Google the phrase “assembly line education” and you’ll see that, for decades, folks have likened our education system to an assembly line in a factory. In some ways, this is a very useful metaphor. It highlights the regimented way that we expect students to develop, setting up a fair critique of our education system as overly industrial, automated, and lacking a human touch. This metaphor also highlights the way that our current system encourages students to disengage and treat their education as something that is stamped on then by the all-powerful factory machines.

The assembly line education metaphor might also help to explain why students and families are so obsessed with attending the “best” college, and why so much of the college search literature emphasizes the concept of “fit.” Ken Robinson’s famous TED talk uses the assembly line metaphor to explain the way that creativity and individuality are pounded out of students. An assembly line manufacturing process values conformity and is assessed by the degree to which it can most efficiently produce the same product over and over. Students in this metaphor are the raw materials and are expected to allow the machinery to cut, twist, attach, shape, and mold them at will. In fact, the best raw material doesn’t do anything except whatever the machinery wants it to do. Individual agency isn’t just irrelevant; it’s detrimental because students (the raw materials) with agency are likely to take things into their own hands. All this does is gum up the works.

So what happens if these students, conditioned to believe that the assembly line does all the work, are given the opportunity to choose the factory that will complete the final stage of their production? It seems reasonable to expect these students to want to get into the best possible factory, assuming that if the best factory completes their assembly, then they will be the best and most successful product. Widen the gap between “successful” and “not successful” and getting into the best factory will seem even more and more important.

Maybe this helps to explain why so many students and parents spend countless hours and millions of dollars on test prep, college applications, essay writing tutors, and all the other resources that might give them a leg up in getting into the most elite college or university. After all, if the educational assembly line makes the student, then getting into the best factory matters a lot. By perpetuating a system that is grounded in conformity, we aren’t just telling students that agency doesn’t matter. We are telling them that it actually could be a bad thing.

Yet, it turns out that agency is fundamentally important to success during and after college.  Four decades of research tells us that success after college and learning in college is a function of what you do in college, not the school you attend. In other words, there is no best college. At most, there might be a long list of colleges and universities that are an equally reasonable fit.

Don’t get me wrong – colleges and universities can vary substantially in the quality of their educational design. Some schools make it easy to make the most of your education. Others make it insanely difficult. Often, variation in design quality can even exist between departments within an institution. In other words, the life you encounter in college will be a lot like what you encounter in your professional life, your social life, and your personal life. There will be good and bad and a lot in the middle. You can certainly make choices that increase the likelihood of good and minimize the likelihood of bad, but there will still be a lot in the middle. And what you do with the circumstances you encounter will make the difference.

In other words, find a college that is good enough and won’t cost you too much, then learn everything you can about how to make the experience meaningful. We spend far too much energy in our culture framing the college search as a high stakes hunger game in which the best you can do is hope to avoid the bad and get lucky sneaking into the good. In end, all this approach gets you is a deep sense of helplessness and an utter lack of agency. But if you start the college search knowing that you can make almost any institution work for you . . . then you are in charge throughout.

Turns out, that is the way to succeed in life.  Might as well tackle college in the same way.  If nothing else, it will be good practice.

Mark Salisbury, Ph.D., spent 25 years in higher education as a coach, admissions counselor, instructor, and academic dean.  His research on college students and organizational design has been featured on NPR and WNYC and has been published in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed.  Dr. Salisbury launched TuitionFit (tuitionfit.org) in 2018 to empower the public to create college price transparency through crowdsourcing and sharing information.

Are your students forgetting things? Missing deadlines?
 
That’s not uncommon. We see this every year. On the college essay.
 
And we can’t blame COVID. Kids are kids. They need reminders during normal times, too.
 
To address this issue, we give our students a schedule before we start working together. It helps keep them on track, so they don’t lose momentum. It also helps us manage them – and our business – because we know what to expect when.
 
You’d better believe we stick to that schedule, especially at the start.
 
Here’s a story to illustrate what I mean.
 
Ari was enthusiastic about applying to college. He had a schedule, and so did his mom. Still, he missed his first real deadline: setting up a brainstorm appointment.

No big deal, right? The appointment wouldn’t take place till the next week.
 
In the larger scheme of things, it was a big deal, because I needed him to understand that the schedule mattered. We intentionally start with a low-stakes task, so if a student misses that deadline, we won’t be thrown completely off kilter.
 
Monday morning, I emailed Ari:
 
I was expecting you to set up your brainstorm appointment, but I don’t see one on my calendar. Please schedule it today. Just take a look at the email I sent earlier with the instructions to start writing your college essay, and you’ll see the dates that are available for brainstorm appointments. Thanks. I am looking forward to working together.
 
I copied his mom on the email too. And guess what? Ari set up that meeting. That day. Best of all, he never missed another deadline.
 
When a student misses a deadline, what do you do?
 
If you set everything up at the beginning of the process, create a schedule, and give it to your students before you start, you won’t have to chase them after the fact. 

Here’s a sample schedule from the Wow Method, so you can see how we do it.

