Introduction to the 2nd Annual Pioneer Co-Curricular Summit
Pioneer founder Matthew Jaskol introduced the theme of the Summit as “new frontiers.” Noting that 44% of desired core skills will change in the next 5-10 years, he expressed Pioneer’s intention to begin now to prepare students for the new “soft skills” involving creative, critical thinking and self-leadership.
Highlights of the seminar
Pioneer founder Matthew Jaskol opened the 2023 Co-Curricular Summit by introducing its theme: New Frontiers. Its aim, he said, is to “align the community with the fundamental goal of education, preparing for the future beyond college admission and even beyond the post college job market.”
Jaskol noted that within the next 5-10 years, by the time today’s high school students are entering the job market, 44% of desired work skills will change. Programming, coding, and data modeling will no longer be in core demand. The “soft skills” that will become the new “hard skills” include thinking skills—creative thinking, analytical thinking, systems thinking, technology literacy. Agile thinking that can understand biases and synthesize messages, mindsets that are not currently taught in schools, will be desired qualities.
Self-leadership, another skill not taught in schools, will be essential. This involves such qualities as understanding one’s own emotions and triggers, self-control and regulation, self-motivation, and wellness. Successful educational systems will need to incorporate these new ideas into their curricula, and this will be difficult, since many institutions—high schools, colleges, government—are linked in this endeavor, and institutions change slowly.
Jaskol sees Pioneer Academics as having the potential to help lead the way into the new reality. “Pioneer believes that we, as a community of students and educators, should start acting to incorporate the building of these new skills and mindsets into our academic and co-curricular pursuits now.” To accomplish this, he intends that Pioneer will “integrate these approaches into our curricula and our research experiences,” and will also work with innovative high school curriculum developers who have the same goal.
“We will decide the kind of world it’s going to be in the future,” he said, and “we will need stronger leaders, more ethical leaders than ever before.”
Authenticity vs. Anxiety: The Connection Between Self and Success
Pioneer founder Matthew Jaskol introduced keynote speaker Frank Bruni, opinion writer on topics related to education for the New York Times, and Professor of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University. Jaskol noted that the theme of the presentation would reflect the title of Bruni’s best-selling book, Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania.
Bruni began by noting that when he began his teaching career two years ago and saw the education field from the inside, he acquired an insight that allows him “to speak now with more knowledge and authority than I did before.” He offered some “truths” to help students “see college in the right light,” and get the most out of their college experience.
He began with the admissions process. Rather than being “an objective measure of your self-worth,” he notes, even at the most selective schools, the admissions process is almost random. Admissions directors are trying to assemble a student body. “Like stage directors who are casting a production, they have certain needs, certain priorities, certain proclivities. And those variables are usually matters of chance.” Therefore, “every bit of anxiety that you lavish on the question of how you can get into the most selective school possible is time and energy taken away from what matters most, which is figuring out what you want to learn, who you want to be, and how you can press whichever college you do attend into the service of that.”
His second point is that college is more than a credential. Of course financial security is important and a college education can be “the on-ramp to a decent income,” but it is far more. College provides “an unrivaled, inimitable chance to grow intellectually and emotionally in ways that will make you better, not only at whatever career you choose, but also at being a responsible citizen, at wringing the most enjoyment out of life, at navigating relationships, at participating meaningfully in the communities that you inhabit.” And “those things correlate much more closely to contentment than income or professional repute does.”
Therefore, Bruni insists, “students must use college as a laboratory for self-discovery.” Rather than choosing the most comfortable environment and starting with a preconceived notion of your goal, college is a time to find what you “genuinely and authentically love,” which will lead you to a truly satisfying occupation.
Bruni offered further insights in response to questions from the participants. He encouraged parents to think about what kind of adulthood they hope their children will have, and try to reduce the self-pressure to get into the most prestigious schools. He pointed out that in a less competitive school, a student has more chance to stand out, “and you may be on the path toward a meaningful life and a healthy one faster than your peers.” He summed up by noting that “what you do when you get to campus is much more important than that safety net of the college’s name.”
00:00:03 Brett Fuller (Pioneer Academics): Okay, good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Second Annual Pioneer Academics, Co-curricular Summit. I should say, good morning, good afternoon, and good evening! We have folks joining from all over the world, and we are thrilled that you have joined us today. My name is Brett Fuller. I’m an academic development manager here at Pioneer. I’ll also be serving as the MC for our event today, and my first responsibility and honor and fulfilling that role is to introduce our founder, Matthew Jaskol.
00:00:36 Brett Fuller (Pioneer Academics): Matthew Jaskol, founded Pioneer Academics in 2012, with the intent of offering deep intellectual exploration of talented young people to geographic and cultural diversity. He’s a strong proponent of Pioneer’s social mission to offer need-based scholarships that transcend geographic and socioeconomic barriers to outstanding academic engagement.
