Johnny Rastello: The Future of College Admissions

Hey, it's Nick. This episode is on the future of college admissions. I'm with Johnny Rastello, the director of college counseling and dean of the 12th grade at Tarbut Vitora Community Day School. A top tier independent high school in Newport Beach, California. Johnny is an expert in college admissions. He has worked in higher education for a decade and a half at public and private high schools, as well as in admissions at Chapman University. In this episode, we discuss the future of college admissions, how artificial intelligence is upending the college essay, the ongoing college admissions arms race, and what families can do to change the narrative to provide a healthier environment for all students going forward.

Enjoy. What gets you excited about your job? What gets you out of bed in the morning? What are you pumped about with getting to do what you do? It's the students. As you begin to just genuinely ask questions about what makes someone tick and you begin to see like how activities they pursue or leadership they take on or success in a classroom, it really starts taking shape. It feels so good to empower someone to do something that you genuinely feel like they were pre-programmed. Destin, however you want to quantify that, to do that. It gives me hope in the future when there's not a lot of outlets independent of that to truly find hope in tomorrow.

Love that. It really is a form of for lack of a better phrase, life coaching. What is it you want to do with your life? Where do you want to go? What kind of person do you want to become and helping guide them towards these institutions that can help make that a reality? Yeah, absolutely. The institution, as we know, is the launching pad. It's just the starting point. There's an element of life coaching to it. To me, it's about possibility and about being excited about tomorrow and walking away being like, I don't know what admissions to pen means for you, but I know that you're passionate about computer science.

I know you're compassionate about artificial intelligence, and I'm very excited to see for years so now what you're doing with those passions. I like your mindset with the way you're talking about technology because so much of what we get on social media and especially through various news outlets is so negative. I do think it infects people with a negative outlook about the future. To approach what you do with kids in the terms of, well, you're all going to be involved with technology somehow and there are endless possibilities with it. All of us are connected to all the other billions of people on the planet now.

There's so many incredible opportunities. It's one of those things where you need to be hopeful and excited about it and embrace it whether you're a parent or whether you're an educator if you're working with youth because that's the world that they live with then. Speaking of technology, let's get into the latest development of technology, which is artificial intelligence and how that will affect the college essay because, hey, I can write it for you now and I am of the belief admissions officers will not be able to tell the difference because for anybody who hasn't messed with it before, I mean, you can give it specific commands to sound like a bright 17 year old and then ask it specifically to write a college essay about the specific interests that you have and your background story and in a matter of minutes, compiles all that information and spit something out.

If you upgrade to the latest version of chat GPT, you can actually train the AI with your own writing samples so that it's really in your voice. What's it going to do to the college essay? Will it be irrelevant? There's a lot of fear around it. You know, so much of holistic college admissions is this student the right fit for our university and so a lot of emphasis is placed on the supplemental questions and on the personal statement, it's the common app or for personal insight questions if it's the UC application and so I think it definitely leads to a lot of fear that like, are we getting a real understanding of what is the student going to contribute to our campus?

Is the student really a good fit for our campus? Admissions offices simply because of the volume of applications they're now receiving are probably not going to have AI detectors built in that are going to or at least not in year one or year two that are built in to be like, do we detect AI writing with this? I envision at some point, similar to the way that high school English teachers or college professors in literature English, they will have AI detectors built in to admissions experiences just to double check, triple check that this is the student's authentic voice. I envision that that will be procedural safeguard that's eventually built into this experience but in the in between, it's going to be like, well, how do we know?

And so I don't have a true like, oh yeah, you're gonna know but I also think in a weird sort of way, it's a good thing and the reason being is this process already is subjective, this process is already somewhat flawed and you know, like we saw it with the college admissions scandal and how people were able to take advantage of testing and now all these schools are going test optional and how much is testing factored into the admissions process. Well, now they're going to have to do that with essays. And so where I think this process is inherently going to be good thing is to a certain extent, we needed to blow up the admissions process to basically get to a point where it's like UCLA can't just continue to get 150 than 160, 175,000 and their admit rate can't just go 8.6% to 7.5% to 5.7% because at a certain point, you're just like, well, what's the point of all of this?