Kim Lifton is President and Co-founder of Wow Writing Workshop a premier college application essay coaching and professional training company, offering private, virtual writing coaching services to professionals and students throughout the world.  Since 2009, Wow has been leading the college admissions industry with our unique approach to communicating messages effectively through application essays, including personal statements, activity and short answer essays and supplements.  Kim leads a team of writers and teachers who understand the writing process inside and out. Kim blogs regularly about the college essay’s role in the admission process for multiple industry publications and websites. In 2019, she was named a LinkedIn Top Voice in Education.

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Unless you’ve had to fumble your own way through the college search process recently (as a student or as a parent), you might be tempted to discount stories of students graduating with crazy-high student debt as silly financial decisions made by naive folks. After all (you might ask), how could someone come out of college with such massive debt when there are plenty of less expensive schools?

Although we can’t presume to know why some people do what they do, we can take the publicly available college pricing data and see if it’s plausible that someone could make rational financial decisions using the available information and still end up paying more than they should–or could–have paid.

So first, let’s outline how the college search process plays out in most cases.

1. You know that you want to go to college.
2. You know that you only have so much money to pay for college.
3. You have access to some information, but you certainly aren’t an expert on college admissions.
4. You assume that similar schools give similarly-sized scholarships to similar types of students and therefore assume that the sticker price is an appropriate gauge of which schools will be more and less expensive for you.
5. You don’t have the time or the money to apply to every possible college or university, so you narrow your choices to a set of finalists and (see bullet point #4) your educated guess about price is one of the factors you use to narrow your list.
6. You are accepted to some of the schools to which you applied, and you now assume that your choices are limited to the schools that accepted you.

Then let’s take a hypothetical individual; let’s say that someone wants to attend a challenging college or university in Boston (you can run this same scenario in any region of the country and get similar results).  I’ve picked three well-known institutions that would be a reasonable fit: Boston College, Boston University, and Northeastern University.  Let’s posit that our hypothetical student is typical academically for the kind of student that is accepted and enrolls at each of these institutions.  In other words, she has a very high GPA and a composite SAT in the low to mid 1400s.  As a result, let’s assume that she will be accepted and offered a financial aid package of scholarships and grants that end up charging her the average actual price.  We will have to make do with the most recent pricing data available – prices paid by students entering in the fall of 2017 (yes, the time lag in current available data is another problem, but one we won’t be able to tackle that fully today).  And let’s posit that, like most students, price matters a lot and she (and likely her parents as well) will be borrowing to pay for college.

The Department of Education collects pricing information from all colleges, and I’ve pulled a few key data points from the Integrated Post-secondary Education Data System (IPEDS).  Schools must report a “total cost of attendance,” which include the listed tuition, fees, room and board, and an estimate of books, travel, and other necessary expenses.  Schools must also report the average actual price that students pay, calculated by subtracting the average amount of federal, state, and institutional grants and scholarships awarded from the the total cost of attendance.  Finally, colleges must report the average actual prices paid across five different income categories: families making between 0 and 30,000 dollars per year, between 30,000 and 48,000 dollars per year, between 48,000 and 75,000 dollars per year, between 75,000 and 110,000 dollars per year, and above 110,000 dollars per year.  Have a look at the price tags below.

Let’s look at these prices in the order in which they would be revealed.  If our hypothetical student uses the sticker price as an indicator of which institution will end of up being the least expensive (a reasonable assumption), she would lean toward Northeastern, since their sticker price is the lowest of the three.  If our student is like many who don’t have a blank check to spend on college applications, she might only apply to one or two of the three schools, but probably not all three.  So rational decision-making would likely lead our bright young mind to apply to Northeastern and either Boston University or (although slightly less likely) Boston College.

So what happens when she gets accepted and sees the financial aid packages she is offered?  Unlike the sticker prices, we can see that the range of most to least expensive institutions is reversed. Although Boston College and Boston University were about $3,000 more than Northeastern, when financial aid awards arrive Northeastern is almost $8,000 more expensive than Boston College and just over $5,000 more expensive than Boston University.  What’s more, if you look at the differences in average actual prices across the different income brackets, Boston College would be the least expensive of the three institutions in every category except families making more than 110K/year, and Boston University jumps into the most expensive spot in four of the five income categories.

But the problem for our hypothetical young student is that she doesn’t have the benefit of this table.  We only know these prices because they have become public two years after the fact.  Moreover, since our student only applied to two of the three institutions, she has no idea what that third institution’s price would be.  If she applied to Northeastern and Boston College, fortune has smiled on her.  But if she applied to Northeastern and Boston University . . . ugh.  Imagine if her family’s income is less than 110K/year.  In any of these situations, we have a student who is going to pay substantially more than she could have paid, if she had only known.

You can find a combination of relatively similar institutions in every region or metropolitan area in the country where this same scenario plays out like clockwork.  Still wondering how it is that so many students end up with disproportionately high debt?

Mark Salisbury, Ph.D., spent 25 years in higher education as a coach, admissions counselor, instructor, and academic dean.  His research on college students and organizational design has been featured on NPR and WNYC and has been published in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed.  Dr. Salisbury launched TuitionFit (tuitionfit.org) in 2018 to empower the public to create college price transparency through crowdsourcing and sharing information.