What Yale Looks For, Part 2: Supporting Others

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Inside the Yale Admissions Office. I'm Hannah and I'm a Yale Admissions Officer. And I'm Mark. I'm also a Yale Admissions Officer. Today's episode is part two of our mini-series where we go in depth into what Yale looks for. Yes. We are hoping to provide the most detailed look yet at how we select applicants and what factors we're weighing as we make our decisions. This whole series in part is a response to some recent calls for greater transparency in the admissions process. Those calls make perfect sense to us, you know, a highly selective admissions process with a holistic approach, meaning there's no rubric or specific weighting that we can point to. It's going to be opaque by nature. Yeah, every year we get tens of thousands of applicants who are writing essays, sending letters of recommendation, their detailing, their activities, their accomplishments. They send supplements, they sit for interviews, and all of that is going to add up to more than two million pages of documents just for last year's applicants. At real people, like Hannah and me, read those documents, we have real candid conversations about what's in them, and we try to reach the best consensus decisions that we can. Even though, hey, let's go ahead and say it, we are flawed individuals and we are dealing with incomplete information. Very limited information, and the reason that admissions officers often sound so vague when we're talking about what we look for, I mean, this is like our most frequently asked questions. What are you looking for? How can I make my application more competitive? It's impossible to capture everything that goes into that process. We can't just boil it down to a formula, we can't tell you if you do this, you'll get in. Yeah, and that is inherently frustrating. I think that's worth acknowledging. And also though, I think it's what makes our process more responsive to the complexity of the world that's out there, and we think it also allows us to select students who are the most likely to contribute to the Yale experience here and to take the most away from the experience. So we won't be giving you a formula, we can't do that, but we can do our best to articulate as clearly as possible the criteria that we consider and how we consider them. So in our last episode, we talked all about our first and most important consideration, which is academic strength. And in that episode, we covered all the elements that you'd expect, like transcripts and standardized tests, but we also talked about how things like your essays and your activities and certainly your letters of recommendation, those can all give us some greater insights into your academic preparation and what might specifically make your application stand out along that academic dimension. We also want to talk a little bit about the non-academic factors that we care about. And today, we're going to start with one that we care a lot about, which is supporting other people and caring about other people. Now, this is an admittedly very broad topic, and it can be difficult to pin down the exact words that will capture what's important to us. We sort of landed on supporting others, but you could imagine a lot of different vocabulary to get at this. But I think to put it most simply, what we're trying to say here is that we are looking to admit students who make a positive impact on other people, be that their peers, members of their immediate community, and more generally, just like the human race. Yeah. Okay, so like we did for the last episode, we'll kind of start with the basics and then go through the elements of the application to talk about what we look for in each of those elements to understand how an applicant supports other people. For this episode, before we dive in here, we're going to take a little bit of a history lesson. No, boy. All right. So before we describe what supporting others means, I think it's worth taking a moment, we've been 50 episodes in this podcast, and we haven't really addressed this question that I know a lot of people have, which is, you know, why is it that admissions offices like Yale's don't simply make their decisions based on academic strength? Like why do we have this murky, holistic process where you also consider character and extracurricular achievements and socioeconomic context and all kinds of other things, too? Yeah. A lot of universities around the world admit students on the basis of academic credentials alone, right? So usually this is based either on like a single leaving exam after secondary school or your full secondary school transcript or some combination of the two, and there's also a lot of US colleges that operate this way. So why are selective American universities like Yale different? You know, I wish we could say that this is because once upon a time some wise people recognize that academic measures are incomplete and that our learning environment is richer and better at preparing students for positions of leadership. When it's filled with people who have a really wide range of experiences and backgrounds who are also invested in each other's success, and to be fair, that what I just described is in a nutshell why we practice holistic admissions today, but we have to be very honest. That is not how this process started at all. The simple and shameful answer to the question of why did American universities start caring about other