(00:00.11)
Hello and welcome to season two of Headway, an official podcast of Head Royce School. In this episode, head of school Rachel E. Skiffer sits down with Whitney Soule, vice provost and dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn and previously at Bowdoin, Whitney has led initiatives to make the application process more humane, equitable and reflective of each student's individuality. Today, Rachel and Whitney talk about what she's learning from this work.

who tends to thrive in college once they arrive, and what high schools and families can do to help students get the most out of the college experience.

I am honored to be joined today by Whitney Soule, currently serving as Vice Provost and Dean of Admissions at Penn. Welcome, Whitney. So Whitney has been a national voice for reimagining how colleges get to know students, not just through numbers or resumes, but through their authentic stories, their character, and their potential.

Thank you so much for having me.

(00:59.586)
So at Penn, you've introduced thoughtful human-centered changes, like the Thank You Note essay. What inspired those shifts, and what have you learned about students when they're given more authentic ways to represent themselves? And what is that Thank You Note essay?

I will describe the Thank You Note essay. It is one of my favorite things that I've ever been part of in more than 30 years of college admission work. Before I describe the Thank You Note prompt, I just want to talk a little bit about the work we do in designing questions in the first place. I think somebody in my role overseeing a evaluative process for college admission, we really own a responsibility to annually look at what is the information that we need to know to be able to select students who are

going to both enjoy the experience of being at Penn, are ready to take on the experience, and also will contribute to the learning of everybody around them. The questions that we ask and the way that we want to do this evaluation, we have to be able to have an evaluative system that is not overvaluing resource-dependent activity or experience. And so that feeds its way all the way from what are we asking, how are we asking it, and then

how are we evaluating the material that comes through? and using all of that as we go through selection of approval, right into the class. And so that responsibility lives with every piece of material that we're asking the student to submit. Does it do what we need it to do? Does it do it well enough for everybody for it to be a substantive component of the application, whether that's the role of testing or writing or recommendations or our

prompts. And so with that in mind, one of the things that is typical of college applications, and this is not wrong, but they're very self-centered. They're designed around a student using this platform to identify their strengths, their aspirations. We ask them questions to bring that stuff forward. So most of the answering is, have done this. I want to do this. I aspire to. I think I will contribute by.

(03:13.29)
And that's all good. That's what that's for. But also, we found ourselves in conversations around applicants trying to imagine what they would be like as a roommate or a lab partner or a friend or as a person who would pursue working on something with a faculty member. Those kinds of questions, you can start to get some information to help you answer them by looking at activities and how students are described.

But really at the heart of that, to be in a community, you have to be responsive to other people. Rather than trying to exclusively extrapolate this idea of how students might interact with others from questions we were asking, we were like, we're just going to ask a question. And it was intended to be a gratitude prompt where we were going to ask students to share something for which they were grateful in a short answer.

One of the many beautiful things about working for the University of Pennsylvania is I get to work with some amazing people, including Angela Duckworth and Adam Graham. And I was in a conversation with both of them in a phone call about something else. And I shared with them that we were planning to put this gratitude prompt in. We were having trouble landing on exactly how we wanted to ask it. Could I run it? Could I read it to them? Which I did. And they said, both said, I think you should make this a thank you note.

Is there science behind putting words to saying thank you that is different than being grateful for? Actually directing thank you to a person and writing it to that and expressing it that way for the science as it makes you feel good. So we were like, great, let's do that in a process where students are super stressed and we're going to ask them for this information. Let's do it in a way that makes them feel better. So that's the prompt to.

Please write a short thank you note to someone for whom you're grateful that you've not yet thanked. And if possible, share your thank you note. It was a way for students to provide information that they could notice and respond to positive influence of other people. And it's information. It's not competitive. You can't be a better thanker than other people. We've had students advise to use the note to thank somebody so that you can bring it back to.