What's the point of getting 4.7 GPA, black belt in karate, an Eagle Scout, ASB president, if at the end of the day, I do all of that and I'm still not getting in because of your application volume and I'm just not meeting whatever the subjective holistic admissions process is. So there's a part of me that is like, well, good. We kind of need to blow the system up to reinvent how kids are evaluated and how they're seen as a human being. Well, and along those lines, I mean, I do like the idea of there being an equalizer for the essays because I have in my line of work read a lot about it and the quality of essays as judged by admissions officers correlates higher with income than do grades or standardized test scores.

And so it is like this undercover piece of the admissions puzzle that is biased towards the upper end of the socioeconomic scale without anybody really being aware of it. And the issue with essays as opposed to testing is that everybody says that they can tell if an essay wasn't written by a student, but there isn't a falsifiable test on that, right? Because you don't know the ones that snuck past you. There are some adults that are actually really talented at sounding like a bright 17 year old, and people hire them to write their essays for them. And it's not ethical at all, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen.

And that kids who are honest and moving through this process the right way aren't disadvantaged as a result of that. And I do like this idea that now that this is accessible to anybody, well, anybody could have a I really help their college essay and then do what they need to do to customize it and adjust it and make it their own. Yeah. And so maybe it's not all bad. And think about like when we were talking about students and hopefulness and like where tech can be for years from now, where I'm hopeful is like, what does college admissions looks like? Like four years from now, because we need to reinvent it.

Like it can't just keep being what it is, because it doesn't really seem to be working. There aren't brand new schools that exist. Like the IVs have remained the IVs for a while now. Stanford has remained under 5% acceptance rate for a while now. USC is now below 10%. UCLA is 8.6%. So now if you can't get into an IV, now you're looking at these other schools that per US news will or it's would be like top 25 school in the country. And now those admissions standards are now getting higher and it's harder to get into. And so it's literally the slow burn of we're getting to a point where like all the same kids are only applying to the same 25 schools.

And it's fairly identical what that holistic process looks like at most of those schools, which is personal statement, supplemental essay testing. If you're testing is within that school's middle 50th percentile. Otherwise you can apply test optional. It's submitting a transcript, having a letter of recommendation. And frankly, because a lot of these kids have been coached up, like they're not asking teachers that are going to write them a poor letter of recommendation. They're going to write a positive supportive letter of recommendation. So at the end of the day, these colleges have 80,000 applications and they easily could admit 75,000 of them.

And instead they're emitting 10% of those kiddos. And so that's where the subjectivity of it is. It's like, well, what makes kid one more valuable than two, four, five, six. And so I think for me, where I get excited is like, okay, well, let's look at how writing is evaluated in this process. And let's figure out if there's a better way to evaluate candidacy or qualifications for students at these incredible institutions. Like the fact that the rankings are what they are, the fact that the selectivity is what it is, does not negate that UCLA is still an amazing place to go to school. And it isn't necessarily not shaping incredible young people.

But I will still say that the process is flawed. Like, you can't tell me that a public institution with an 8.6 acceptance rate is a good thing for society. And so I hope that like they would even say like, yeah, there's things we could do to potentially make things better for the student. Yeah, I've had this discussion with so many different people that work in admissions in very selective colleges. And I feel like we always come back to the same thing, which is that they're doing as much as they can to make it fair and transparent. And yet the real issue is having at least a 10 to one ratio of qualified students for open spots at all of these schools.

And it seems like the this may not be practical, but that the solution would be to have everyone have a wider idea in their mind of what success in the admissions process looks like. Because there are hundreds and hundreds of excellent colleges that most people have never heard of, and they never end up applying to them, unless they have guidance from somebody like yourself who says, Hey, you may not have ever heard of Lewis and Clark University. Yeah, fill in the blank, excellent, small, little college that does an amazing job educating students that doesn't have a huge brand name. And it feels like that would be the solution.