factors besides academic strength is racism, specifically anti-semitism. Yeah. And there's a very well documented history of this. It wasn't really secret even at the time when it was happening. Yeah. We'll give you sort of like the express version of the history until about, you know, 100 years ago even the most prestigious American universities weren't very selective at all. No. That was not the current application landscape that we have today. Schools like Yale had their own entrance exams that weren't considered especially difficult, especially for students who had attended the private schools in the Northeast that were considered feeder schools. So like if you could pass that exam and you could pay tuition, you're in. Thank you. And exactly as you would expect, those schools were filled with affluent young men, all young men, who had pretty much attended the same expensive private secondary schools in the Northeast. By the 19 teens and the 1920s, though, interest in attending schools like Yale increased really dramatically. Quick side note, interestingly, part of the story is the popularity of this new sport called football. It was pioneered at Yale by a student named Walter Camp. And at the same moment in time, America was also experiencing a very large way of immigration, including the largest ever group of Jewish immigrants, mostly from Eastern Europe. And many of the first and second generation Jewish immigrants did very well in their American public high schools, sort of newly opened American public high schools and they applied to Ivy League universities and numbers that had never been seen before. So enter admissions offices, basically, which were at that time kind of given explicit guidance to alter the admissions processes in order to limit the enrollment of these students. Yes, these admissions offices created vague character standards, which they used very deliberately to select students from backgrounds that they considered more desirable, which really very clearly meant Christian and especially Protestant, and exclude those that they considered less desirable, overwhelmingly Jewish students. Yeah, so this went on for decades for those Jewish students who were admitted and enrolled. They often faced prejudice and exclusion, especially from their peers. There's a lot more we could go into here if you want to learn more about this chapter in higher education history. There's a very well-researched book called The Chosen, The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. That's by a really impressive historian named Jerome Caribel. I also recommend a podcast that is created by a Yale graduate, any Yale professor named Mark Oppenheimer, that's called The Gate Crashers. And Hannah, by the way, it's worth mentioning women weren't even considered for undergraduate admission at Yale until 1969. Yeah. It took 268 years for Yale to enroll its first female undergrad. Yeah, 1969 just like was not that long ago. Yeah, so as much as we appreciate the value of holistic admission now, our profession has what I would call a pretty noxious history of racism and exclusion, most of which was advanced in the name of something like promoting and maintaining community. Now, there are also some pretty bright spots in our history. And today, that holistic admissions process we believe is used as a tool of inclusion. Yeah, so we believe in our office that a student body filled with a wide range of talents, aspirations, experiences, opinions, and beliefs makes for a richer and better learning environment. So a little bit more history. At Yale, the shift from admissions as exclusion to admissions as inclusion coincides with the presidency of a guy named Kingman Brewster, who led Yale as president from 1963 to 1977. And we're going to talk about him today because he wrote a letter almost 60 years ago that still serves as our official policy document for undergraduate admissions. You'll actually sometimes hear us call it our constitution. Yes. This was back in 1967. Kingman Brewster wrote to the incoming director of admissions, John Meiskins, who had just started his job and had asked the president to kind of share some guidelines for selecting applicants. It might seem crazy that a 60-year-old letter still serves as our office's constitution, but it actually really articulates well what matters in our admissions process better than anything else. And this is why we actually just put it up on our website on what Yale looks for page. And enlisting the factors that the admissions committee should consider, president Brewster wrote among other things that a sharp and inquiring mind coupled with a capacity and desire to use it constructively and effectively are obviously the most important qualities. And that's really what we discussed in our last episode. Academic piece. Absolutely. He also wrote about moral concern and consideration for others and said that this has its place high on the list of attributes worthy of reward. He says not only should demonstrated amorality and selfishness be held against an applicant, no matter how bright they seem, but outstanding public motivation and capacity to sacrifice the self for something larger, seems to me to deserve positive appreciation in the admissions process. That's what today's episode is all about. Yeah. Hannah, let's wrap up this long history lesson with what I think are the most important two takeaways. Yeah. Number one, you, a member of the public, you are right to be skeptical of a process