(05:34.336)
how that person helped you with your achievement. And we're like, no, that's actually not what that's for. This is de-centering yourself. But it was really beautiful. In the first year that we did it, we're about 60,000 applicants, and everybody has to do it to apply. It's required. And it's just wonderful insight into what students think about and notice. And then also 60,000 thank you notes went out into the world from teenagers. And you think about that.

year over year now, how many thank you notes have been written and shared. And important enough that students wrote and thanked us for having asked them to do it. Teachers wrote and thanked us because they'd seen it and saw what their students were writing and then they some incorporated something like that into their classrooms. So it had a much bigger effect than what we were intending. But the purpose of that question, like I said, was to

to allow students to show us they could accept positive influence from other people, and at the same time to signal out into the world, this matters so much to Penn, you can't apply here without expressing it. It's not optional.

And I love the piece where it's actually a gift to them because they're actually going to feel better about it in the context of this larger process for Appliant College, which feels incredibly stressful, but I think it's actually a gift to the students.

(07:02.978)
When you are reading an application or people on your team and sort of thinking about not just achievement, but how can you get a sense of whether a student is really going to thrive in college? And there's so many different ways to do it. There are extroverted ways, introverted ways, but really kind of make the most of the opportunity versus just surviving it or treating it as another hoop that they have to jump.

to happiness, of Angela Duckworth.

I love the question and I also, I wish I could shout this from the rooftops every morning because there's so much influence on students now on how to apply, which turns itself into how they should be, which turns itself into here's what you have to do. And it's canceling a person's opportunity ever to just experience.

being motivated to pursue something out of internal curiosity, joy, chosen stress. And by that I mean like choosing to do something really difficult and knowing that it will be stressful because the student pursuing it feels a value in doing so and is applying their energy to pursue that thing. It's really challenging.

in our seats as evaluators because there's now so much interference in that natural process for a young person. So much advice that is telling students how to be, how to do a thing, that it actually becomes really unusual and important when we come across an application that really is the student expressing

(08:59.18)
this is what I do with my time. And here's why I do it. And here's what I want to do when I get to your school. And to your question about what's really important or what do we value, what's going to make a student successful? It's being able to connect information from one experience to another to be, whether that's academic or social or experiential in some way. And usually that all mixes together in one big mashup.

and that a student is able to organize their time and their energy around things that matter to them. And when you see that happening, so when we're reading, we're thinking about, you know, an academic assessment, there has to be a degree of content learned and skill to draw on that content for a student to be at a starting point for which they can be academically successful when they get to Penn. That's really important. But we're also looking at a student's ability to describe what we think of as purpose and contribution.

And there's no formula for that, but it is this idea of being able to organize your time and your energy around what matters, even if what matters has been assigned to you, right? This could be family responsibilities. This could be a commute to school. This could be a lot of things that you might not have chosen to put there, but they matter and you're able to prioritize them and you're able to prioritize your energy around things you care about.

including your energy around a course that might not be your favorite, but you know it's really important and you're able to apply yourself to it. Those are the skills that are going to help a student land in a college space where there's so much choice, so much opportunity, and not have to be led every step of the way to explore an experience because there's some evidence already at an age appropriate level of harnessing one's energy and interest in forward motion towards something.

you

(11:02.38)
I sometimes talk about what students want to do versus what they think they should do. Granted, there are graduation requirements. They're just things you have to learn to be a learned person. And every high school determines for itself the graduation requirements and the things they want everyone to have. But how have you seen, just given your career, an admission agency of students? Like, can you tell that there's a difference? You talked a little bit about outside interference.

And not that I want to give anyone like clues about this is how you should do your application. So it seems like no one is helping you, but is there like a general trend or a shift that you've seen around student agency?

I mean, I think a lot of student agency has been diminished over time. And this is not to say that students shouldn't respond to the advice and influence of people who are in a position to help them. I mean, we don't go through our lives alone. And back to the thank you note question, That the ability to recognize it and accept positive influence from other people is really, really important. So this is not a like white knuckle it on your own and don't let anybody interfere with what you're doing.