And then there wouldn't be so much pressure on kids to just like you said, have the black belt and karate and be an Eagle Scout and get perfect grades and the perfect scores on standardized tests and of course have perfect hair all along the way. I mean, I don't think kids that feel pressure to be perfect is a healthy environment for any young person. Definitely not. The way I see it is this. Yes, some of it is coaching and educating students on amazing institutions independent of those that carry the brand name. And then there's also the reality out there, which is the information, whether it's your social media feed, whether it's news sources, like they're only going to report on the brand names.

And if you're someone that's an immigrant to this country, like you may only know the brand names. So where AI to me is like an interesting thing is, well, it's if a student utilized AI, well, it takes less of a burden on them crafting an essay that they could spend you were talking about being an Eagle Scout or a black belt, like it takes less of the burden off. Now there's a moral situation to that that like should the student really go to AI to draft their essay and the answer is like, no, but then in the same sense, it's like, well, the AI kind of takes pressure off, right? So then it's like, they can submit this essay that basically does everything they needed to do in two seconds.

And then it's up to the colleges to figure it out. So for the record, I'm just going to squeeze this in because you and I discussed this before we started recording. Both of us feel strongly that AI should not replace all writing in school. People do need to learn how to write and how to write. Well, those models were trained off of human beings that have been writing for the last 100 years. And we need to continue to create new content. And the only way to do that is to really know how to write and learn those skills yourself. We need kids who are critical thinkers. The only way you're going to get kids who are critical thinkers is to start getting them to read, start getting them to engage in debates, start getting them to write, start getting them into experiences where they can philosophically disagree with someone and not let it be a debilitating issue.

You go on any college campus and mental health and anxiety isn't all time high. And so what I'm really trying to get at here is it's really complicated. Like AI is not the solution to minimizing anxiety with teens. And as an educator, I cannot say I am not apprehensive or terrified of what chat GPT means to the college essay because yeah, every time I read a kid's essay, I don't have an AI detector and I'm going to have to ask myself like, do I feel like I'm reading this kid's authentic voice? So there's that element. But where I'm saying like, it's potentially a good thing is like, we kind of have to implode it.

Because when I start talking to individuals that work on higher education campuses, like they're literally changing their programming to focus on wellness initiatives and mental health initiatives because these students suffer so much from anxiety now and are so crippled with like debilitating fear of not being perfect, which is kind of what you're getting at that they're not critical thinkers anymore. They're not freely engaging in practices to potentially fail, but to learn from those failures, right? And that's the beauty of college is you learn through trial and error. That's a beauty of a high school and your adolescence and your youth.

And so blow it up, blow it up. So there's an opportunity for failure again, because right now with a school with a 3% acceptance rate, there's no opportunity for failure. The high school admissions counselor at a very elite private prep school said a parent came in and said, well, we want to apply to Stanford. He has done extremely well. He's in the top end of the class at a very rigorous high school. And he said, yeah, the issue is that he has a couple of B pluses and a couple of A minuses from his freshman year. And he said, I don't care that he has those grades. But if you were Stanford looking at the regular admissions and you go, well, we're trying to be fair about this.

And I've got this kid over here who doesn't have any A minuses. He doesn't have any B pluses. And this kid who does in the current system, the way that it's built, it seems more fair to take the kid who had the straight A's. But the knock on effect of that is that you've got to have a kid performing in his absolute best when he or she is 13, 14 years old and has no idea who they are and shouldn't have that type of pressure on them. The one solution I have heard, the only one I've ever heard that could actually be put into practice came from Alcom Gladwell, who is a pretty smart guy. I think we can all agree on that.

I enjoy his writing. And he said that he would like to see all of higher education above a certain threshold. Let's say you've got to hit certain marks, but it would be a reasonable GPA that you have to hit a 3.5, let's say, sure. And you could still have a standardized test, but you had to hit a reasonable mark. I'm going to pull one out of the air, let's say 1,300 on the SAT. And from there, you could apply to any college you want in the country, but it would be a lottery system once you're above these certain thresholds. There's no additional benefit from having a 4.8 versus the 4.0 versus the 3.7 or wherever you put that cut off.