that doesn't have a rubric and doesn't realize simply on the straightforward measures like, say, GPA and test scores, we will be the first to admit that in the wrong hands, that sort of license could be used to advance the worst sort of ends. Number two, though, we think it's a good thing that our admissions process allows us to ask whether an applicant has something like, as Brewster said, moral concern and consideration for others. We think that this makes our learning environment better and we think it makes our graduates better prepared to make positive contributions in the world. All right. Let's fast forward back to today, the present day, and what we mean when we say we care about whether an applicant supports other people. What does this look like in our admissions process? Like our discussion of academic strength, there are some simple, just baseline expectations and then also some more nuanced ways that applicants demonstrate this strength and stand out. And this is all important to us because we think that a key part of the Yale education is going to be collaborating with your peers, like simply put, Yale isn't something you can do on your own. That's not an option. And this whole place is built around bringing people together, having them challenge each other, learn from each other, pursue projects together. And we think it's really critical that we enroll students who can excel in that kind of environment. Yeah. And just like we can say, if you aren't academically prepared to succeed at Yale, you won't be admitted. We can also kind of say, if you demonstrate a lack of regard for other people's well-being, you won't be admitted to Yale. Right. Obviously, if you are an evil genius who is straight out of a James Bond movie, or let's just say a complete misanthrope who thinks that all other people are horrible, easy for us to say game over. Yeah. And that's demonstrated in your application. Yes. Right. Right. But there's some other bright lines that are worth mentioning. So a record of lying, cheating, stealing, academic violations, all of these we view as sort of a lack of moral concern for others and ethical violations within your community. Now it is not the case that any sort of disciplinary infraction is an automatic deal breaker. For example, if your school writes you up for not wearing the uniform properly, that was the kind of school that I went to, that's different categorically than stealing a copy of the test, right? Right. But we do take these issues seriously. We also take your obligation to answer the questions we ask on the application very seriously. And sometimes, emitting something you thought wasn't a big deal turns it into a big deal when we find out that it was emitted if it's something like in this category. Yeah. Not a good idea to think, oh, I'll just leave that out. No. It does not end well. Yeah. Thankfully Hannah, most of our applicants don't have any of these issues, right? These are overwhelmingly pleasant, ethical young people who follow rules and they contribute positively to their communities. Right. So if that's you, great. Awesome. You've given us no reason for concern in this area. You have an, as President Rooster said, demonstrated amorality and selfishness. But now that we've kind of established that baseline, we also want to go beyond that. We want to see, quote, outstanding public motivation and capacity to sacrifice the self for something larger. We sometimes write this in our admissions materials this way. We say that we are especially interested in students who have had what we call a profound, positive, and lasting impact on others. I think it's a good way of putting it because we think that that kind of student has the potential to really enrich the Yale community and we get excited about the good that they're likely to do after they take their Yale education out into the world. And I think it's really important to note that this kind of impact can take many, many different forms. I think it often gets simplified and boiled down to like, okay, that means I have to lead six different clubs. Or I create some visionary service project and have made this huge mega impact on the world, but positive impact can take on many different forms. It can be on many different scales and many of the ways that students stand out in this area is through smaller things that they would do every day in ordinary settings rather than some like grand sweeping gesture. Yeah, absolutely. I think the simplest way to put this is that what we're looking for are individuals who make their communities better. We want to admit students who uplift others and contribute to other people's success. The opposite of that Hannah would be someone who's driven solely by competition and views success as a zero sum game where for them to win, somebody else has to lose. Right. We're looking for people who care about others emotional while being and seek to learn from people who are different from them. The opposite of that would be someone who's either like indifferent to their peers or views them with some kind of contempt. Yeah. We also want to select students who are putting their energy towards projects big and small that benefit others or have the potential to benefit others. Yeah. And the opposite of that would be someone who's only looking up for themselves and isn't willing to sacrifice anything for the good of other people. Yeah. Okay. So what does all of this mean to you, the applicants? Let's get kind of more