It requires the people in a student's life to allow them some agency space for the student to develop the confidence to take up that agency. And in the ideal, it's happening all the time. Like that growth is just succession, know, moment after moment, year after year as a student is growing and developing. What we see a lot is a lot of interference early on of

people who want the best for young people and see a path for them and adults who are themselves really influenced by what they hear out in the world about what matters and making that important in the life of a young person because they want to see the best outcome from that person. This is truly born out of love and care. But it does begin to overemphasize the opinion of many people who have no position in the students.

(13:10.55)
life and development. And then what happens from an evaluative side is we have a whole bunch of applications who've all followed some similar version of advice and have canceled their number one superpower, which is their own individualism. You know, I get asked all the time, what's going to set me apart? And you see all the influencing, here's the essay that got me admitted. And first of all, I'm like, you don't know if your essay got admitted. You don't know if we invented you in spite of your essay.

Right.

(13:40.332)
But the authenticity that you referenced right in the beginning and what we are looking for when we're reading for things like purpose and contribution is not perfection. We're looking for age appropriate ambition and motivation that is movable, right? You want a person to be able to follow interests. I think it's really unfair to place an expectation of passion.

on high school students, tell us about your passion. Some students might have that, right? Like they've been into astronomy since they were a little kid and that's what they're gonna do. And there are a lot of other students who don't know what that is yet, but they're really motivated to keep moving forward, keep learning, keep investigating. Those two things are equally important. It's that willingness to pursue what has your attention and to commit to it, even when it's challenging. This goes back to grit.

Right. know, it's like to persist. I think that it's important for those who have influence and impact on a young person's path toward college and through the college admission experience is to remember that we're expecting to read the work of a 17-year-old, not a middle-aged person who has their life figured out. It's not a deficit for a 17-year-old to show up with, here's what I know so far.

Right, and it is long 17 years. This is the wisdom I've gleaned.

I think the anxiety around, I get in? Can I get in where I want to get in? The idea that where you want to get in is an end all be all for the success of your life, I think is really damaging. What ends up happening is in admission processes where the evaluation is really comprehensive, often referred to as holistic, as ours is, there is no way for anybody who was not participating in the entire selection period

(15:40.416)
of that year, not just even on that case, but like all of the many complex things that go into figuring out, are we going to draw down from this many applications into a class and the conversations that happen to make, to get there, how a decision got made. And so it's really frustrating for the public because it remains a black box. And so to relieve the anxiety of what is going on, the public will take data points that they can find, often anecdotal, and tie them together to make sense.

and then influence young people to operate toward that. And it's so often so far away from what it is that we're trying to understand and establish that it's really counterproductive, unfortunately, for a student in an application.

(16:29.454)
Thinking about the other side of the application process and the student is at your university, what are they doing to make the most out of their undergraduate experience?

I've worked in a number of different schools and I think that there are some characteristics that matter everywhere. And then I think there's another element that schools have their own personality and energy. And so some of that of what's going to help a student be successful is matching that natural kind of energy. And first of all, there's not only one school that is a perfect, well, first of there's no.

perfect match, but there isn't only one school that's close enough. There are many. And it's so important for a student to understand and to reflect and have people reflect with them. Like, this is what I notice about you kind of conversation. The ways in which a student lights up with interest and where they most easily pursue things. Because the ability to respect that in yourself, to have some awareness of it,

And also some awareness of how you as a student work your way through things you do not want to have to do but are required. working through challenges and how have I managed these things before successfully. The students who have some grasp of that, of sort of being able to step out of themselves and see that in themselves are going to have an easier time working their way through figuring out what to take up from all the possibilities that are in front of them.

And when I think about the personality of the school, what I was thinking of in that reference is, you you can be in a school where the engine feels really competitive and you have a lot of really motivated, ambitious students who naturally get energy. They'll work together and they'll collaborate and they see the value of the opportunity of that. But they also love the drive of competing and it feels exciting.

(18:38.008)
There are other students who can be equally motivated and as ambitious and interested in collaborating where that kind of competition drains them. And they would prefer to be in a place where the competition isn't the engine, it's the process of doing the work. Both are really valuable, but knowing that about yourself in some way will help move into a community where

You're not working against yourself all the time to try to make the environment work for you or get out of the environment what you want it to be.