And same thing on the standardized tests. And then same thing on the extracurriculars. In fact, they wouldn't play into it at all. And you would have students then that need to perform well still. But the knock on effects would be, well, okay, I just have to hit the certain areas and beyond that. It's all down to luck. And then I don't have to crush myself in order to pretend to be perfect when I apply to college. Because I think the mental health crisis that's going on in college is a lot of it stems from what's happening when students are much younger. They're just carrying it forward in college.

Yeah, COVID exasperated it, right? Sure. Yeah. And so I think that 100% you are right on. And I would say that what Malcolm Blyall was suggesting is a great suggestion. And I always tell students trust the process, be thoughtful. If you're being authentic to who you are, this process will work itself out. And there's a certain still an element of luck to it. Right. And so, and I think that that's kind of what Malcolm Blyall is getting at, which is like cast your net within a reasonable means. If you're thoughtful, like I'm going to apply to these five, these eight schools that are really realistic options.

And then see what doors open, right? What ends up happening is whether it's biases or influences from parents or whether it's biases or influences from media or from just sources or from relationships that the students have with others. Sometimes it's like they get fixated on the ideal and when they don't get what they want becomes debilitating. And personally, where I saw it was more so this year with my current seniors, where this year more than any previous year seemed like college admissions decisions really had a negative impact on how they viewed themselves. And within three weeks, they were fine.

But there was this window of time for two to three weeks, where it was scary as an educator, where I was like, I don't know what they're going to do with this sadness. I don't know what they're going to do with the fact that they did not get what they wanted. We have to do something about that. We have to develop the resiliency skills to have them except the fact that they're not going to always get what they want. They need to have a better understanding of the subjectivity of this process. So maybe that's education on our part. I do think the admissions offices need to rethink to a certain extent how they're evaluating candidates.

Maybe we adopt the UK philosophy, which is like, you only applied five, you cat. The common app allows you to apply to 20, but with the evolution of the coalition with the UC app with the Cal State app. It doesn't necessarily mean the students can't apply to 50 schools still. I saw an article and I think it was the LA Times on a student that had applied to something insane, like 127 schools. I don't know where a kid would find the time, but there is no cap right now. On some level, it's a logical response to the craziness of the current state of affairs. Yeah, absolutely. I definitely think that going back full circle to our AI conversation, AI is just throwing one more wrench into already a chaotic situation.

It's all screaming the same thing. What are we really wanting and our applicants? What are we really looking for in in candidacy? And like, how are we really evaluating if the students are good fit? And I do think that there is a need to kind of not implode or blow up the system. But I do think I would ideally, I would love to see the system blown up just because I think that like we need it. But in the same sense, I do think there's a need to kind of reevaluate. I don't think just going test blind is the solution. I don't think just eliminating race from the application is the solution to me. Those are band-aids to a larger issue, which is what we're getting at, which is our kids are really struggling with this desire to be perfect.

And it's getting increasingly harder to get into these brand name institutions. And these institutions aren't really like helping change the narrative when it comes to like mental health in the US anxiety and how to really shape and open opportunities for young people that like then instead of colleges spending so much time focusing on mental health resources, they're really able to have professors that just are able to build shape, use the students potential to really be the engines for change that we started this whole conversation with, which is why we have hope in this process too. So right?

Well, it's about what we want as a society from higher education in general, because now that I'm thinking about it, one thing that would radically change if we did move to a lottery system for admission to these schools and had a cap on the number of schools you could apply to is the incentives for those top-end universities would also change because they spend in ordinary amounts of money on marketing right now because they benefit monetarily from being as selective as possible. The donations go up, the research grants go up every time their selectivity goes down, right? We moved from 5.2 to 3.4% this year, and everybody thinks it means that much more and it's that much more valuable to go there.

