106: Colleges That Change Lives: Great Schools You May Not (Yet!) Know About

Ethan Sawyer  0:00  
Music.


Hello, friends, Romans and countrymen. This is Ethan saw your aka College Essay Guy. My goal here is to bring more ease, joy and purpose into the college application process. This is the College Essay Guy podcast, where I interview some of the awesomest minds in the college admissions world, synthesize their genius and and just, you know, try to break it down into some actionable steps. Now that's normally what I'm doing. Sometimes the genius comes served up on a platter and there's, I don't really have to do anything. I just kind of have to hit record. And that is the case with my guest today. So if you heard the last episode, I was talking about how to deliver a life changing essay workshop, offering some tips to that specifically for counselors, this episode is going to have a wider appeal, and it's especially for parents who are interested in not some a workshop that might change lives, but colleges that change lives. And my guest is Maria Furtado. She's the executive director of a nonprofit called colleges that change lives, which came out of a book of the same name, which she'll tell you about in a minute. The organization itself is dedicated to the advancement support of a student centered college search process, and when we talk about what that means, on the podcast, I had so much fun talking to Maria. She's brilliant and funny. I laughed like 20 times. You'll just basically hear me laughing in the background as she's talking. And it's one of those like hours that you'll just feel smarter after having listened to her speak. So some of the things we discuss, we discuss. We talk about what a liberal arts education is, what that means and why that might be important. We talk about three questions that every student should ask when it comes to picking a college she's got it boiled down and expresses it beautifully and succinctly three ways to reduce anxiety during the college application process. She's got something called, I'm calling it the car idea how to avoid college creep. That is to say, all of your conversations starting to become about college. If you know we're talking about parents and students, how the ice cream prize can make a tour better, you'll have to listen to that. Figure out what that is. And she also shares one great way to increase not decrease stress during the college selection process. How to Make the most of a college fair experience is a great resource that she shares, and I share another resource at the end of the podcast, and perhaps the single most important thing for parents to consider when it comes to the college application process, all this and more, this is a good one. Y'all check it out. Thank you. We're lucky enough today to have Maria Furtado, the executive director of colleges that change lives, aka ctcl, with us. Maria has worked in higher education for over 20 years. She actually worked at two ctcl schools, Clark University in Worcester, Mass and Eckerd College in St Petersburg, Florida, aka St Pete. Maria speaks all around the country to students, parents and counselors on college rankings and popular misperceptions, a word I really like about college admission, the strength and worth of a liberal arts education, and she offers tips for students and parents on how to manage the college search. So Maria, thank you. And welcome to the podcast.


Maria Furtado  3:21  
Thank you very much. Ethan, I always appreciate being asked.


Ethan Sawyer  3:25  
Awesome. So talk to us a little bit about ctcl. You know, how did it start? What's its mission, and how does it promote that mission?


Maria Furtado  3:34  
We came together as a group, unofficially, 21 years ago, so longer than many of the students we're working with have been alive, which I'm starting to think of as a kind of a strange conflict somehow, or a strange moment in time, I guess. And what happened was Lauren Pope, who wrote for The New York Times for years and years and years and years about higher education, really started to develop a love of the liberal arts college in the way it is structured here in the US, the liberal arts college typically a residential community, often in a small town or in a on an urban campus, so not necessarily blended immediately into the city. So he wrote about liberal arts colleges quite a bit when he wrote for The Times, and eventually families came to him and said, Lauren, we love what you write. Could you help us? So he started advising families as they looked at the college search, and they came back, and their students came back and said, Lauren, I had a great experience. This college changed my life. So it reinforced what he had been learning about residential colleges, especially liberal arts colleges. So the families came back again, as good American families will do. And said, Lauren, can't you make us a list of good schools? And and Lauren said, No. He said, but I'll write a book. So in his 80s, that's eight zero, not the 80s. His 80s, he wrote his first book, which was called looking beyond the Ivy League. Lauren wrote that one in narrative form, and he touched on. About 200 colleges. And again, the families came back and said, Lauren, this is great. This is so helpful. Thank you so much. Can you make us a list now? And Lauren said, No, but I'll write another book. So his next book was called colleges that change lives. That was done in short parent not paragraph format, but Chapter format. So he did a couple of introductory chapters about the college search, and then he profiled 40 schools in depth. And he wrote that book three times. So he wrote it once and revised it twice. After the first book came out, a very smart woman working at Beloit College in Wisconsin said, You know what? We should probably think about, a way to collaborate work together. So we met, and we decided that it would be great for us to try traveling together. So we started doing tours domestically, 21 years ago, and our first tour, we put up 200 chairs at our first stop, and desperately hope that people would come, and 150 people came, but we were thrilled to bits. And as time has gone on, we have become more sophisticated in what we do. We have changed and evolved. And Lauren wrote his third book, his third version, when he was in his mid 90s. So we were fairly confident at that point. And by we, I mean a group of us who had sort of become the unofficial leaders of what we were doing, we're fairly confident he would not work on a fourth version, so we asked him if he would give us his blessing to start a nonprofit, and he absolutely did. He was very excited that his message would grow and continue to go forward. So we started that nonprofit 11 years ago, and then in 2012 Lawrence family hired a writer, Hillary Maisel Oswald, and when they asked her to revise the book, and when she did that, she took four schools out and put four schools in. So we, as an organization, invited the four quote, unquote, new schools. We still call them the new schools. It's been four years, five years now, to join our nonprofit, and they chose to do so. So our nonprofit has 44 colleges and universities, so that's a little bit of the history. The mission is to really help students, parents, counselors, think about the college search differently, to get outside in some ways, to get outside their comfort zone and to step away from the 50 or 100 colleges that they know or believe they know, and think about some other places that might be a better fit. That might be a place where a student will thrive because he or she is challenged and supported. It might be schools that they don't know very well, or that their peer group, the parent peer group, doesn't know very well and the student peer group, but that they can really see the benefit of their process, of the style of the community, of the faculty engagement, etc. And so we really want people to expand their world when they do their college search. And we are very committed to the idea of reinforcing the importance of a liberal arts education. And I can go into that a little bit more, why I think it's important, and why we feel that it really is a an education that will take them forward into a an ever changing, quickly changing economy and world in which they will live and function. Let's