It sounds psychically draining to show up to a place that isn't a good fit for who you are as person. so I'm going to give a shout out to our college counseling office because I know they do a really good job of having students spend a lot of time doing reflection on who they are, what interests them, what gives them energy, what drains their energy, which is so helpful because we think about American kids. There may be a handful of colleges they hear about through TV shows and movies when they're young or

If their parents went to college, they know about that. But there so many institutions that are incredible. But it sounds like that thriving piece, part of that is based on doing the front work of kids really thinking about researching colleges and universities and thinking about, does this feel like I could go there and enjoy myself versus this is the list that my uncle drew up when we were all 10?

Right. And I think that the list of schools that matter, matter to whom, right? But nevertheless, there's a fairly short list of schools that get the attention relative to the thousands of colleges and universities that are in the United States. And when I hear students applying to all of the Ivy Leagues, we're really different schools. And so it's unlikely, boots on the ground, that a student would equally appreciate the experience on

 20:42.286)
each of the eight campuses, right? And yet that idea that the Ivy League itself is an experience that must be achieved rather than I have to live at this school and do the work and make the friends and have the experiences. I actually have to live it out for four years. And am I going to like it? Is really, really important. Whether it is an Ivy League school that

A lot of people have heard of before or a school that you might not have heard of or your family hasn't heard of, but actually a lot of people have gone there and go there and it could be a great place. at the end of the day, enjoying your education and feeling connected to it is the thing that's going to propel you forward.

 (21:34.926)
Can we talk a little bit about artificial intelligence? Sure. lot of schools are talking about it. What is great about it? What might be horrible about it? There's a whole environmental conversation. think English and history teachers have lots of thoughts on it. But have you seen an impact in the admissions world? Does your office use it in a way that benefits you? Or what impact might it have on college admissions?

this upcoming generation of students.

think the conversation around AI is an important one that sort of has to be constant because I think both the evolution of opportunity and the interference of AI is moving so quickly that we could have this conversation six months from now and I might have it in the next year. I think as an opportunity area for AI for students who are applying to college, on the most basic level, introduced

a consult opportunity for students who don't have a lot of support in the college process that many other students have had all along through their schools, their parents, all kinds of places where there's feedback on writing and an opportunity to take your ideas and have somebody help you polish it. All of a sudden there was a free tool that offered that opportunity to students who otherwise didn't have it. And I think that's really...

valuable and important. And I think there's an integrity question that lives within the college admission space, broadly speaking, and also applies to AI and the use of it, which is we expect, and students have to sign an attestation when they submit their application, that what they say they've done, they have actually done. It is what they said it is. Their participation in it reflects what their participation actually was.

(23:31.954)
And so that it's honest and true and it's their own work in the same way that a student who, whose English class might spend the first three weeks on college essays, that's their work. Like they get to call that their work, even though they had help and they probably did peer review and they might've had a teacher helping. That doesn't make it not their work, but having somebody else write your essay or somebody else edit your essay so completely that it's very much not you anymore. That's not really your work, even if it was originally your idea.

And that whole scale in between of I did this entirely by myself, nobody's ever seen it, to I've had a lot of people look at it, to someone else wrote this. You gotta find your place on there of what you feel you can sign your name to that is true. Quite obviously, having somebody else write your essay or write most of it is not your work. But there is support out there that I think students can accept where they still believe the work that they're turning in is theirs.

It truly reflects their thoughts, their effort in writing, their effort in organizing, and the activities and academic work that they've done. And I think AI fits in that same territory. If you're using AI, you should be able to stand by your word that what you're turning in was yours. And there's a lot of ways to use AI that would violate that. Is AI detectable? It's meant to not be detectable. And it's getting so sophisticated that I'm sure we see AI that we don't recognize. There's AI that's not hard.

a spot and that doesn't make it wrong. But sometimes it's like a regression to the mean, right? It's like getting all this information out there and sort of bringing it to here's the good way to do this, which goes back to where we were in the beginning of this conversation, which there's so much influence of how to do the thing that many applications start becoming very much alike instead of taking advantage of the uniqueness of individuality. And if you're not inserting

very much your individuality and what you're putting into AI. It's going to give you what it gives everybody else asking the question of what's a good essay for Penn, right?