00:00:58 Brett Fuller (Pioneer Academics): He therefore, founded Pioneer Academics as a public benefit corporation and has guided Pioneer to partner with leading nonprofit organizations that assist high achieving low-income high school students.
00:01:09 Brett Fuller (Pioneer Academics): Graduating with a BA from Skidmore College, Matthew’s early professional roles were in business advisory and technology consulting services at Accenture, Deloitte Consulting and the Economist Intelligence unit. He completed his MBA at Yale University’s School of Management in 2,008.
00:01:26 Brett Fuller (Pioneer Academics): Matthew, welcome!
00:01:28 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Thank you so much, Brett! And I’m really thrilled to be able to open up our Second Annual Co-curricular Summit and to be able to speak to everybody around the world about the important things we’re going to be talking about today.
00:01:46 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): The year 2023 unveils, early glimpses into the frontiers of the future. As the turmoil of the pandemic receded, we seem to have hardly had time to catch our breath before we were confronted by a watershed of extraordinary technological advancements highlighted by artificial intelligence.
00:02:09 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Societally, we are also faced with an urgent imperative to address the needs of access to educational opportunities for underrepresented students while considering equity across the broad spectrum of young people preparing for the future. So, new frontiers is the theme of this year’s Co-Curricular Summit. It’s the aim to align the community with the fundamental goal of education preparing for the future beyond college admission and even beyond the post college job market. And that future can be exciting and scary.
00:02:50 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): There’s a term I’ve just learned in a documentary we were, that is called a 2077, and it’s a term for the possibilities of the more far off future. Hence called “Hellven”. Yes, believe it or not, this is a real term, that German Futurist, Garret Leonard, uses to describe his view of 50 plus years from now. Hellven, a possible hell, or heaven, or some combination thereof. It could be heaven, he says but it will take collective will to bring that about. Our collective will.
00:03:32 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): A future 50 years out may find us embraced in technological marvels. But how people relate to each other and how we construct that future, will decide the kind of world it’s going to be. In that future we will need stronger leaders, more ethical leaders than ever before. According to Nick Bostrom, director of the Future Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, artificial intelligence will reach a human level of intelligence by 2040 or 2050.
00:04:06 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): And New Scientist magazine predicts that AI will outsmart humans by the twenty-seventies. It’s hard to imagine the kinds of jobs that are going to be in demand at that point. Well, if 20 to 50 years from now is too amorphous, perhaps too intimidating, for an audience finishing high school, let’s consider the skill sets, skills and mindsets that are demanded in just the next 5 to 10 years. For juniors or senior students, this is the preparation and capabilities that jobs will demand right after you graduate from college.
00:04:42 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): According to The World Economic Forum 44% of workers’ core skills are expected to change in the next 5 years. The needed core skills. Yes, that’s saying half of the skills you need most to get a good job now will be no longer applicable will be different by the time you graduate college. Programming and coding won’t be in as high in demand, actually.
00:05:13 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Data modeling will be more often handled by machines. It’s likely that developing artificial intelligence and working with big data will be in demand until it’s actually emulated by AI itself. So, if you’re thinking that studying artificial intelligence is the next hot field like Pre-Med, you may be surprised. Pulling back to the skills that we know will matter; creative thinking, analytical thinking, systems thinking, along with technology literacy top the list of valued skills.
00:05:50 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): According to a recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute, what we’ve been calling soft skills will likely become the new hard skills in the coming age. Understanding biases, synthesizing messages, agile thinking, these are key mindsets that are not emphasized in high school curricula, not measured by standardized tests but they’re critically important in the next 5 to 10 years. Another area, self-leadership is also not part of current curriculum and will not be, and will be fundamentally important in the next decade. What is self-leadership?
00:06:30 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): These are qualities like understanding one’s own emotions and triggers, self-control and regulation, self-motivation, and wellness. Can you take a test in these aptitudes, and submit your official scores to colleges? Of course not. Not, for now at least. But according to McKinsey, these new skills or qualities hold significant keys to people’s future success, not only in work but in leading a fulfilling life. Eventually, successful education systems will need to adapt to new demands.
00:07:02 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Accomplishing this will require the collective effort from secondary education, higher education, government, and independent educational organizations. We know it takes time for the first 3 of those, the government, the high schools, the colleges, to develop new systems and curricula. Indeed, the skills valued by secondary schools are heavily influenced by college admissions. The college entrance expectations have become interwoven in the educational fabric often making change more difficult.
00:07:40 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Acknowledging the challenges, and this time lag in terms of those reforms, Pioneer believe that we as a community of students and educators should start acting to incorporate the building of these new skills and mindsets into our academic and co-curricular pursuits now. Co-curricular organizations as well as faculty led or student led initiatives in schools can be on the leading edge guiding later more systemic shifts in our educational system. This approach will allow this generation to get exposed to new key skills and aptitudes before the main before mainstream education, core curriculum adapt.