Ethan Sawyer  8:16  
do it. Talk to us about it. Why? Why is a liberal arts education for and for those who may not even know what that means. What does that mean to you and why is it important? Absolutely,


Maria Furtado  8:24  
that's a great question. I always try to remember to start with that, but I didn't so that thank you for reminding me a liberal arts education, in essence, means that a student is going to be asked to step outside their comfort zone, so an artist will always be asked to take a science class, and a scientist will likely be asked to take an art class. Someone in the social sciences will have classes with people outside their typical frame of reference, their typical peer group, academically, because they're taking a history course with a science person, and that science person is going to come at that history course with a different view and ask some different questions, which may tie things together differently for everybody in the class, same with the artists. The artist going into a lab to take that science class might look into the microscope and say, Huh, amoeba, cool. Look at the colors, look at the shape, look at the size, look at the way it evolves. Look at the way that I could adapt that and make it into art where a scientist is looking in and seeing cell generation or cell division, and so looking at it differently brings different conversation to the table, and that has great value. When you go out into the work world and you are trying to work with people who don't approach the same problem, same question, same solution in the same way, two things I always say about the liberal arts, and I say them no matter how sophisticated I think the crowd might be. Number one, the liberal arts are not just for liberals. That comes up. You didn't have to laugh. I appreciate it. I laugh in my head every time I say it, but I think that it comes up more often than we would anticipate. Those of us who are in higher ed or related. Education don't recognize that there are a lot of folks out there who are not and so they hear liberal and they think liberal politically, but there are many schools whose political and social fabric is much more conservative than we might anticipate when we first think about a liberal arts institution. And I can give you examples within our group and examples outside our group, both. And then the second thing is a reminder to everyone that a liberal arts education includes science, biology, chemistry, physics, math, computer science, environmental studies or environmental science, and it often includes engineering, and that seems to be playing out in the media in a very either or way. And it's not an either or they are they are intertwined, but the media seems to be presenting the sciences versus the liberal arts, and I think that that's unfair, because science at a liberal arts school is extremely hands on, and perhaps more hands on, more quickly than it might be at a large research institution because the main faculty teach, they teach, they lead the lab, and they continue to research. So students who want to be involved in research may have a chance to do that much earlier in their college career at a liberal arts college than they might at a larger research institution where there are graduate students and juniors and seniors standing in their way, in an appropriate way, of course. So I think that there's a lot that's that's being discussed about the liberal arts that is perhaps unfair or too quick to judge is perhaps another way to look at it. I think when you look forward and you look into the future. And you say the students that we are working with today are going to go out for jobs in, say, five, four to five to six years, perhaps the world will change immensely between now and then. Think backwards and think how much it has changed in the past four to five to six years, how we move through the world, how we use our world. So they will be looking at jobs that don't exist today. If you think about the parent group that we're working with, none of us wanted to be web designers when we were in high school. None of us wanted to work in social media because it did not exist. And even though it feels like a long time ago, some days, it's actually not that long ago that we were in high school when you think about the breath of time and how much has changed in what we do. You and I are talking on Skype in high school, I would have been talking on a phone that was attached to the wall and stayed right where it was. And so things change very quickly. So teaching students the skill set that comes with a liberal arts education is, I think, great preparation for the future. So the skill set is in my mind, and typically, when you read about liberal arts education, not just in my mind, the ability to think well, think creatively, think critically, the ability to communicate well, one on one, one in a small group, one in a large group, and communicate well in writing, using the amazing idea of more than 140 characters at a time. The ability to analyze data, to see patterns and trends, and also the ability to problem solve. Well, because those skills are applicable to any industry, one that is as old as we can think of, and one that is coming and all of a sudden going to appear in five years, that skill set is going to be applicable across the board.


Ethan Sawyer  13:40  
This is great. I mean, and i What i One of the things I love you're doing is, for some folks, I imagine breaking, busting some myths and breaking some or going against some conventional wisdom. And there's this great note at the start of colleges that change lives, at the start of the book that says you're not as smart as you think you are if you believe. And I want to just read this really quick, there are like five things. One, your college should be bigger than your high school. Two, a name brand college will give you a better education and ensure your success. Three, a university will offer you more than a good small college. Four, you should go where your friends are going. And five, you don't need to examine yourself for the college. So I just want to talk about a couple of these, because I think you've touched on them a little bit. But this first one, you know, Lauren Pope says that most good colleges have a population of 1000 to 2000 and I'm curious if, Maria, if you feel like this is true, or, you know, either way, what are some of the merits of a good small college and who might thrive at a good small school? I think


