I have long contended that the college admissions process is a great topic for a best-selling non-fiction book. (In the interest of full disclosure, I made this argument because I hoped to be the one to write such a book.)
With two million families navigating the transition to higher education every year, there is a built-in and replenishing market consisting of families thirsting to understand a process that is mysterious and anxiety-producing. Going to college may be the closest thing our culture has to a coming-of-age rite of passage, and college admission is also the playing field for public policy issues including access to opportunity, affordability, merit, fairness, and the role of sports.
So why hasn’t the great book about college admission been written up to now? It may be because “the market” for such a book may be in fact three different markets, seeking different genres of college books.
There is the “secret handshakes of getting into Harvard” genre, typically written by a recent Ivy alum whose expertise consists of having been accepted themselves or a former admission officer who spent two years as a junior staff member at one institution. Of course, if there were secrets and they were published in a book, they would no longer be secret, negating their value. In the selective admissions process, the rarer a skill or quality, the more valuable it is, and the more people who possess knowledge or talent, the less valuable those become.
A second genre consists of college guides and rankings. Each fall we have “America’s Best Colleges,” the U.S. News & World Report publication that has outlived the news magazine itself and that reputedly outsells the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Other books in the genre include The Fiske Guide to Colleges, Colleges That Change Lives, and The Princeton Review Best (however many it is this year) Colleges. All are predictable. The descriptions in Fiske and Princeton Review will never vary significantly from a college’s stereotype, while the U.S. News rankings, based on assumptions that are questionable and a weighting formula that is mysterious, will always be topped by Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford.
The third genre, generally the most interesting, are books that look at college admission from a big picture lens, identifying broader trends and issues. Typically written by journalists, they often attempt to debunk the infatuation with prestige and name colleges, as in Frank Bruni’s Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be. A sub-genre is the “year in college admission” book, exemplified by Jacques Steinberg’s The Gatekeepers and Jeff Selingo’s Who Gets in and Why.
Selingo’s new book, Dream School: Finding the College That’s Right For You, has received more attention than any college admissions book I remember. It debuted at number 7 on the New York Times best seller list, and Selingo has been making the rounds promoting the book in major media outlets ever since its publication.
Dream School is a worthy addition to the cohort of books about college admission. The breadth and depth of research underlying the book is truly impressive, and Jeff Selingo is widely-known and well-connected within higher education. I learned that first-hand in 2020 when he and I co-presented at a conference of college presidents. I will always remember the date because it was barely a month before Covid invaded the country (not to mention the rest of the world). While riding the Washington Metro that weekend, I noticed a woman wearing a face mask, and for the first time I wondered if Covid was something I needed to worry about. Little did I know.
Jeff was clearly the draw and I an afterthought. If we had been professional wrestlers, he would have been Hulk Hogan, while my role was to be a jobber like the Brooklyn Brawler or Iron Mike Sharpe. If we had been Fox News hosts, he would be Sean Hannity to my Alan Colmes. The person organizing the session seemed surprised, perhaps even disappointed, that Jeff Selingo knew who I was and that we largely agreed regarding the Operation Varsity Blues scandal.
The essential argument in Dream School is that dream schools may not live up to the dream, with numerous anecdotes from students and parents demonstrating that Plan B ended up being a better choice than they would have imagined. The book is divided into three major sections plus an appendix with a list of 75 “New” Dream Schools.
The title of part one, “Why Your Assumptions About Elite Colleges Are All Wrong,” is self-explanatory, showing why the prevailing wisdom about elite colleges is based on misconceptions. He argues that Plan B often turns out to be Plan A, sometimes by necessity due to the uber-selectivity at the top end of the pecking order and other times because your backup option ends up providing a better experience.
I find the second section, “Mapping the New Admissions Landscape,” to be the strongest part of the book. Selingo tracks some of the changes in the college admissions world since Covid, including a migration to public flagship universities, especially in the South, and a changing economic landscape that is causing families to choose value over prestige. One particularly memorable part of this section was a tutorial from Rick Bischoff (about to move from Case Western to Chapman) about how Case uses tuition discounting as part of its enrollment management operation.
Part Three, “What to Look For in Your Dream School,” is the how-to section of the book, providing advice on sources of information, the importance of relationships with faculty and peers as part of the college experience, and how to evaluate the return on investment in terms of employment after college. The most compelling story in this section is the demise of Birmingham Southern as a cautionary tale about the rapidly changing financial landscape for colleges and universities. Helping our students and families understand that some colleges are strapped financially, eliminating faculty and staff positions and majors, is a new challenge for those of us doing college counseling. My daughter’s stepdaughter just asked me to review a list of colleges she is considering. She described my response, which included that warning about financial stability, as “thorough,” a polite way of saying that I gave an essay answer to her short-answer question. That will probably not surprise regular ECA readers.
For all that I like about Dream School, there were two things that didn’t sit as well with me, making me wonder if they were part of Jeff Selingo’s original vision for the book or were negotiated or imposed by the publisher. I reached out to Selingo to ask, but received a response from his office that he is busy promoting the book and probably wouldn’t be able to answer.
One is the list of “new” dream schools. The genesis of the book seems to be requests from parents to provide a list of colleges that are good but not generally considered “elite.” He explains his methodology well enough for his lists of “Hidden Values,” “Breakout Regionals,” and “Large Leaders,” although an earlier chapter describes his frustrations at identifying and weighing what data points are relevant in curating the list.
There may be some irony in a book that starts by arguing against fixating on “name” colleges ending by providing an expanded list of “name” colleges. Certainly the emails many of us received following publication of the book trumpeting some institution being recognized as a “Dream School” bore a remarkable resemblance to the emails we receive each fall about a college being ranked by U.S. News.
Of the schools on Selingo’s list, he deserves credit for acknowledging his ties to two of them (Arizona State and Ithaca), and there is no reason to suspect that either made the list because of those ties. Of more concern, the New York Times just reported that another of Selingo’s Dream Schools, Montclair State in New Jersey, is essentially abolishing academic departments as part of an organizational restructuring. That is either a revolutionary new direction or a warning sign for higher education, but it is also a reminder that the aforementioned now-defunct Birmingham Southern was one of the original Colleges That Change Lives.
My other concern has to do with the title. Is it misleading given the thrust of the book? I have been told that publishers are not willing to publish a college book that doesn’t play into the perceived market seeking insight into gaining admission into elite colleges. “Dream School” as a title seems designed to catch the eye of that audience, and yet the book itself argues for redefining the “dream school” concept away from prestige and toward the quality of the experience.
Jeff Selingo deserves congratulations for both the book itself and the acclaim it has received. Both personally and professionally, I hope the success of Dream School will inspire the publication of other college admission books.