Jack Klett
THE FUTURE OF COLLEGE ADMISSIONS TESTS
MARIA GEFFERS
Can you tell us about yourself, your journey, and when you knew you wanted to work in higher learning institutions?
JACK KLETT
I refer to myself as a higher education evangelist. Regardless of my role and what institution I'm working for, there's one common denominator. I advocate for access and equity in higher education. I view the higher education experience as much more than a college education. Higher education is any experience past high school that is formative. A lot of that can occur on a college campus and a lot can occur through an apprenticeship or a trade. It can happen through active military service. I’ve spent my career focused on the institutional experience of higher education and what it does. When it’s done correctly it lifts the veil and allows individuals to become everything they were meant to be.
MARIA GEFFERS
Saying you’re a higher education evangelist brings a different tone to your experience and role. When did you decide this was what you were going to pursue?
JACK KLETT
It occurred early-on for me. I was working for a member of Congress when I graduated from Rider University in central New Jersey. I was facilitating the congressman's higher education advisory committee and his college affordability task force. Those groups were full of higher education administrators and faculty. They spoke in such a glowing way about their institutions and experiences with students. It seemed this was an experience that gave them a great sense of purpose.
I often tell students what Paul Dolan said. “Happiness is the balance between pleasure and purpose.” I had a good amount of purpose, but I hadn’t figured out how to bring pleasure into the role yet. I decided to make a jump and told some of the professors I worked with to let me know if any opportunities became available on campus. Fortunately, I landed a job in the admissions office at my alma mater. I went back to Rider and was there for four and a half years until I moved on to other institutions and my career advanced.
MARIA GEFFERS
We are all students, and we should always be learning, so having the confidence to step out is important. You’ve had a lot of positions in this field. Can you describe your roles and interacting with college students?
JACK KLETT
My career experience in higher education was all about stepping out because the opportunities presented themselves. I typically said yes when things were presented, even though I often thought I had no idea how to execute that job. I knew I would figure it out, however, and found some mentors to help me. I always felt the responsibility to give back. When I started in admissions, I was interacting with prospective undergraduate students. These were mostly high school-aged students who I talked to about the value proposition my institution at the time had to offer.
Then at Drexel University I got to work with adults who were changing careers. I really liked working with that population because going to school as an adult is no longer this rite of passage. Education is now intentional. They’re doing it because they need to shift careers or advance in their career. They need a particular set of knowledge or skills, or they want to land the job that they’ve always wanted. I enjoyed working with these people and watching them get their graduate degree or experience college for the first time. I found their stories to be compelling. I spent a lot of time in graduate education while I was at Drexel.
Then I went to Philadelphia University, which merged with Thomas Jefferson University. I began doing a lot of work in graduate studies and was asked to become associate dean of graduate studies, which was an academic appointment. That was when I shifted out of enrollment management and admissions work and went into more of a traditional faculty and academic administrator role. That was when I started teaching. I was working with a graduate population in my administrative duties, and I was educating undergraduates by teaching courses. Working on a college campus is so wonderful because there is so much hope and promise. Students, for the most part, aren’t jaded. Their life has unfolded in a way that brought them to college and they feel good about it. The sky’s the limit in terms of what they feel they can achieve and that feeling is addictive to be around. It keeps us young.
MARIA GEFFERS
You're a true teacher at heart. You've studied and taught Simon Sinek's Golden Circle concept and how it’s important for people to start with their why. Why is this concept so important to you and why should this be important to the student and the parent as they're looking at colleges?
JACK KLETT
The concept of starting with why is simple and Simon gives a simple graphic representation of something called the Golden Circle, which has why at the center. Even though it’s about effective marketing strategies, it’s evolved over time. At its core it’s focused on understanding one’s essence and purpose. Then he applies it to business. He’ll ask an organization why they exist. Often people think, especially in America, that an organization exists to make money. As a result of their business, they expect a profit. If they’re profitable as an organization or a company, they’re solving people’s problems. They need to know what problems they solve and why they solve them. Answering those questions gets to the core of why an organization exists. The same is true when people go to college. If they’re able to peel back the layers of who they are and what’s important to them, they understand it’s critical to know themselves so they can be successful and happy.
It's not easy to know one's why. It takes a lot of self- reflection and sometimes requires us to look at aspects of ourselves that we might not want to look at all the time. It’s important for students to begin to wrestle with this concept as they try to put their best foot forward in university admissions offices. Institutions want to get beyond what is in the applicant file and want to get to know the students as people. Admissions professionals must get to who the person is and how they can benefit from their experience here while our campus also benefits. It’s an important concept I’ve tried to instill every place I’ve been.
TOM GEFFERS
Your history has a lot to do with marketing for colleges and getting students in the right seat. In any business that’s important. What is the biggest challenge colleges face when trying to do that? What is the one thing you would tell colleges to do to get more students?
JACK KLETT
The institutions must know their why too and many do not. They need to be authentic in communication. There are a lot of enrollment management and university marketers who are working to market the brand. That's understandable, but students and family members want to walk away with an understanding of what makes that institution special and unique. They want to know how that specialness and that uniqueness will benefit their son or daughter or benefit themselves as a prospective student. I encourage all my enrollment management and university marketing colleagues to understand what makes their institution special and unique and to be authentic in their communication. One of the things we learned in the past year is that it doesn’t require a glossy view to communicate authentically. One can grab their cellphone and record a video of a student talking about their experience and that authenticity. Even if it’s not flashy or well produced, that authenticity goes a long way in communicating effectively and making a connection with a prospective student and their family.