Maria Furtado  14:43  
many different types of students can thrive at a small school, but not all types. And I do think that's important for me to say out loud, because I represent small schools. Our schools are about 4200 and smaller, so the smallest school is probably about 300 students, and they go. Up to about 4200 so it's a little bit bigger than what Lauren mentioned in his original books and in his original preferences, but I think that it's still a nice sized community. It's easy to be connected, it's difficult to get lost. And both of those are good for the right student, for some people who learn very well by listening, who very are very motivated. Are willing to walk up to the front of a 500 person class every day or every week for a semester until the professor starts to know them well. A smaller school is perhaps not the right space, but for a student who really is, for whom communication is important, for whom community is important. I think a small school is a great place to be, and they're not as small as people think they are. So I went to a high school, a very large high school. I graduated with 775 of my very best friends, and I went to a school that had less than half the population of my college but true story, I sat at commencement four years later, between a woman I had not seen since orientation and a woman I had never met and so and I wasn't the shyest of people, I wasn't the boldest of people, but I wasn't the shyest of people either. So I did know quite a bit of people on campus. I think that the idea that 2000 people is not enough community is a little bit of a of a misperception. Let's use that word. What I often will say to students is, how many people did you go to the movies with the last time? And typically, you know, it's three to five. I did have a student tell me 20 people the other day, and I said, All right, that's good. That's a big crowd. But then, and then, how many people do you have in your life that you would text with a problem at 2am How? How big is your actual support network? And I think that then we, when we ask students to think about it a little bit differently, you can see them starting to say, okay, yeah, I really I don't need 30,000 people to find 30. I can find 30 and 3000 or 2000 I did have a great experience, though, in Phoenix. A couple of summers ago, a young man and his mom were at the end of our program, and they were standing out in front of the registration table having one of those family conversations that's awkward for everyone else. And he said, I really want a big school. And she said, why? And he said, I want a big school. She said, why? She said, I need, I want, I need, a big school, a big school. And she said, but you're not being you're not telling me why. And then finally, he looked in your and he said, For the possibilities. And I thought that was such an interesting way to approach it. And for him, the definition of possibilities was big. For other people, the definition of possibilities can be smaller because they see that they will find more people at a liberal arts college, for example, who have maybe similarities or enough difference to make it interesting, but not so much that everybody is kind of moving individually through the world, and it's harder to make those connections. I think, I think that not all of us, I'm sorry to interrupt you, no, no. I think not all of us at 17 or 18 are confident enough to move through a population of 30,000 in many ways on your own, there will be support. I'm not saying that big schools don't have support. Please don't hear that. But what I'm saying is, and I think not all of us are ready for that big population.


Ethan Sawyer  18:46  
You know, part of this is making me think, Maria, that in some cases, students are applying to the bigger schools, because those are the ones they've heard of, right? Those are the ones that are out there. What do you feel like in thinking about or only focusing on name brand schools? You know? Is there any danger in that? Is there anything that students are missing out on? I


Maria Furtado  19:04  
think they're missing out on places that might serve them better. There might be better communities for them as the people that they are, if they're honest about who they are versus who they think they are, think they are. I think that because more people know them, many of those more well known schools get more applications. Therefore, unless they can suddenly grow as an institution, they become more selective. And I think that that having only a group of very selective institutions, or more selective institutions on the list, adds to the stressors for the student and for the family, if it's a mixed list, so some schools that the student is more confident that of admission, more comfortable with the idea that they'll be admitted, and schools that might be a little. Bit less comfortable on the idea of admission or on the possibility of admission. I think that mixed list with schools that have some similarities creates a better experience for the student and the family going through the process. Because to me, that idea that you spend all of your senior year wondering if it'll be a good answer, if there'll be any possibilities, I think makes it a really hard senior year. And unless I'm mistaken, we all get to do it once. And so, I mean, I know I only did it once. I think that that we as a culture are helping students in maze that that are making it harder for students. So we encourage them to spend all of high school thinking about college, and all of college thinking about grad school or the job, and we're forgetting to experience the actual time you're there and growing at the at the time and place and space that you should be at that time.


Ethan Sawyer  20:58  
The term that comes to mind, and this is a huge buzz word in the college admissions world, is this term best fit. And I'm curious, Maria, what that means to you, and if, if you can think of what are some ways that students can work to find that that best fit?