concrete now and walk through the parts of the application to give you an idea of how we get a sense of how our applicants kind of support others in each part of the application. Yeah. Let's do this just like we did when we were talking about academic strength and talk about how students can stand out in these different parts of the application and we'll go in order. So let's just start with your list of activities. When your admissions officers reading your application, they often have sort of questions in mind that they're trying to answer with the information that you've provided. So if I'm looking at your activities list, a few questions on my mind. Are you spending time with others? Are you pursuing projects that benefit others? Do your activities involve collaboration and compromise? Have you been recognized for your contributions? As you can imagine, those questions can be answered in many, many different ways and sort of like demonstrated through many different kinds of activities and involvement. But in general, we're looking to see that there's some evidence in your activities list that the time you spend outside the classroom demonstrates this kind of care about others and collaboration with others. Every student's activities list is going to be a different mix of things, right? Some might be more solo projects, some might be more group oriented activities. One of the things that we think about is we are asking ourselves, are other people conspicuously absent? Right. So it's certainly not the case that we expect every activity that you do to be involving a big group of people and that you are recognized as the person who's making that activity better. But if we see that the only things that you're doing are entirely on your own, you're going to be forcing us to say, "Oh, we're soar as everybody else." Yeah, does this person play well with others? And again, let's just go back to the reason for this is we are building a campus community of people who are going to get the most out of their Yale experience if they're working together with others. Right. So we want to see that. You can do that. Yes, and we are not going to jump to the conclusion that you are a moral or selfish because of that. Right. But you've missed an opportunity to stand out as someone for whom this ability to support others is a strength. And just like to underline something that I'm sure we've said before in terms of activities, we're looking for quality over quantity here. And that applies both to the number of things you're involved in and also the scale of the impact. So if you feel like, "Oh, I've only had an impact on a small number of people," that's okay. That's just as important for us to learn about as if you were involved in some national organization that impacted some huge number of people. Yes. And with that, the substance of your contribution matters much more than the title that might be associated with it. Right. Yeah. There are a lot of leadership positions named President of something or Vice President of something where we have a hard time when we're reading an application understanding what that means for your engagement with that activity or that community. Beyond simply, you ran for some election and got voted, right? We are much more interested in the student who maybe doesn't have the title. But it's clear that what they've done has really made a positive impact with that group. And the way that a robotics team or a soccer team or a theater troupe operates is different and better because you're there. That's the kind of contribution we get excited about, even if there's no title associated with your position. Totally. All right. Moving on to the next part of the application we see, your essays and your writing. As we're reading those essays, we may be asking ourselves questions like, "Are others present?" Writing, how do you describe and write about other people? Do you show that you're open to being changed by others? And I think this is a tricky spot because we will tell you that the essay must be about you. Yes. You want to be the main character in your essay. It can be actually a misstep to simply use your essay to describe somebody else because we are most curious about you. However, we hope that in discussing yourself, you make some space for the impact that others have had on you. Again, we don't want to feel like we're reading an essay and feel like others are conspicuously absent. Right. And that we've only heard about you and sort of your own individual journey here. Yeah. I would bet that if you are reflecting on an important thing that happened to you or an important lesson that you learned or something you're really proud of, I bet there were other people involved at some point along the way and we're curious to see how you talk about them. And perhaps we'll get the next throw who just said, "Hey, what I did was I went to the woods and lived by myself and I'm going to give you that deck." That would be interesting. Sure. It would be very for concern, but that's probably not how most American high school students or any high school student is spending a big chunk of time. Right. But then, if throw is applying to Yale, I guess my next question is, "Why do you want to come and live on a residential college?" in a community of people, that's something that we're all is thinking about. - Yeah, good point. Yeah. - And then I think just another note on when other people are included in your essay, I'm always very interested