It would realign incentives at universities to be about educating students and maybe they would even shrink their marketing departments. Because it is a little perverse that universities have marketing departments at all. They shouldn't be run like businesses. So Darren Finks, when I asked him about what the biggest change he had seen over the course of his career was that colleges didn't have marketing departments when he first started in this. That would have been a crazy idea when he first got into this line of work and moving back towards those first principles of universities, which is really about elevating students so that when they graduate they have skills and the tools to go make the world a more interesting, better place.

It'd be great to move back towards that. For sure, there's some brokenness here that can be repaired. There's some blaring problems that we all can see and it's like, what do we do to kind of shape the narrative and Stanford's been under 5% acceptance for a while now and a good chunk of the Ivys are now too. And then we think about flash a public institutions. Michigan has an 8% acceptance rate. UCLA has an 8.6% acceptance rate. I used USC earlier, it's under 10% acceptance rate. So it's like, okay, well now all the other schools that didn't have necessarily comparable acceptance rates that were more open to students.

Now their acceptance rates are shrinking because all we're doing now because of the selectivity is just encouraging kids to apply to more schools. And we're still demanding that they be perfect. And we're still sending out the marketing materials. We're still sending out the rankings every year. We're not really changing it. Well, the more we talk about this, more excited I'm getting about this lottery idea. The other other part that popped into my head is that Yale just as an example, not to pick on Yale in particular, but they since it's become public knowledge. And I think this is indicative of the majority of selective schools now.

They have the administrator class at universities has expanded dramatically. So Yale is now, I believe it's about two and a half students for every administrator at Yale. And part of that is those schools have so much money. It's incredible. I mean, that Harvard endowment, I think is coming up on 100 billion. I should Google that just to fact check that. And they're being run like businesses, right? They need more middle managers. They're treating students like clients instead of students to be educated. And that leads to a lot of what's going on in universities with, well, we don't want to upset our paying customers.

So if a professor is challenging their beliefs too much and they don't like what they're hearing, well, then maybe we need to get rid of him or her professor because of the professors at cost, right? That's just labor we're paying for it, right? College has moved away from tenure because they're trying to cost cut there and move towards trying to placate to paying customers. And all of that seems very negative for long term education. And the example that I caught the other day, I think was on the Lex Friedman podcast. There was a professor that had given a lecture for 25 years on the use of offensive language in society and what it means for discourse and democracy.

So the lecture is on offensive language, right? But some students complained because he was using offensive language in the lecture and he was fired for it. And that doesn't sit well with me. I think it speaks to colleges being run like businesses instead of colleges. And I think the lottery system might help to fix some of that. Yeah, I mean, you can even look at it even in a larger macro sense, their resident life. Situations, their student rec centers, the amount of gyms students can use to work out in pools that they can swim in their dining experiences. Like all of those are wonderful amenities for students.

You see it on an athletic level, you know, where like you recently saw with LSU, where it's like their library is literally it pales in comparison to what's right next door, which is a locker room with every amenity you could possibly fathom for I believe it was the football teams. It is absurd, the amount of your basically placating the client or the consumer by creating all these amenities and resources that like, yeah, that would justify the cost of said tuition. And while I understand like you want to make it a place where it feels safe for the student, and it feels like a place where they can really call home, there is a certain level of like, do we need to do all of these things?

Well, then there's a balance that needs to be struck there. I mean, I certainly sat through lectures and participated in discussions at Pitzer that pushed me well outside my comfort zone. There were a lot of viewpoints put forward that I disagreed with. And I grew as a result of that discomfort and that disagreement. I mean, it was never in a bad spirit. I really think disagreement is at the heart of how education is supposed to work, right? We've got this clash of ideas. And then out of it, we find balance between those ideas and maybe a better solution than we would have come up with on our own.

Yeah, so anything that goes against that seems misplaced. A little correction. So Harvard's Endowment was coming up on 54 billion in 2021. It's definitely larger now. Yeah. But 2021 was the latest figure I could find with a Google search. We want to make sure we got the facts straight. You're getting at it like, and it from academic rate, my professors and all of these different resources that you have, it's like those type of evaluative tools that are based on like popularity hypothetically, or maybe a student got a grade they didn't like. So instead of them being able to accept failure, because they want to go into med school, they then just rip this professor apart and it potentially affects that professor's job status at the institution.