Maria Furtado  21:11  
I


think for me, best fit has three parts, academic fit, personal or social fit and financial fit. I think those three make to me to find fit ways that students can help, and I can flesh those out, if you'd like, but go for it. Okay, I think that the academic fit, and these are some of the ways if a brand new school came onto my radar screen. These are three school three questions that I would ask, and these are what I recommend to students when they get excited as sophomores and juniors, and they take their PSAT or their plan or their AC T or SAT, if they choose to, and then they check off that little box that says I would be happy to hear from colleges, and all of a sudden they are extraordinarily popular. So their email box exploded and their mailbox is full. And so to me, I would ask three questions. Number one, who teaches? Because, from an intellectual perspective, probably the most important relationship on a campus should be with faculty. It's going to you have intellectual relationships with other students. But I think that the teacher, student experience is so valid and so core, central to the experience, that it should be what we think about first. So who teaches? Ask if it's faculty. Do faculty teach intro classes, or do they only teach upper level classes? Is it all grad students for the intro classes, and are you okay with that? So you know, we first, if you, if you love the liberal arts, your first thing is, well, grad students, oh, my and I just think we have to ask the second question. Are you okay with it? If you're okay with it, then that's a different answer that leads you potentially in a different path. So the first one who teaches the second question, this is a big if. So if I say if again, I'm gonna say it one more time, if, if the student has a major or academic interest already, then I think you should look at the classes that are offered and I say if, because I don't want parents to run back to their juniors and say, Oh, my goodness, you need a major now, because they don't, but if they have something in which they have interest, say they love history, I would say, go and look at the history department and related departments. So maybe look at economics and politics. Maybe look at anthropology, maybe look at ancient Civ. Maybe look at something, you know, the peripheral departments. Look at the actual classes offered. Because in that example, if a student truly loves American history and is particularly interested in the Civil War era and has been a reenactor and all of those things, and that's really what they love, and they look at a department, and there's two or three courses in Civil War history and restoration, restoration, but there are a lot more courses in early American history or in post war, post World War Two history. That department might not be a great fit, right? So if they then look at other schools and see, oh my goodness, this school has a bunch of people who teach in teach about the Civil War and that era in the US, then that might be a better fit for them from an academic perspective, but they have to kind of look on the edges too. So if they're interested in psychology, look at sociology, look at anthropology. If they're interested in economics, look at geography, look at politics. If they're interested in international issues, don't just look at the International Relations Department, but if there's international business, if there's International Development, if there's something else that seems like it's connected, look at those departments. Departments, too. One of the challenges, I think, in many ways, especially for American kids, our kids at American high schools, is that we teach macro and micro economics, for example, but we don't often teach more economics than that, so they don't really know how big the field is. We teach geography. Maybe, if the student takes AP Human Geography in high school. Maybe they only teach it when they get when they go and do preparation to get their license. Here's a map, here's how to read one. Here's a GPS, here's how to listen to one. That's the new that's the new challenge. So understanding what geography might do for them is hard until you actually look at the courses and say, oh, oh, I had no idea that's what geography meant. So I think that digging in deeper is great. Now I want to go just back to the step and say if, if the student has an idea, if they don't, if all they would say is, well, I'm better at science. And I say that, like it's a terrible thing. All they would say, if they would say, I'm better at science, then go and look at science, but look at chemistry, biology, biochem, neuroscience, look at whatever they have and see what courses look interesting. Because oftentimes a student interested in science is particularly interested in, say, frogs or fish, or particularly interested in micro or particularly interested in the way that disease moves the body. So you might see that there are courses that make a lot more sense at one school versus the other. Look at the research that students and faculty do together. See if you can find that information that helps to flesh out the idea of what the academics are like at that place. Now, if a student has no idea, I really have, and many of them don't, and that's okay. I think that makes them really interesting thinkers. They're that broad that they are kind of like, oh my goodness, that's exciting, that's exciting, that's exciting, that's exciting. Then flip through, flip through different departments, and see years and years ago, when we all made paper catalogs, there was a mom at a program, an admitted student program, and she assigned her son to get the catalog from his last two or three schools in which he had interest. I did take a highlighter and highlight any course that looked interesting, regardless of department, because at the end, you get this really kind of interesting flip book. And I tend to be a fairly visual person, so I thought that was a wonderful thing to do, because one book would have all this yellow, and one book would have not much yellow potentially. So I thought it was a kind of an interesting exercise. So the third piece, or the, I guess that was a, one A and 1b Yeah, one name would be on academic. Thank you. I appreciate that. Number two, let's say, from the social perspective, would would they find a group of people who have common interest. If community service is where they have made most of their friends, is community service something that's talked about on that campus? If theater is something that's really important to them, and they've made most of their best friends sitting in the lighting booth trying to figure out how to like the show, or building the stage or running lines, look at what they do in the theater department. How do they talk about theater on that campus? Because it is likely that that's where you will find another group of friends who have like interest. If religion is really important, how is religion played out on that campus? Is it a big piece? Is it a small piece? Is it a really important piece for some people and less important for other people. How does it? How do the students move through the world? That's that social fit for me. And then the third one is the financial fit. It's easy for me to say, because my child is two and a half, to say the financial aid will work out, but my child is two and a half, so I'm not in the thick of it. Like families are, like parents are who have kids in high school. So I think the important thing is to look at the financial possibilities at an institution. Do they give merit based aid? Do they give need based aid? Do they talk about giving a gap or leaving a gap, meaning that they will not give all the money a family might need? Where is the student going to fall in the pool? And by that, I mean if the student is much stronger than average at a particular institution, it is likely that their aid packages would be stronger. They would get more merit based aid. They would get a larger percentage of need met if the school does not meet full need, if they are under average, if they're way under average, especially, they might be admitted, but they might not receive a whole lot of financial aid. And for some families, that's fine, because they have different financial wherewithal, and for other families, that is not a good thing. So I think that that financial fit is very important, and I really just scratched the surface on that common


Ethan Sawyer  29:39  
right? That's great. This is, I mean, you're crushing it, right? Emery, I just was from my perspective, and


Maria Furtado  29:46  
that's a phrase we use with our son, you crushed it to get him to really be excited about what he does.


Ethan Sawyer  29:54  
So, you know, I know that part of the ctcl mission is geared towards making the college application process. Is, quote, unquote, student centered. And I'm curious in your mind, why is this so important? And as a part two? Because it seems today, all of my questions are either two or three parts, what are some signs that a process is student centered, and what are some signs that maybe this the process isn't student centered?


Maria Furtado  30:15  
Well, I would give you two answers to that surprise. Actually, I have three parts, student perspective, the parent perspective and the college perspective. So I think that from a student perspective, the process is student centered, when they feel that the people they are interacting with are trying to engage them, are trying to give them all the information they need to make a good choice. And I don't mean that the reps are trying to sell them, I mean that they're trying to engage them in conversation, and they're trying to help them determine whether that institution is a good place for them, a reasonably good place or not a good place. Because no school is perfect for every single kind of student, no matter how big, no matter how small, no school is perfect for everybody. So I think that student centered piece is really keeping the best interest of the student at heart from and the student being able to feel that in the interactions with the rep, with any faculty, with students on campus, with anybody from the groundskeepers all the way through to the president, whomever they interact with, from the parent perspective. So part two, I think keeping it student centered is reminding yourself as a parent that college admission is not your report card. Students have a very tangible process from K through 12 and even into college. There's an evaluative system. At the end of a quarter, semester, trimester, year, they get a report card of some kind, grades, narratives, whatever it is. Somebody sits down and says, These are the things you've done. Well, these are the things you haven't. And somehow, in our culture, I think that we as parents have decided that college admission is our report card. But it's not. It is not about the coolest bumper sticker. It's not about or the most recognizable bumper sticker. It's not about being at a work event and having someone say, Oh, your child's in high school, right? Where are they applying? And you giving them the list as a parent, and them going, Oh, or Oh, those are two very different O's. And the answer in my mind, to the second O, the maybe your child has schools that that on the list, that that somebody might not know, is to have two or three great facts about each school. So to be able to say, oh, oh, you don't know about Eckerd, for example. You know, did you do they do a really cool winter term, and that their orientation is three weeks, and that they have a great Marine Science program and creative writing? Did you know those things? So really, kind of being an advocate for the schools on your students list, not being for to use a loaded term, but not to be embarrassed by your students list. To be proud of all the schools that your student has found, whether they are well known like a Vanderbilt or a USC, or if they're less well known, like a Hiram College or a Guilford College, be proud of all of them. And what I tell students as they go into family events, like into the holidays. Oftentimes there's the Uncle Joe, where are you applying? And if the student doesn't have schools that Uncle Joe knows, Uncle Joe, I don't know anything about those, what I tell students is have three things. Tell them right off the bat, I love this, I love this, I love this. And then if you can politely walk away, because you need to own the process. The student needs to own it. Not Uncle Joe, right?