00:08:29 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): So, this summit is honored to have such experts who share their vision and their experiences in today’s sessions. Pioneer Academics is focusing on the new skills and mindsets needed beyond college admissions and plans to integrate these approaches into our curricula and our research experiences. High school leaders like Bruce Hammond of Tsinglan School, who will be speaking later today, are also building new programs and approaches in high schools as they contemplate the future.Keri Kolettis, one of our speakers from Pinecrest School, has led new approaches to teaching students social entrepreneurship and innovation, and has worked with Pioneer to educate Pinecrest students on tackling complex system level problems, problems that seem to most individuals impossible to address or mitigate.
00:09:29 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): To my community of friends, educators, students, and parents here today, now is the optimal time to hear our keynote speaker, Frank Bruni, discuss the connection between self and success. His speech reveals a timeless concept which is also the title of his book “Where you go is not who you’ll be.” This concept will become even more relevant with the backdrop of the major shifts we will be experiencing in the future.
00:10:00 Matthew Jaskol (Pioneer Academics): Frank is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, Bestselling author of Beauty of Dusk and Professor of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University. It’s my honor to have him speaking here today. And now please welcome Mr. Frank Bruni.
00:10:17 Frank Bruni: Thank you, Matthew. Thank you so much for having me. I’m really delighted to be here with you all today. And after my remarks, I hope to answer a lot of your questions.
00:10:27 Frank Bruni: So, for well over a decade now, I’ve been reporting and writing as a journalist about the college experience, and how young people and their families approach it. I’ve been visiting colleges speaking with college presidents, speaking with faculty, speaking with students and beyond campuses I’ve spoken to students on their way to college with the counselors who advise them, and with the various stakeholders, as they say in this world. But something big changed for me 2 years ago, and I want to start there.
00:10:56 Frank Bruni: In July 2021, I joined the faculty at Duke University, one of those coveted dream schools, 6% acceptance rate that so many students put at the top of their list and plot and strategize about. I’m a full professor at Duke, and I’m seeing higher education from the inside. I’m getting to know quite well the students who are among that 6%. So, I speak now with more knowledge and authority than I did before. And with an added perspective. And I believe more than ever in a few truths that are what I most want to convey to you and share with you this morning, because I think they will help students manage the unnecessarily outsized anxiety of getting to and then getting through college.
00:11:43 Frank Bruni: And I think these truths will help students see college in the right light. I think they’ll help students get the most out of college, and I think they’ll help with an authentic life which is often synonymous with the fulfilling and a meaningful one. One of these truths is this. Where you get into college, who admits you, who doesn’t, none of that is an objective measure of your self-worth. None of that has anything to do with how talented you are or how much potential you have. It’s neither an objective calling, nor is it a scientific one.
00:12:22 Frank Bruni: It’s informed by so many dynamics and so many whims that for students to talk of being rejected. For students to feel that they’ve been judged inferior is absolutely nuts. It may feel that way, but it’s not that way. What are schools doing during admission season? They’re assembling a student body. They’re putting together a given class. That’s it. They’re like stage directors who are casting a production. And they have certain needs, certain priorities, certain proclivities. They’re thinking about current and future donors. They’re thinking about diversity of various kinds.
00:13:03 Frank Bruni: Maybe the football team needs cornerback. Maybe the band needs someone who plays French horn. Maybe there’s a women’s volleyball team that desperately lacks players. A Classics department that desperately lacks majors. And so the admissions committee is on the lookout for all of that. The list, the variables go on and on. And those variables are usually matters of chance. I have now taught close to 150 students at Duke in classes size so that I got to know many of those students pretty well. And they’re a bright, talented bunch of people. I enjoy them. I’m impressed by them.
00:13:44 Frank Bruni: But do their papers, but do I read their papers and listen to them and think you were obviously and unequivocally in the 6% of the most brilliant and dazzling people in Duke’s application pool? No. And that’s no insult to them. As I said. They’re bright. They really are talented, but I’m sure, in fact, I would bet everything I own that I could reach into the pile of applicants who were not offered admission to Duke and find several thousand who are arguably just as bright and talented, depending on who’s doing the judging and what those judges are looking for.
00:14:21 Frank Bruni: Why am I telling you this? Because every moment that you spend and every bit of anxiety that you lavish on the question of how you can get into the most selective school possible is time and energy taken away from what matters most, which is figuring out what you want to learn, who you want to be, and how you can press whichever college you do attend, into the service of that. I’m exposing the lie of college admissions that it’s some objective meritocracy, so that you can focus on the authenticity of your experience, not on the brand name of it. So why are so many of us, why are so many people focused on the brand name?