Like those are the type of things that it's like, are those the instruments that we should be using to really evaluate the effectiveness of how our students are being educated? How do we really get this point where we're evaluating students on like, it can't be project based learning? What outcomes are we looking at? How do we explore things independent of a test or an instrument that was effective 30, 40 years ago, but may not be as effective today based on all the external influences on today's youth? We want them to become critical thinkers and contributors to society. So how do we get them to truly do that in a malleable way?

All right, let's change gears slightly. Yeah. If you had a chance to give one piece of advice, yeah, parents out there that are entering this process, their kids are just going into high school, or maybe they're all the way up there with current juniors and they're about to start writing applications, what would that piece of advice be? Can I redirect it? Yeah. Naturally, counselor, you have a daughter who's about to be in high school. Right. What do you want for her? Oh, great question. My goal is certainly not to get caught up in the college admissions arms race, which I think there are certain advantages in society right now from being admitted to a very high end institution.

But in the grand scheme, I also feel like the college admissions arms race is a race to nowhere. Right. I want her to develop a good sense of who she is, who she wants to become, what does she want to do with her life, and then move towards making that a reality. Yeah. And if college can help with that, fantastic. If she said, hey, I need to drop out of high school junior year so that I can start this business or work on this new app, whatever that might be, I would support that. Yeah. Listen, I know your family, so you guys are both educators, your daughter's not going to drop out of high school.

I say that like obviously in jest, but like, I think that to me, the question I just asked you is the advice that I give to parents. And it really kind of comes back down to everyone wants what's best for their kid. But are they really looking at their kid? And are they really thinking about who their kid is, what their innate abilities are, and are they really focused on like the growth of that individual? Because the truth is, is like getting your daughter to Harvard as great as and as proud as that would make you as parents. If she can't critically think if she's going to struggle with anxiety to the point where like she can't really like deal with getting a bad grade in a class, and then you and your wife are on the phone with her every like other day trying to talk her through it.

Like that's not the probably the quality of life you want for her, even though she got the trophy of Harvard. And so I think that like that's the advice that I give to parents is like, look at your kid and be honest about who your kid is, and be honest about like what is best for them. And there's a lot of colleges out there. And there will be a good option for your kid if you check your ego in this process. And I think it's hard, I think it's hard for parents because we've all worked really hard to create lives for our families and for our kids to create access and opportunity for them. And so it's hard sometimes to check that.

And and sometimes we can get a little manic and a little caught up in our own desires. And we're not truly being thoughtful to the person in like there were standing in front of just looking at and interacting with. So I think to me, the the first piece of advice that I'd ever give to families is like, well, what do you really authentically want for your kid? And let's help achieve that and take college out of the equation. And that was your point, right? It's like, it really doesn't matter if she's contributing and this is what she wants and taking a break from high school or taking a break from college is the answer.

Great. Yeah, it's interesting. Harvard doesn't blow my socks off anymore. Just having hired so many Harvard grads who are planning to go to grad school in a year, two years, or maybe they're in grad school to work as tutors at Test Prep Gurus. But a lot of Ivy League graduates, I found had a aversion to putting in their dues. They really had a sense of like, don't you understand that I'm so smart? I don't need to put in the work that you normally make the normal people go through to learn your system and learn how to teach kids what you're trying to teach them. Like you saw them and I graduated from Harvard, right?

I'm already there. Yeah. I have abilities that you can't even fathom. I mean, for us, we have to look at their standardized test scores, whether it was when they were in high school or as an adult, how high can you score on it right now? Because they have to score above a certain threshold, which is basically a perfect score and whatever they're going to teach, which so it's a high threshold. Yeah. But beyond that, where they went to school generally does not matter. What I want to see is that they come in and they really want to work hard and have a passion for connecting with kids and get on board with this idea of teaching.