Ethan Sawyer  33:44  
And you know, listening to this podcast will be a variety of folks. There'll be students listening, there will be parents and there will be counselors. How can, and if you want to answer for all three, that'd be awesome. How can any one of the three types of folks that I mentioned make the process be more student centered. In other words, how can students, you know, take control of the process? What? What can they say to parents? For parents, how can they make sure that they're putting their students at the center of this and and what can counselors do, especially if they've got parents who may be embarrassed at the cocktail party about their students school list? So whatever comes to mind on that,


Maria Furtado  34:19  
I think we can fix some of it, and we have to accept that in some some people, for some people in our culture, and in other cultures, the visibility the name brown thing, name brand thing, is super important and and in some ways you can't fix that. For some people, you can ask them to think about it differently. But I have learned over time that I cannot make people think differently if they choose not to think differently. And I also have learned that I have to be respectful of other cultures where, if they came to the US and then returned to another culture, would it be really hard for them if they were not presenting a resume? With a school that is at least visible in some way. So I try to really keep those things in mind. So I'll start there. The best thing I think that people can do is come at this the way that I heard it presented at a presentation not very long ago. So I was co presenting with a the VP from the University of San Francisco, and he said, I have four adult children. The single most important thing for me is that they are happy, that they are happy people. And I think that at the core for some family, some parents, they sort of just need to be reminded that what they really want for their kids is for them to be happy, and that where the parent might be happy is not necessarily where the child might be happy. I have friends who are both very scientifically inclined. So one is a nurse practitioner. One is a phlebotomist. They think in a very scientific way. And one of their sons got through high school, was ready to look at colleges, and looked at them and said, I really want to be a philosophy major and a religion major. And I think both of them stood and blinked for a couple of minutes, and part of it was, where did I get this child? Where is this, the recessive gene thing? So I think that parents, it's easy for us to tie up our self worth in what others think of our child and what others think of our parenting, but to make a process student centered is to really look at your child and say, Wow, I would not be happy here, but look how happy my child appears to be thinking about this institution. And again, I think it's important for us, especially if, if you're a person like me, I'm not I'm not huge, I'm not hugely swayed by brand name, except for a small number of things, like, I don't buy off brand soda. I know that sounds really like a strange example, but I will only buy certain soda. I don't buy off brand soda and but many other things, I'm kind of like, Okay, it looks good. It seems to be well made. I'm okay with it. It doesn't have to be brand name. So I think that that there are pieces of our culture that have developed in a way that the name is very important, and embracing it, I think, is makes the difference,


Ethan Sawyer  37:30  
right? And would you go so far as to say, you know that there might be students out there who you know might be a good fit, or, dare I say, even a better fit for a name brand school based on cultural factors, etc. Yes,


Maria Furtado  37:41  
I think that's very fair, and I think that that's okay, that's okay. And I fully try to reflect, I've tried to reflect on this myself as a professional and as a human, and I have to remember that, because I think it was important for me to step back and say, okay, they're telling me something in what they're saying about how they're approaching this search, they're telling me that that's important to them, and I have to be okay with that, because that's who they are as a person.


Ethan Sawyer  38:13  
Here's here's a question for you, if you were applying to college, what schools would be on your list? That's a fascinating


Maria Furtado  38:21  
question. When you do this for a living, you think about your college experience more than you ever thought you would. I have to say the truth, right? I think that, am I applying as who I am now, or am as I applying you as who I was in high school?


Ethan Sawyer  38:36  
Let's say who you are now, and it's tough. I mean, I know that the probably the better question is, what process would you undergo in order to develop that list, which we can talk about in a second. But I'm also interested in, are there particular schools, and, you know, let's say we can do three. You don't have to do, you know, eight. But are there a few schools that you think just sort of base? And I'm also interested in your thought process for how you're coming to these schools. But are there a particular schools that you go, Hey, that's a school that's on my radar now that when I was 17, may not have been on my radar at all. Yes,