(25:44.034)
in my college admissions days thinking about the theme of an essay and you can see someone thinking like, this is incredibly original and you might know the book of killer essays that a student got it from and then you're seeing hundreds and hundreds as an individual reader. But it goes back to the argument of support has always been there, some tools that are more democratic, but it's really up to individual students.

and just thinking about their integrity and the help that they get. But now here's a way for more students to be able to get that support that they may not get at school or at home.

I don't use AI a lot. used it once to make remarks I had to make shorter. And it gave me something to react to. But I was on a panel somewhere, and an adult was saying that it's been really useful for students to use ChatGBT to give them college advice because there's so much advice out there. And I was like, no, no, no, I do not think that's where a ChatGBT can help you because there's so much wrong information out there.

And it gets the same amount of real estate, you know, word-wise as good information. And AI is going to capture all of it and synthesize it and bring it back to you. And you don't know how much of what was found is even real or legitimate. And yet it's getting fed to you as this is real information. And I think it could be really misleading. So.

(27:19.692)
I know on this side of COVID, there are renewed conversations around standardized testing. I know that you worked at an institution that was test optional. What can you say to the young people about standardized testing, how schools use it well, maybe how others don't, and what a healthy attitude students could take?

I think, I will say that I think testing has become one of the most confusing conversations for higher ed since COVID, because prior to COVID, there were schools that were requiring testing and schools that weren't. And those that required it were many, many more than those that did not. And so for schools that were deciding to make testing optional, they had a very specific reason for doing so and could explain it and articulate, here's what

testing means in our process and here's how you can decide whether or not to send your testing. And to your point prior to working at Penn, I was the Dean of Admission and Financial Aid at Bowdoin College, which was the first school in the United States to become test optional in 1969. So I was asked many, many times while I worked for that school, what does it mean and what do you think about testing? And I never offered a position in that role or in any position I've ever had.

around whether the use of testing is good or bad. But I would say where I started in this podcast is we own the responsibility to know if the material we're requiring or asking for serves the purpose for which we're asking it, and we need to keep reviewing it. And if you decide that the role of testing is not a necessary component and that you can do the work you need to do without it, and you make it optional, then you explain to students how you can do that.

and that the work can proceed without them being disadvantaged, without having testing there, right? That same thing, if you were gonna require only one essay, I mean, only like one recommendation instead of three, like you'd have to explain why you're making this change and how it fits into your evaluative process. When COVID happened, as a practical matter, most schools had to become test optional. You were not gonna get tests from the students and it was a requirement that just couldn't be.

(29:36.832)
Since schools have made different choices around whether to take testing back and if they bring a requirement back, should it look different than the requirement that we had before? And so now there's so many different versions of the role of testing out there that it is much more complicated space to consider. And I think I know that it adds a degree of stress. I would also offer in this space to look to the school's policy for guidance on

How much does this matter? What are they offering to help me figure out if it's optional, whether I should or should not send my testing? And believe what they say because as schools have reverted to testing, gone back to having some sort of testing requirements as Penn did, we were test optional through last year and have a testing requirement this year, which is just the ACT or the SAT. And if you do not have results, you can have a test waiver. It's that straightforward. And there are many reasons for not being able to have results.

You can't afford the test. You can't access a testing site. You had one shot at testing and that testing site got canceled. You the test results got canceled. You could be in an area where there's a natural disaster and you're not getting testing. It's not a thing that's happening. I mean, there's so many reasons that we have students who are just not able to get tests and we don't want them to be canceled out. And so this applies to you and you don't have a test result. Our process works, but it is more complicated because it's not straightforward.

process anymore. And it is, it can even be school dependent where a student has their test and at this school that's optional, they may choose to send it, but at this school that's optional, they may not. And this is where your college counseling office can really, you know, help students discern situationally how they want to present themselves in the way that the school says that they'll be doing evaluation.

