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 Julia Pasztor is the oldest of four children and the first in the
family to go away to college. She has urged her younger brothers to
start thinking about college their first year of high school and to
have a short list of potential schools by the end of their sophomore
year. Photo by Matt Hagen.
Fiker is one of the lucky counselors. Because of budget
constraints, many of our state’s public high schools don’t have
full-time college and career counselors. And for many advisors and
counselors, issues of health, pregnancy, and poverty take priority
over finding a college.
As high school counselors are becoming less involved in college
choices, recruiters have stepped forward, taking on the tasks of
advising and essay reading. “Now it’s almost a completely different
job,” says Kris Baier.
Besides having six coworkers west of the Cascades, Baier is
crossing paths with recruiters from around the country who, like
him, are haunting the halls of the local high schools. They’re all
hunting for the same thing—students who are ready for college and
who have the grades, abilities, and scores, but who might not be
thinking of their schools.
To stay ahead, WSU’s counselors go beyond the high school halls.
Kris reviews senior projects for the Everett School District. He
volunteers as a chaperone at events for top high school students.
And he and his colleagues live in the communities they cover. One
of Kris’s colleagues, Melissa Uyesugi, who manages the Asian
American and Pacific Islander outreach, serves on the board of the
SafeFutures Youth Center in south Seattle. They’re always looking
for ways to work into their communities and make connections with
high school students and their families, she says.
One sure hit has been sending current WSU students to their home
high schools to talk about WSU. Another is putting WSU recruiters
in classrooms to offer advice on how to write a college essay.
“It’s much more than saying ‘Here’s the school,’” says Baier.
“Pullman is about relationship building.”
Sometimes the relationships are already there. Steve Cotterill,
director for career and technical education at Snohomish High
School, has an office nearly dedicated to WSU. Three of the four
walls are covered with t-shirts, team posters, flags, signs, and
pompoms. “I’m always collecting,” says the 1977 WSU graduate. When
students wander in to look at the booty, “we have peanuts and we
talk about college,” says Cotterill.
The advisor tells them it’s a completely different world from
when he finished high school. “I probably would have stopped at
graduation if it wasn’t for a teacher enrolling me into college,”
he says. “He saved my life for sure.” Now he sees students who get
regular come-to-college e-mails and application packets, whose
parents are coaching them through their paperwork and flying them
around the country to see campuses, who are applying not to just
four or five schools, but may be running up applications to 10 or
more. In the past, students would work for weeks on applications;
now they can apply online in an evening.
Those are the students who are expected to apply. Another
segment of Washington’s high school students, though, don’t have
parents who attended college and may not have imagined themselves
at a university. WSU is now struggling to reach those students and
help them understand what it takes to be prepared for college.
Two years ago, at a WSU African American Alumni Alliance
meeting, a retired Seattle high school principal named Robert Gary
offered to round up local African American high school students and
bring them across the Cascades. The University wasted no time
taking him up on his offer. Last April, Gary brought 38 students
via a chartered motor coach to the University’s Spring Preview. The
new program allows potential WSU students to attend classes, live
on campus, and rub shoulders with future classmates. Abi Bamidele,
a junior at Thomas Jefferson High School in Auburn, was seatmates
on the bus with Hanna Halwas from Roosevelt High School in Seattle.
Once they got to Pullman, they were dazzled by the hundreds of
students and chaperones packed into the large CUB ballroom. They
listened intently as a student speaker extolled the beauty of the
600-acre campus, the success of the Smith Center for Undergraduate
Education, the fancy new student recreation center, and life in
Pullman with academics attached.
Then came the tours. Hanna and Abi headed to classrooms, while
others adventured through laboratories and the veterinary hospital.
One group had to stop for a Dalmatian in slippers in the hospital
hallway. Justin John, a senior at Burlington-Edison, was agog. His
father, Greg, was too. “The school is well rated, well ranked,” he
says, adding that it seems like a good fit for John.
“Well-ranked.” That’s something University administrators love
to hear. Rankings play an important part in recruitment efforts.
WSU, like most of its peers, is tethered to the U.S. News and
World Report rankings, an annual report established in 1983. A
higher score in the rankings means an increase in applications for
the coming year. “How can you not pay attention to that?” says Mary
Gresch, WSU’s associate vice president for strategic communication
and marketing.
Critics say that list and many of the other published ranking
systems are homogenizing higher education. Hundreds of major
colleges and universities are scrambling to meet often brief and
superficial criteria in hopes of moving up closer to Harvard on the
list. In doing so, they’re all focusing on the same things:
reputation, graduation rates, and alumni giving, which are
important to the U.S. News and World Report’s ideals, but
don’t fully reflect the quality of the education a student might
receive.
Many schools, including WSU, are turning to paid consultants,
like Noel-Levitz, for help improving student enrollments and
increasing application numbers, as well as the GPAs, of applicants.
That too may have a homogenizing effect, at least in the ways the
schools are reaching out to future students, admits Vicki
McCracken, who heads WSU’s enrollment management program. The trick
is to use the University’s niche assets, like its research
programs, to attract the best students for whom WSU is the best
fit, she says.
What most rankings don’t measure and the consultants don’t coach
is the student experience. That’s where the National Survey of
Student Engagement (Nessie) comes in. WSU, along with seven other
Washington schools, participates. Unlike the U.S. News
rankings, this survey focuses on the students. It asks about course
work, advising, and faculty contact, to provide a picture of what
the student is getting out of the school. Unfortunately, most
schools that participate in the Nessie don’t make their results
public.
The Nessie results for WSU can be easily found in an independent
consultant’s report on the University’s Website. In WSU’s most
recent Nessie survey, seniors described a favorable experience on
par with their peers around the country, but first-year students
aren’t reporting the same amount of faculty contact and supportive
campus environment described at other schools. There is also a high
level of attrition at the end of the sophomore year, the report
notes.
The University is taking steps to change the early undergraduate
experience, says Gresch. New tools like Freshman Focus, a
residence-hall-based program that places students with similar
interests in the same housing and classes, will create a supportive
environment that will help the students adapt to the rigors of
college and living away from home, she says. The University also
has a reputation for involving undergraduates in research,
something many students say they’re looking for when they choose
WSU.
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