Maria Furtado  39:06  
yes. You know, having having really thought about this quite a bit, there are, there are places that I think the first thing I would do I would have expanded my geography. When I first started my search, I was very excited about going far from home to a very large school, and we visited a far from home, very large school. When I was out on a trip with my parents, and I looked around and went, oh my goodness, this is very large and far from home, wait a minute. And so I ended up 45 minutes from my house at a school has half the size of my high school. I think that I would, I would choose a place where I would not have had to be as bold as I felt I needed to be at the school that I went to. Yeah, go ahead, well, but by that, I mean I went to a school that I think of as relatively and maybe, you know. Changed in 30 years, certainly at a school that was relatively mainstream. I went to Stonehill College, which is about 20 minutes south of Boston, and it was at the time for me, as a working class Portuguese kid from a city that's very Portuguese, to go to a school that I perceived to be very upper middle class with a very large Irish population, it felt, I felt I didn't feel like I was in my my zone anymore. And I figured I had two ways to go with that. I could become who I really wanted to be, which was an even quieter version of myself, or I could become a bolder version. And so I chose to become a bolder version. I'm not sure my mother ever truly forgave me for that, but that's okay, but it was good for me to not fit in. So looking backwards, looking back, I should say, Were I to do my search knowing what I know now, I would choose schools where I feel like I would, I would be less outside the mainstream. So a place like a an Earlham College, which has such a diverse in so many ways, population, or a place like an Eckerd College, where I could spend more time outside, because the weather is different than it is in New England, where you can be outside and a paper, in my mind, a paper written outside at a picnic table is still as good as a paper written inside in a dark library Carol. But I don't think I recognize then. I sort of think of this as the New England. We've never really given up the Puritan thing. So I think that for some of us, the idea that it feels good and can be good work is hard. And I noticed that with a lot of families, when they would come to visit Eckerd College, for example, they're kind of like, it's beautiful here all the time. How do people go to work? Do you go to work? Of course, I go to work. Yes, yes, yes. I think that that from, from that perspective, I would, I would ask myself to be a bigger thinker, and I would, I would step outside. I would more consciously, step outside my comfort zone.


Ethan Sawyer  42:12  
What does it take to become a college that changed lives like how? Say, you know, I know that there was the original list of schools that Lauren Pope, but is there a chance for other small schools like who actually ends up on the list.


Maria Furtado  42:23  
It's really a fascinating thing. If we have met as a group of leadership, let's say our leadership has met three times a years for 20 years, I would bet that of those 60 times, we have talked about that 50 times. So really, it's been a question that's on our mind for a long time, how could we grow? How should we grow? If we should grow, and so I think that we've really been extremely thoughtful, and the reason that we have not grown beyond schools profiled in one of the books is because those schools have been third party vetted, so either by Lauren in his process of working with families, of researching, of digging deeply into graduate school placements, etc, and then Hilary Maisel Oswald research when she revised the book, and looking at many of those same things, they've been vetted by a third party. If we were to do the process now and say, Gee, I think we should add some number of schools. I think we would be really it would take us a long time to come up with an appropriate vetting process that felt appropriately objective, because our board members are reps from the colleges and then three high school counselors, and so we would have to really come up with a process, and I think that's part of what's held us back, is making sure now, are there many, many, many, many schools that would be great additions, absolutely. Do I and other reps recommend them absolutely? So when I'm talking to families and they'll ask me about certain things, I will say, Well, have you looked at Bentley, Babson, Bryant, what I think of as the 3b for business back home, you know, to really have you thought about those schools. So I think there are, easily other schools that would be great additions. I think for us, the challenge is trying to be really thoughtful about how we would, how we would really do the evaluation in a way that made sense.


Ethan Sawyer  44:24  
Maria, what are some ways that students can lower their stress level or anxiety level as they go through this process?


Maria Furtado  44:32  
I think that bringing down stress level is a student and parent process. So these are some examples. These are three sample ways that I think can help bring down stress. Number one, I asked people to think about their car. So I was in my car one night, and I got up to about 10 miles an hour, and my door locks locked, and they made that very rich thump noise. And this one particular night, when it happened, I had two of me. Immediate thoughts. I thought, huh, when parents hear that noise, I bet they think we're in the car. We're trapped in the car. We should talk about college. And then the immediate follow up thought in my head was, students must think, Oh, my goodness, we are trapped in this car. We're going to have to talk about college. So one suggestion I make to families, especially in areas where there's traffic is bad, is to maybe think about making your car a college free zone. I've also known families who have chosen to make the dinner table, or any replica of the dinner table, a college free zone. So when they eat together as a family, some families do it every Friday night. Some families do it Sunday night, whatever it might be, or not at all, or occasionally, whatever it might be. But make that, that family meal a college free zone. So that's one number two. It sort of relates to it, because I believe that not every conversation you have as a family has to be about college, especially if you have younger siblings, younger kids in the family, who sometimes feel like they're kind of lost in the shuffle. When the college search comes into the house, it sort of invades and takes over. And so the second thing I would suggest is, for families who use a family calendar, is that they potentially think about putting college admission on your calendar, say Sunday night, six to 730 and what this does is it can help with the creep conversation, creep of feeling like you have to talk about it all the time. So a student is getting up in a morning one day and has an very immediate challenge French test. I have a French test today, so they're focused on that. They're not focused on the essay that's due in three months, but mom might be. And so mom comes into the kitchen because she's been up for a long time and drinking coffee, and she says, you know, honey, I've been thinking about your essay. The kid's not thinking about the essay. So if you have college admission on the calendar, it's a very good way for the student to have a tool to say, respectfully, I have a test today, Mom, can we talk about my essay on Sunday? And it helps with the conversation creep in my mind. And then the third thing is, as students look at colleges, they look at websites. They look at brochures. Everybody sends pretty pictures. Everybody is happy. There's always foliage. There's very little snow in the brochures. Everybody is giving the best foot forward that they can. And the brochures are good. They have good, valid information. They're important to the process as other websites, but the visit can make the difference, and so I encourage families to visit whenever possible, recognizing that it adds a financial burden. And I'm not trying to do that, but I would like to see, if possible, if they can visit the schools, at least the finalists that the student has it narrowed down to in the senior year. But when they do these trips, oftentimes they get in the car, and it's the you know, we're going to New England two schools a day, 10 days. Get in the car. Off we go. Let's go. And it feels more like a journey, a journey, a hard journey, than a journey, an opportunity to spend time together. So my suggestion is that each family come up with something they can do every day that is not college related, that helps bring them fresh eyes and fresh ears. So for example, if it's an ice cream family, some families just love ice cream. Somebody does the research each day, finds the best local ice cream place they go for ice cream every day. At the end of the week, somebody gets the ice cream prize. I found the best ice cream place, and in some families, the prize is they just get to brag about it forever. And that's fine for me. Personally, I love independent bookstores. So if I'm on the road and I have time, I will always stop at an independent bookstore. I'll stop at Barnes and Noble if I need to, but I'll stop at an independent book store. I find it soothing. I find it comforting. I don't often buy anything, but I can wander up and down the aisles, and I find it very I enjoy it, but it could be the movies, it could be local theater. It could be parks. I had a family that I worked with from Cupertino, California, when I was working at Eckert college. And the mom and the Son, their thing was that they always tried to see the highest point in the state. No matter where they went. They didn't necessarily climb it, but they like to see it in the distance. And so they came to Eckert, and I don't know that little hill right there might be the highest point in the state. You know, it's not a very hilly state. But for them, it worked. It got them off campus, it got them out into nature a lot of times, and it refreshed them for the next visit. So those are three things I would suggest.