TOM GEFFERS
A while ago we went to a seminar with some private colleges and one state college. The state college was trying to sell the idea that tuition should be higher so they could put in a lazy river in addition to their rock wall. Has that kind of spending changed since COVID? Are schools pulling back on those kinds of things?
JACK KLETT
When we look at the increase of tuition over the years, we can see there has been competition among institutions to have the best residence halls, the best culinary options, and the best activities on a beautiful campus. Institutions have done quite a bit to attract students, which doesn’t connect with the mission of the institution. No university has in their mission to provide the best recreational experience for their students. I encourage institutions to scale back on those amenities a bit. At the same time, there are market forces at work. There are students who clamor for those types of amenities and are willing to pay for them.
TOM GEFFERS
We always tell students not to pick schools based on sports teams. We tell them they shouldn’t go for the party. How do you tell parents to take a second look at schools that are big in sports to see if they are a right fit for their children?
JACK KLETT
Everyone is going to have something that's unique about what they're looking for. It’s important to have a real conversation with the prospective student. Parents tend to assume guidance counselors are providing this education to students in high school. There are presentations that counselors give that talk about how to go through a college search process and what to look for. They don’t provide an education about how their experience will be over the next four years. The students have no frame of reference besides what they’ve experienced in high school. It’s important to communicate with and educate students about what college is really like.
TOM GEFFERS
When the recession hit in 2008 a lot of people said kids shouldn’t go to college because they won’t be able to pay their loans back. The same thing is happening now with different careers. Higher education and college took a big hit during the pandemic. Few people want to teach. Professors aren’t held in the same regard as they used to be. A lot of people become adjunct professors. Do you see it changing for the better?
JACK KLETT
People have a very complicated relationship with higher education right now. I don't know if it's going to get less complicated. I do think there was a real shakeup during the pandemic that was important. It was something that needed to happen. Many institutions were faced with their doors closing and had to take enormous risks to keep their doors open. Some, unfortunately, couldn’t do it and have closed. There are even the proposed mergers of institutions at the Pennsylvania state system, part of the PASSHE system.
Institutions have learned and are taking steps to return to the core of their mission. There are institutions that are having conversations they've never had before about who can afford to attend this college or university. They are looking at their recruiting to see if their process is equitable to all students from varying socioeconomic classes to be able to enroll and not be saddled with a debt burden that will prevent them from achieving what they want with their college degree. They are trying to produce students who will become productive members of society, who will achieve career success as well as personal and family success. There are certain advantages an adjunct faculty member can bring into the classroom because they're typically active in the industry or the field in which they teach, which can be of great value. If institutions are hiring adjunct professors because they don’t want to support professor salaries, it’s time to take a hard look back at their mission. Everything institutions do should be connected to their mission.
MARIA GEFFERS
How will admissions be impacted by optional testing? This goes from the PSATs to AP course all the way up to the SAT and ACT. We tell students it’s better to have the score and not need it than to not have the score and need it. What is your opinion on the matter?
JACK KLETT
There are many reasons why we're seeing criticism about testing, at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and many reasons why institutions have decided to make standard tests temporarily or permanently optional. Some of that had to do with access to testing centers when COVID hit. Institutions that provide assessments needed to retool to provide security for at-home testing and online proctoring. Some of those changes have brought about great innovations that seem to be somewhat permanent, or as is the case with the GRE, completely permanent.
I would tell my college enrollment management colleagues to take a break. The role of assessments in testing is a complicated one and it’s one we need to think through and study before making universal proclamations. Testing originally began to open doors and to level the playing field. There was a time when higher education was accessible only to wealthy individuals or for people who came from a family that was well-known. The idea of the assessment was to provide an anonymous, quantitative assessments of one's cognitive abilities and to use that to open doors for them that otherwise would've remained closed.
There are a few things we need to consider when we're removing the requirement. We must think about what an admission candidate evaluation looks like when you take out quantitative data. Institutions are somewhat responsible for this because the way in which they are ranked incentivizes admitting folks with higher scores. That produced an environment that incentivizes the use of scores to screen applicants out, as opposed to looking for ways to screen applicants into your process.
There is no assessment organization worth their salt that would say you should be using scores as cut scores. There will be studies about what test-optional meant for enrollment and if it resulted in the outcomes they hoped for. There is a lot more going into how candidates are evaluated and that needs to be examined before we’re going to know if this was something that should be applauded or rejected. Students should take the test. Regardless of who they are, the test will reveal where they are strong and where they need more education. For enrollment purposes, when used correctly, the test scores let us know who will benefit from extra support. That’s our role. We’re supposed to understand students we’re admitting and know who needs additional support to be successful at our institutions.
MARIA GEFFERS
Is there anything that you would like to add to our conversation?
JACK KLETT
I learned that while students in college have an idea of what their degree is going to bring them, there is a disconnect between that idea and what they value as individuals. Those values align with the things that make them happy. There was a disconnect between someone pursuing their definition of success, which was aligned with the societal definition of success and wealth, influence and fame, and what students valued in their own lives. That’s why it’s important for people to know themselves, their value, and their why. Students must understand what they value and then pursue those things to provide happiness. That is the real definition of success.
MARIA GEFFERS
As a parent, success means you want your child to always be happy. Thank you for helping to make that happen.