in how you paint them as characters, right? Are they simply there as a foil to you and obstacle to overcome someone who is so horribly wrong that you, the savior, have to convince them of something? Or can you paint them in a complex and sympathetic light, even if you disagree with them about something? - Yeah. - That gives me a sense that you are open to, not just supporting others, but being in a relationship with someone who's complicated and that you don't just view people as just means to an end. - And if you think about Yale's short answer essay questions, we have three prompts that we allow you to choose from and every single one involves relationships with others in some form and that is very intentional for these reasons. So those topics include a time when you had an opposing view of someone else and that conversation, so exactly just what Mark was talking about, like how would you describe that interaction, your membership and contributions in a community, and how some personal experience of yours would enrich a community. All of that has to do with not living in a vacuum, but with like interacting with other people. - We certainly get those kinds of insights from the next part, teacher recommendations. - Yes. - Absolutely. Again, I think an undervalued part of the application, we spent a long time in the last episode talking about how much academic insights we can get from teacher recommendations. We also can get a lot of insights about how you engage with peers in a classroom setting and we're keenly interested in this. - Yeah, remember, if you come to Yale, you're going to be in seminar style classrooms a lot of the time. You're going to be doing sort of team-based and project-based learning. We want to know that you are set up for success in that realm that you're not just going to be sort of competing with your peers, but you're looking forward to working with them and learning from them as well. And we get sort of a lot of evidence of that from hearing about how you've done that in the high school classroom from your teacher recommendations. - And I would definitely encourage you to think about that dimension when you're selecting teachers to write for you. Think about a teacher who has seen you engage with your peers and can give us that kind of insight. Things that we love to hear in teacher recommendations on this dimension include things like, this is a student who's really willing to help others understand the material as well as she does, is happy to tutor students can sometimes explain something maybe better than I could to students. Things we don't like to hear include things like, it's usually kind of a polite turn of phrase. It's like, he doesn't suffer fools gladly, which will just make our ears perk up a little bit and we'll say, does that mean they are sitting in the front row just kind of rolling their eyes and sighing every time that their peer runs into a challenge with something because they're so bright, they don't have to worry about that kind of thing. - We will also notice if there's absolutely zero mention of peers in these letters, kind of similarly to your own writing. If your teacher is telling us about how brilliant you are and such a wonderful student, if there's absolutely no mention of peers, in one letter that's not a flag, but if it is a consistent theme in all of your recommendations and the rest of your application, and we get to the end of the application, we're like, does this student interact with other people ever, that's something that would maybe raise some concern for us. - Yeah, it's a big question, Mark, and one of the themes that we'll get back to you over and over again is that we are dealing with limited information. So if in that limited information, it just doesn't come up at all, you've missed an opportunity. So educators and counselors, if you're listening out there, it's definitely an important piece of advice from us in writing your letter recommendation is to include some mention of how a student interacts with others, caring from a teacher who says, "Hey, the student really cared about me, "and my well-being, sometimes we hear, "I was going through a hard time, "or man, this class was a struggle, "or it was my first year teaching this, "and man, I was a better teacher "because the student was in the class." That's an awesome dimension of supporting others. It's not just the pure dimension. - Yes, absolutely. The next place that this kind of thing can often come up is in your interview. - Yes, this is going to be a candid conversation with another person. And really, the only time we get to have a spontaneous, like, sort of unscripted interaction with you as an applicant, obviously, you know, you're not necessarily going to be interviewing with me or Mark, but as a proxy, maybe one of our alumni volunteers or our senior interviews would sit down and have a conversation with you. And this is really a kind of a front row seat in how you're going to interact with others. - Yeah, and, you know, the episode that we recorded about interviews was many years ago, but the advice we shared there is still the same, which is that you should simply show up as a complete thinking, feeling, human being. That's the best thing that you can do to prepare for that interview and just say, well, let me be myself and let me have a natural conversation with this person. We're hoping, though, that in that conversation, you can talk not just about yourself and your accomplishments, but also