Ethan Sawyer  49:56  
I love this the one of the things that popped into my brain is. Because students who might be overwhelmed when they start to get all those letters and start to get all the information and they get the emails, is there any advice you'd give to, you know, students who or even parents who are overwhelmed by just the volume of information that they're getting from


Maria Furtado  50:12  
schools? I say do a quick pre vet, as much like those three questions we talked that way at the very beginning. Who teaches? Does the courses look interesting. Do the people seem like I can find my group, and if it seems like none of that is working, get off the mailing list, send them an email or unsubscribe and say, I really don't think this is the right place for me. The student should remember that if, in three months, they say, oh my goodness, that place really is very good for me. The college is going to welcome them right back onto that mailing list. That is not going to be a problem.


Ethan Sawyer  50:46  
That's great. And one of the things that you said to me when we were just chatting briefly before the podcast is this question of, Do I want to know if I want to do more research on a school or no more research, which I really love? That's a great simple question, more research or not more research? Yep. So Maria, what are some practical ways that that colleges the chain line change lot chain lives? Wow, that's a great slip. Wow. We might just leave that in. Let's just leave that in. It's not a Freudian slip. I don't anyway. Maria, what are some practical ways that colleges, that change lives can be useful to students? What do you recommend? Do you recommend? Do you recommend they just pick up the book and read it? Or what do you say? I


Maria Furtado  51:25  
would recommend couple. Recommend a couple things. Number one, they could read the book, especially the opening chapters, if they feel like they don't want to read the 40 school profiles. I'm okay with that in some ways. I know that that they should, but I understand that they're busy, but if they read the opening chapters, just to get them thinking about the process differently, and then maybe pick five schools, 10 schools, maybe all 40 schools, that'd be, that'd be the ideal. They can follow us on Facebook. We're just at colleges that change lives. They can follow us on Twitter, which is ctcl colleges. And I try to post something, typically three to five things a day, and they're a mix. They are interesting things that students are doing, alumni, faculty events at the colleges, ways that people can think about those institutions differently, different kinds of research that are happening, as well as different pieces about the liberal arts or about the college search in general. So that's a an easy way to have it come onto your feed, or come into your Twitter feed. You have to like a few things to kind of keep it right front center. But I think that that works out quite well for a lot of people. I've had people say they found that helpful, especially counselors. Counselors have told me that they find that helpful because it gives them ammunition and the appropriate use of ammunition, it gives them


Ethan Sawyer  52:44  
to send a love bomb, right? Yes, the kind


Maria Furtado  52:46  
of stories that can help, because a lot of this is, is understanding the stories that make an institution what it is and who it is, and makes their students who they are. The third thing I would always recommend, if possible, if families come to one of our programs on the road. So we do about 25 programs a year, and they can find those on our website, ctcl.org, under Events. And I will do a short opening, usually about 25 minutes or so. And then we do a college fair that's about 90 minutes long, an hour and a half at each stop, and it gives them a chance to talk with the reps from the colleges. The college fairs are structured a little bit differently because of the opening, so I always encourage people to come for the opening. We give them two handouts, and one of the handouts is called, How to choose a college that's right for you, fairly general to the search, but inside, there's a little fold out that looks sort of like a bookmark, and it has a series of questions that students can use to engage the rep in conversation. Because what I found over the years is students will come up and say, How's your biology program, right? And the rep says, Good, right? Unless it's very, very late in the day. And sometimes the rep will say, Don't do it. But really, you know, they're just trying to create a little bit of fun. So what they really might want to know from the biology program is, can I research? When can I research? Does anybody else there love fish? Is somebody else into ichthyology? What about the art department? What are the media that the faculty work in most I love photography. Are there some photography people? Are there opportunities? What have you seen? So they need to dig a little bit deeper than what they might so these questions are some from the reps, some from family, some from counselors, and some of them are adapted from the nesi survey, the National Survey of Student Engagement. The NES data is great if it's available on a particular school's website to see what the students actually say about their engagement at the experience, during the experience, what changed them while they were there, that transformative piece that creates colleges that change lives in its biggest form, so that I. Idea of looking and getting that piece. So they can get that piece at any one of our programs. They can also go on our website and request it. And high school counselors are more than welcome to request the piece as well. They can ask for one. I'll send them a sample. They can let me know if they need 100 they need 200 if they need 12, but that's available as a resource from colleges change that change lives to students, parent counselors as well.