Like we're going to use these standardized tests to teach life skills that will last forever. And so all that to say, if one of my kids decides that's where they want to go and they want to shoot for that, fine, I will support them in that process. But if they don't, it doesn't affect me at all. I mean, the word that comes to mind is just entitlement. And I don't like the word entitlement because it has so many negative connotations to it. But I think what I'm really trying to get at with entitlement is when we think about it from middle class families or families with means or the families that potentially you and I serve a lot of times, they've created such a good life for themselves that when a problem arrives with their child in education, they will hire a private tutor to help solve the problem.

They will hire a tutor for testing to help get the score that's going to get them access to the school that they genuinely believe. They will send their kid to a private school and have access to a college council that's going to provide the guidance and the support related to the college applications. So the entitlement is really what I'm trying to get at is like, well, these kids really have been given so many supports to kind of get through the process or have the system kind of be rigged and ensure their success and to ensure their success that like then, to your point, as an employer, when you're looking at them on the back end of that, you're like, well, well, who are you?

And they're like, well, what do you mean? Who am I? I'm a Harvard graduate. And it's not that there's anything wrong with that. But it's like, what we're really getting at when we're really when I'm talking about critical thinking, when I'm talking about kids of character and value of substance, it's like, no, no, no, like, who are you? Like, what makes you tick? What makes you specifically get up in the morning and motivated to do the first question you asked me, why do you do what you do? It has to be bigger than just the diploma you have, or the county you were raised with then. And I think that like, that's a really hard question for this generation that's kind of going to school and even graduating from school right now is like, I don't know if they have a true authentic sense of who they are, because so much of their time has been being perfect.

Right. Which is antithetical to what you brought up before, which are critical thinking skills. Right. And this story flashed into my head. Yeah. But I was in elementary school and I really wanted a pet rat. I had a friend who had a pet rat and it was a clean, nice rat. He was albino and had nice white fur. And so I really wanted one. And my parents, I got responded to it really well. They said, fine, but you are 100% on your own with this. And you need to go out and go find a book that has everything in it that you need to know about taking care of this animal. And we are not going to get on board with this until we know you have read that book, understand everything in it, and we're going to check you on that.

I went to a pet store, found a book on rats. And I remember it being this insightful moment where I was like, wow, everything I do need to know about this is actually here in this book. And everything went well with the pet rat. I did take it to the friend's house. I had a female rat. He had a male rat. And I didn't fully understand what would happen if we put them in the same cage for a few hours. And I think it was like six weeks later, I suddenly had five rats. Yes. Because flash forward to now I'm in my 40s. And I know all these people that are buying Bitcoin and are telling me, if you're smart, that's where all your investments should go.

And I thought about that rat book when I was really thinking about putting a bunch of money into Bitcoin, because it sounded great. And you get that FOMO going where you hear about people making a bunch of money, you're like, well, I want to make money doing nothing. All I got to do is click the mouse a few times. I went and bought a book on Bitcoin, right? Didn't look on the internet, but found someone who had written a book on what cryptocurrency and blockchain technology really is. It was a grueling read. I sent the author an email. He wrote back to me, said, Hey, it'd be easier to answer your questions over the phone.

You want to set up a call? We ended up talking on the phone for like two hours. And I asked him, at the end of it, I said, man, I feel like I actually have a little bit of an understanding of this. Now, how much money do you have in Bitcoin? He ran a crypto investment firm. And he said, yeah, personally, I don't think you should have any more money in it that you can afford to lose. You need to think about this like Vegas. Like it's fun money and it'd be really cool if it went up, but nobody knows what's going to happen. And it's kind of gambling right now. And I don't know how much money that ended up saving me.

But I came away from that going, yeah, I'm not going to do that. Yeah. I don't want to gamble with my kid's future. And the only thing that helped me do a good decision there were all those critical thinking skills. Yeah. So that's what I want for my kids. Yeah. That's the answer to your question. Yeah. I want that for them when they come out of high school and come out of college. Absolutely. You solved the problem. You feel good about that decision. So to me, that's a success story. Yes. Yes. It didn't end in agony. So it's a success story. Yeah. Yeah. That is what I would hope for any high school senior is that it doesn't have to be a book.