the people who've been important around you. I hope you should feel comfortable talking about the communities and the activities that are meaningful to you and how you've tried to make those communities better. Great interview reports often give us some great insights, not just into whatever kind of connection you can make in 45 minutes with a stranger, but also your willingness to talk about how other people play an important role in your life. - Yeah, so all of these pieces are important opportunities for us to learn a little bit about you and how you interact with other people. Again, we'll emphasize that this is sort of an incomplete suite of information for us, but we do our best to make sure that the students that we are admitting to Yale are going to be able to succeed not just academically, but also personally, we'll talk a little bit more about this in a future episode, but we're not just admitting classroom students, we're admitting community members, we're going to be living with others and interacting with others, and we want to be confident that the students were admitting are set up to be good, positive, supportive peers in that environment. - Yeah, and I think it's worth noting that we recognize that the space in the application is limited, right? - Yeah. - There are trade-offs that we have to make between running a complex holistic process and simply being able to evaluate the volume of applications that we receive in the window of time that we have. - Yeah. - I think I speak for all my colleagues when I say we wish that we had lots more time and lots more information and that we could spend a day with each of our applicants to give us the kind of insights that we would really want to have in that admissions committee. - Yeah. - So we're always aware that we're working with incomplete and imperfect information. No, we can't predict with certainty that every member that we've selected is going to be a saint on campus and never have an experience where someone is like, "Wow, that person was kind of a jerk," right? - I mean, in the same way we can't predict that you're gonna get straight A's at Yale and you're never gonna struggle academically, but hopefully this gives you a little bit of a sense of why we ask the things we do in the application and what we're thinking about, the questions running through our minds when we're reading those essays and those recommendations. - Yes, and I don't think we're perfect at this, but I am proud of the fact that students overwhelmingly say that what stands out to them about the Yale experience and one of the top reasons why they choose Yale is the strength of the community, that this does strike them as a place where students are interested in each other, invested in their peers welfare. And we think that our selection process plays a role in that. Let's wrap things up. And I think it can be really easy to think about the college application process as just all about you, you, you. - Yeah, right. - That is one of the most important things in approaching the college application is to be reflective and self-aware and willing to talk about yourself. - Yeah, but Yale and other schools are interested in building communities not just recognizing excellence in certain disciplines. So make sure that you use the application to show us who you are with others as well as just reflecting on yourself and your own experience. And remember that our work is specific to the Yale community. We're making these kinds of judgments based on the university's values and our sense of how our student body enhances the learning environment. Other schools may have similar values, but also may have other values and may be looking for different things or emphasize different values in their process. - All right, I wanna wrap up this way. - Okay. - We haven't had an old movie reference in a while. - Yes, all right. - So when I think about this, before we even said we wanted to do a podcast episode about this, this idea has always been crystallized in my head around a line from one of my favorite movies and musicals. This is the classic 50s musical, Damienke's. - Okay, we're back to baseball, people. - People will understand why this is perfect for me. It is such a delightful mix. It's baseball, it's foused. It's like vaudeville silliness. There's a 1958 movie with Gwen Verden who plays Lola and it's got Bob Fossi's choreography. It is just iconic. You should go watch some of the numbers on YouTube. It's amazing. - And if you haven't seen it, don't feel bad. We'll have so many of you there. - Well, Hannah, you are in for a treat 'cause you get to learn today that my favorite line is from one of the big show stoppers in the show. It's called Heart and it goes like this. You've gotta have heart, miles and miles and miles of heart. Oh, it's fine to be a genius, of course, but keep that old horse before the cart. First, you gotta have heart. - Aw, alright, perfect. Well, we'll be back soon with more episodes covering what Yale looks for. - And maybe some more movie musical references if I can make it. - Oh, surely, surely. - For now, thanks to former admissions officer, Andrew Britt Johnson, who composes our music. You should check them out at Andrew Britt Johnson.com. - If you have comments or an idea for an episode, drop us a line at Yale [email protected]. And finally, remember that the views expressed in this podcast are ours and don't necessarily present those of Yale University. University. Thanks for listening.