Ethan Sawyer  55:23  
Great. This is awesome. I'm big fan of any resources that help students to make more of college fairs, because it can be overwhelming, right? A student walks in and sees 90 schools and they're like, you know, what do


Maria Furtado  55:35  
I do? One of the other takeaways I ask students, or takeaway assignments I give to students is that I ask them when they go to a college fair, every college fair that they go to, that they go to one table of a school they did not know before they walked in the door, just to expand their horizons. And I've also known some counselors who collect pens from all different kinds of schools. And when a student comes in for a meeting and they're talking about colleges, they'll have them take a pen at random out of a box, bag, cup, whatever it might be, and go and do a little bit of research on that school, just to get them thinking about something besides the 100 schools they know.


Ethan Sawyer  56:18  
How do you keep colleges that change lives from becoming just another brand in the college marketing ecosphere? Pun intended,


Maria Furtado  56:25  
that's a great question. Part of that is trying to make sure that when we do our programs, and this is the most tangible way, when we do our programs, and when I speak to a high school group or to an organization about the college search, my presentations are really in many ways, from the philosophical perspective, actually made him dad mad at one school because I wasn't talking about essays or something. But what I want to do, and what we want to do as an organization, is ask people to think bigger, ask people, and by people, I mean students, first and foremost, parents and counselors, to think more introspectively, to think more boldly about their college search, and to make it be something where they're stepping a little bit outside their comfort zone to look at these schools or and schools like them, as opposed to saying, Well, I know these 10 schools, they are, quote, unquote good schools. I'm going to look at them. And that's that,


Ethan Sawyer  57:35  
Maria, why do you do this work?


Maria Furtado  57:39  
That's such a good question. Some days I wonder, like everybody, I do this because, for a couple reasons, one of all the professional development I have had this has been my own personal professional development. The people I have met in the 20 plus years that I've been working in some form or fashion with colleges that change lives have become some of my very best friends have become my best mentors have pushed me to do things I would not have done professionally and in some ways, personally. And so it's been such really good professional development for me, and development as a person for me. And the other reason is, I'm a first generation kid. My dad is of an age he would be over 100 now, where he alive? He's of an age when you went to eighth grade and then you went out and you worked. And so he did. And my mom was one of one or two, depending on who you ask, in the family of 10 that actually finished high school and but they were they were very curious. They were very intelligent. My mother, until the day she died at 89 years old, read a piece or a part of every article in the newspaper every day so that she could be an informed person and have a conversation about a lot of different things she might not get in depth on the internet. Believe me, she was afraid of the internet, but she was really willing to be a lifelong learner, and so as a first generation kid, it's very exciting for me to be able to help people do this differently, to think about it differently, to to be willing to say I could go to a school that my friends don't know. I could go there and recreate myself. I could go there and create my best self with help of others. So for me, it's a really fun way to make a living. I like what I do. I like the people I have met. I rarely come across families that frustrate me, which is pretty lucky, when we do 25 programs a year, and I see maybe eight to 10,000 people at these programs, I occasionally come across somebody that I think just doesn't get it or doesn't want to. But most of the time, it's really fun at the end of the night to have high school students come up and see. Say, Thank you. I did not want to come here tonight. My mother made me come to this program, and I had a great time, and I found five schools that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise, that's a pretty nice way to make a living. I'd say so.


Ethan Sawyer  1:00:16  
So it's time for the show and tell portion of the podcast, which is just a chance for you and me to share something that we want to just flag for folks, and this could be something that's either useful in life or useful in the college application or college admissions process. So Maria, what have you got? What have you brought for show and tell today,


Maria Furtado  1:00:36  
I think based on the phrasing of the question, I would say my show and tell is that life is short. We all know it intellectually, but we have to remember it, and that if you can go through life and laugh every day about something, then it's been a pretty good life.


Ethan Sawyer  1:00:56  
Wow. Love it. So it was a philosophical it's great. Well, it's also, it's the content matching the form. You know, it's you putting your money where your mouth is. So folks, that's what you can expect. Just pearls when you show up at one of these, one of the ctcl events, mine is much more practical, much less philosophical. So my resource is something that, or my show and tell is something that I put together for our local NAC act Pasadena College Fair, which, you know, when I talk to a bunch of students who are struggling with, how do I, you know, how do I, what do I do with this college fair? You know, I put this together, this little resource that called How to make, how to make your college fair awesome. And it's just a little front and back PDF that folks can download. I'll put it in the show notes, and I'm going to be talking to you, Maria about some of those amazing questions on the ctcl one. So I'd love to talk to you about potentially dropping a couple of those questions on because they're just I remember when I first saw that resource that y'all had, that I remember having a stack of them and holding on to them like gold and sort of doling them out to I was working.


Maria Furtado  1:01:57  
You don't have to hold on to them too tightly. I have a whole bunch


Ethan Sawyer  1:02:02  
of them. Okay, that's great to know. I remember I was, you know, helping out at a charter school, and I would hand them to students and say, Are you going to use this? And, you know, kind of make them opt in verbally before I handed them one. But so that's just shows you how much I value that. Thank you, Maria, this has been so awesome. I'm so grateful for your work and feeling I found myself just nodding throughout the podcast and laughing, laughing more probably than I let on, just because I didn't want to interrupt. But I just really appreciate your time and your work. Thank


Maria Furtado  1:02:35  
you. Thank you very much. I appreciate being asked, and I think that there's this process can be so successful. It makes me sad when people feel like this process cannot be successful, because I think so many people, the vast majority, land in a great place and have a good experience, and that's really what I want for every kid out


there. Yeah, I'm nodding still. Maria, thanks. Thank you.


Ethan Sawyer  1:02:59  
That's the episode. You'll find the resources and links that we mentioned in the show notes on the next episode of the podcast, you'll hear Park Muth, who's former Associate Dean of the University of Virginia, share what he's learned from reading over 10,000 college essays. So it's another great conversation with another human being whom I deeply admire. So check it out. And if you're enjoying the podcast, leave a review. I'd really appreciate it. That's all for today. And as always, stay curious. You.


Transcribed by https://otter.ai