdash;and this is where I'm always uncomfortable&emdash;what we're looking for are students for whom success is a by-product, not a goal. So they are students who have stayed up all night studying not because something is due, but just because they were in love with something, they were entranced, they couldn't put it down.

You know, I worry about saying that because I feel that it's just going to add one more hurdle, because your students are going to hear now, not only do they have to do all these things, but they have to look like they're having the time of their lives. So it's really a dilemma.

Actually, one of my role models has been Fred Hargadon, who's now at Princeton, and was also at Swarthmore and Stanford. We're often on panels together. We were at something two years ago in the midwest with a group of parents. One parent asked him, you know, "Will you tell me what you're looking for?"

And Fred, with all his sort of Fredness, said&emdash;oh, gosh. This is where I remember that these things are printed. He said, "No, I won't tell you, because if I tell you, you're going to go out and try to do just that and look like just that, and it won't be genuine."

And I think that is the dilemma that we find ourselves in; right? How do you talk about what you value and talk about what you feel is important and not have all these students and parents just rush out to wear that as though it's a piece of clothing they can put on? And I think that's a large part of where, in my admittedly somewhat simplistic view, this incredible pressure and lack of balance comes from.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: I'm actually returning to the advanced placement test courses, conversation of some time ago. This might not be a circle we need to make. But I'm sure you are sincere when you tell us that it's really our obligations as individual schools to define the most difficult programs that we have. But I hope you understand why we're somewhat mistrustful that that would work for us as individual schools, because we don't in any way want to disadvantage our best students in the eyes of any admissions officers.

So I think we probably come to this problem lacking courage. So I guess my comment is this. It's a little bit probably our responsibility and not the college admissions office, but I think we don't want to make such a decision to eliminate advanced placement courses on our own. So maybe it's a collective problem, and the people in this room could do something about this together. That is, it's a little bit like a disarmament treaty. I'll stop training my missiles on you if you stop training your missiles on me.

That is, if we as a group decide that advanced placement courses are, in fact, not the best for the teachers who want to create wonderful courses for our students, then maybe as a group, independent schools could work together to lessen their influence or perhaps even just abandon them all together, in which case I think that we wouldn't feel so afraid for our students. It's just a comment.

MS. MAMLET: I do think that the credit examination that's happening at at least several universities&emdash;and I guess it's far more; I think it's sort of in the air, but people don't know that it's happening, for example, at Stanford, because we haven't reached that point in our tortuous governmental system yet. But I think that you're going to see more and more of us saying that we don't think that students should get graduation credit at least either for certain scores, as Harvard is going, or in Stanford's case, I think, at all.

I think that we're feeling that it sends a message to students&emdash;by awarding Stanford credit, it sends a message to students that AP really is better than anything else, even though we're saying that's not true. And so because of that, I hope, if this goes through, we'll be stepping way back. I think that we're at a moment where there is a change coming, because we see so many students pressured in ways that we don't believe are healthy for them, and I think if you all wanted a group that would talk about some possibilities and perhaps set them out without necessarily committing to them and you wanted a group of colleges to endorse those principles, that would be fairly easy to do.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Because I'm the head of a pre-K-through-grade-4 school, we don't have any AP classes. But I think the conversation should deal a little bit with what the national definition of success is and the way in which both our schools and the top universities promote the myth of success in literature, brochures. Admissions, even at our level and your level, is mostly a game of this than this, but in the "this" part, we talk about all those wonderful successful people, all those wonderful successful programs. We create a myth for the people who are going to buy our services. And what that's done for the people in my environment, in pre-K to four, is that it has created the flip side of the national depression: The national anxiety. And I have the three-year-old who's already involved in three after-school activities, parents who can't sit down to dinner with their families, no conversation about values,

and we never have touched on that here at all, about what the issue of students and values and morality plays in the admission process, and how do we ferret them out. It's created, I think, a whole loss of childhood in our country, starting from the universities. And I think they have an important role to play in helping us to reverse that. I'd just like you to respond to that in some way.

MS. MAMLET: I think you're exactly right, and I think it is very much, of course, all related to this, right? That if students are packaging themselves or if parents are saying that students need to, then the message students are internalizing is that who they are is not enough, and that they have to be something more than that for us to look with favor upon them.

This is actually what I was referring to when I talked about the things that colleges need to do, and I think that we have been too quiet about how it is that we want students to approach the college application process, what it means to render an honest depiction of who you are, and what it is, where it is that students might be crossing that line.

I think that is going to be the next thing that Stanford, for example, looks at: Whether or not we can produce a statement of principles of what it is that we expect from students as they start the application process and what integrity and morality means as they approach it. Currently we have them sign our statement of good practices. But I don't think we ever break apart for them what that truly means, and as a result, we see students violating it, and when we withdraw their offer of admission, I think honestly some of them are quite stunned.

MS. LEE: That's all we have time for. I know that Robin will be here for some minutes and if you are burning with a question to ask her, please come up and seize her.

Robin, we knew we'd be stimulated, but I don't think we ever realized how charmed we'd be by your grace and thoughtfulness, and I think you're a wonderful role model for all of us in dealing with our parents over these very same questions. I just wish they could have been here to hear you, as well.

There's a half-hour break now, and then we're due back at 11:00.