 (31:30.582)
You have been on the other side of the college admissions process as a parent. What surprised you the most, given everything you do know from the admissions side, that was still something you had to work through as a parent? And what advice can you give parents of our juniors and seniors?

One of the things that I thought I would be better at that I was not better at even in the least little bit was separating myself from my child's process. And I really thought that I would be cool about it given all the talking I do about the role of a parent. And then I was a parent with a child going through

the college process and I was very anxious about it. You know, want what your children want and you don't want them to be hurt. And you see them living out their lives doing college, the college application process like they do everything else. And you're like, no, no, no, no. This is the time you have to get organized, but they're not gonna become different people all of a sudden because it's a college admission process. And what I wish I had...

had a better view on for myself at the time, even though I could articulate it in doing my work, but actually living it as a parent. And whether it was procrastination or it was not liking a school that I thought would be such a great school and wanting them to look further and then didn't really want to. And I really needed to step back from that is that the more I allowed the should conversation in my mind.

And whenever I let that out of my mouth, I was interfering with the one place that my child had to be safe and express whatever they were thinking about in applying to college. Cause I had made it a shed space instead of a landing space. I hope I was better equipped for that on the second, second pass to her child number two.

 (33:44.32)
All this to say my first child going through the process did not want me involved at all, which I also was not expecting because I was like, I'm a great resource for people. But I was not according to that child. I watched her accept help from other people. you know, I wanted it to be me, but I also took comfort in that she did allow help from other adults. And also I think it was important for me

In your house.

(34:13.386)
one was just parenting generally, but like my children are really different people. And so they were approaching college in really different ways and had their own desires and anxieties around different things. And so really trying to remember this is this, this child is being very much themselves going through this. And so is this one and very different, sort of in a very different way of managing the experience emotionally and practice.

So what would be my advice? My advice would be be the landing place instead of another should place.

(34:53.678)
So you've read tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of applications in your career. What moves you? Or what continues to surprise you in a beautiful way when you're reading an application from a 17-year-old sort of bearing with themselves?

Things that are well written are easy to connect to. But truly, like the thing that strikes us as readers, when I think about, like you said, I've been reading applications for 34 years, and I don't even know how many thousands, are there ones where the student conveyed, I wouldn't even call it joy necessarily, but you could feel the connection of the student saying, here I am, right? And providing examples.

that reflected that and it makes it so personal. It doesn't have to be dramatic or highly emotional. I'm even just thinking of a student who wrote an essay about a funny phrase that developed in her family because of this incident in the grocery store, right? It was like this silly thing, the ability to use that as an anchor to describe family and to describe

what was meaningful to her about her family and the expected loss of some connection on the way to college. Like I said, it wasn't drama. It was just a way of seeing how this young person was connected to family, all of them connected around this one silly thing. And then her ability to describe it as an example of love and

connection and then also to sort of imagine love and connection in a different state of being. That's really special. And that's not an achievement essay. That's just a real, that's a real essay.

(36:55.886)
Thank you so much for this conversation. Thank you for your time. I know it is the season, so I appreciate it.

I will say though that I absolutely love every opportunity that I'm given. So thank you for providing this to talk about what we care about and how we work through reading material. Because if there's any mark I can make from my role as a Dean to remind students that the admission process isn't judging you on the value of who you are and whether you're admitted or not.

is a function of what I'm responsible for delivering to the university at the end of a process. And it's a discipline of limits. And that all of the things that a student shares and all that they see in themselves and all that they hope for, all of that stays intact. Nothing changes about that student, even if they're not admitted. And if they are admitted, it doesn't make them more special of a person than someone who's not. It means they have this great opportunity.

to take what they showed us and explore it in our school if they decide to come. I will take every opportunity I can to try to state that in as many ways as necessary to try to remind students that this is one part of a long life and you're allowed to be young and developing and present yourself that way.

Thank you for joining us for this episode of Headway. To follow our progress and learn more about our strategic direction, please visit headway.org and be sure to subscribe to Headway wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss what's ahead. Until next time, thanks for listening.