But when I've always said be thoughtful about your list or be thoughtful about your choices, know who you are, what you want to study, what you're looking for in an experience, like what are the values that are really, really important to you and try to cast a net that reflects a significant number of percentages of that. Because even like crypto, there is a certain lottery to all of this, right? There's a certain gamble to all of this. And then you have to be okay with the outcomes no matter what. And you're not going to get everything you want. It's a small, percentage of students who get into every single one of those schools.

Like at the end, it's like you have to look at your outcomes. And even if you only got into one, that's okay. It's not about getting into eight out of 10, because then you have an 80% success rate. You only get to go to one. Right. And it's about you then solving the equation. It's about you finding the success story in it. And I think that to me, like kind of what you did with crypto is what I would want with any high school senior, which would be like, okay, look at the problem in front of you or look at what you want. Look at what's influencing you. All your friends are applying college. You feel thomo.

You feel like you're missing out. Okay, it's not about thomo. It's about you. And it's about like how you want to approach this problem. If you can really be thoughtful and be in a good critical thinker about who you are and what matters to you, I do think that the process isn't flawed in the end. Right. Like I do think despite admissions being a subjective process, I think if the student stays in control of his or her or they or their experiences, I do think it ends up being like the trust the process works out. And so I think that like that would be the best piece of advice I can give to any student is like the more thoughtful you are, the more you engage in critical thinking about what makes you tick, the more positive the results will be.

And arguably the more resiliency you'll develop within yourself to figure out like this is how I should approach more things moving forward in life. See, this is the type of high level counseling you get at TARBUT or a high school of its quality. I didn't have a lot of people at upland high school who were thinking this much about how to speak to students, what we're really trying to achieve with this whole process. And I also am passionate about the idea of somehow finding a way to take what's done in private high schools, how tremendous the education is at those schools. And we're not talking academics, we're talking life skills like we're discussing right now and how we take that model and find a way to make that accessible to every kid in America.

Sure. And that would be my dream scenario. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't have a good solution. And a lot of it comes from affluent communities. But what you end up having is you create many endowments, right, at the public school model where you get funding from the parents that all contribute a certain percentage. And that funding helps create programs or create smaller class sizes. I mean, like the reality is, is like you can't really develop the life skills if you're teaching a class of 40 kids, because then you're like, you're certain it's in a hurting cattle. Unfortunately, there is a certain economics to it in the sense that everything requires smaller caseload or smaller class sizes or more resources.

And when you're limited in funding or limited in resources, like you can't really replicate the private school model. 100%. I mean, I know incredible public high school counselors, but it's not logistically possible for them to sit down and spend the time to get to know every kid that's under their purview, because there are hundreds and hundreds of them. Right. And even at parochial schools, not the same models as public schools. But when you're talking about casels of 250 or 500 students to one person, no, there's just no way you can develop life skills with one or two kids that you create a mentoring relationship with.

But there's just no way you can have that. I mean, Malcolm Gladwell, the role of 150. There's a certain point where you can only have influence on a certain number of people at any given point. Now, I don't know if the funding is the solution. I think it's a really good question. You're asking about creating access and opportunities for kids who don't necessarily have the means that the likes of my community does have with paying private school tuition. Turning the college admissions system into a partial lottery is the key. We're going to lower tuition costs by doing that, because they want to spend so much money on administrators and marketing.

And then we're going to take that savings and put it into primary education and secondary education. We're going to lift up the level there so that everyone receives an excellent education. We've solved a lot of problems tonight. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. All right. Well, Johnny, this has been an absolute pleasure. I've enjoyed myself thoroughly, Nick. Thank you for having me. Let's go get something to eat. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for listening to the Nick Standlea podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate five stars, and leave a review. The best way to support this podcast is to visit our sponsors in the description.

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