00:15:06 Frank Bruni: They’re focused on it in part because of the partial false excuse me, and cruelly edited narrative that they’re told a narrative that they’ve come to believe about, quote unquote elite institutions of higher education being necessary prerequisites or automatic catalysts for big careers. Big as judged debatably by the altitude of a job title, or the altitude of a salary.
00:15:32 Frank Bruni: When we in the media write about corporate Titans, or best-selling authors, or prominent politicians, or trail blazing scientists or startup gods who went to Harvard or MIT or Stanford, we routinely mention that pedigree, sometimes quite prominently, as if it imparts logic to their arc, as if it’s a crucial explanation. But when we write about those same kinds of overachievers, and they went to state universities or schools of lesser profiles, we leave out that information, or we relegate it to paragraphs much, much lower in our stories, as if it’s a piece of the puzzle that just doesn’t fit.
00:16:12 Frank Bruni: And I bet that if all of you think about your own lives and your own conversations, you’ve noticed this same pattern. It happens when people are introduced to you. It happens when you introduce people to others. Mr. Jones went to Yale. Maria just got into Princeton. Mr. Bruni is teaching at Duke. That creates an impression. Only certain schools matter. Only certain schools are profoundly consequential. And that’s a lie.
00:16:42 Frank Bruni: Every so often I play a little game. I take a grouping of people in the news at a given moment in time, and I look at where they went to college. I did that just 2 months ago in regard to the men and women at the pinnacle of American government right now, and as I wrote in the New York Times, well, you may not admire some or all of these politicians, you cannot argue that in terms of professional achievement they didn’t reach the summit. So where did Kevin McCarthy, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, go to college? The Bakersfield campus of California State University.
00:17:16 Frank Bruni: He’s the top Republican in the House. Hakeem Jeffries is the top Democrat. He got his Bachelor’s degree from Binghamton University, which is a branch of the State University of New York. Okay. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader of the Senate, went to Harvard, which is indeed one of those hyper elective schools at the center of an intensifying anger about the admissions practices of the elite institutions. But Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, went to the University of Louisville.
00:17:49 Frank Bruni: It accepts roughly 3 out of every 4 applicants. The acceptance rate is roughly the same at President Biden’s undergraduate Alma Mater, The University of Delaware. At Vice President Kamala Harris’s Alma Mater, Howard University, the acceptance rate is about 35%, a competitive situation, but not crazily sub. I go through that because I want to encourage you all, I want to challenge you to do something, something that will bring you toward truth and away from anxiety. Be as alert and as open to biographical information of the kind I just provided, as you are to its opposite, like those constant references to how all the Supreme Court justices, except Amy Coney Barrett, spent time in the Ivy League.
00:18:41 Frank Bruni: Hooray for the Supreme Court! That’s one panel. That’s 9 people. That is not the universe. That is not you. Another truth that my time at Duke has reaffirmed for me is this. College is more than a credential and to get the most out of it, and to pave the path towards success as I define it, a concept that I’ll return to again in a bit. You should treat college as more than a credential.
00:19:09 Frank Bruni: I understand that the cost of college and the competitiveness of the job market today and all the economic uncertainty around us, I understand that with all of that. It’s important to use college to tee up employment. It’s important that it be an on-ramp to an immediate and decent income, some of which may be needed to pay back student loans. So, I understand that you can’t spend your time at college frivolously, and I would never encourage you to.
00:19:36 Frank Bruni: You can’t ignore certain financial realities but you can pay heed to more than those realities, because what college offers you through the breadth, of course, offerings through the richness of professors, experience and wisdom, through the cultural activities all around you, through the diversity of your classmates, is an unrivaled, inimitable chance to grow intellectually and emotionally in ways that will make you better, not only at whatever career you choose,
00:20:07 Frank Bruni: but also at being a responsible citizen, at ringing the most enjoyment out of life, at navigating relationships, at participating meaningful, meaningfully in the communities that you inhabit. Those things correlate much more closely to contentment than income or professional repute does. And isn’t contentment what we’re all chasing in the end? Isn’t that the real goal? Define success that way, as the cultivation and attainment of a life that makes you feel fulfilled, and that leaves you content. And if your fulfillment and contentment do hinge on reaching a certain stature, in whatever work you do,
00:20:52 Frank Bruni: well, I would argue that you’re still going to be better off if you treat college not strictly as a training ground for the best first job, but in a more expansive fashion as an environment in which to grow smarter in all sorts of ways. Use college to hone your emotional intelligence. To become fluent in dealing with all kinds of people, from all walks of life. To become more interesting, to become more interested. That kind of nimbleness and fluency will distinguish you from the other people in your field.
00:21:33 Frank Bruni: But there’s something even more important than that, and it’s this. You will be the best at what you do, if you’re doing something in which you’re genuinely engaged, if your commitment to it is authentic because then your energy for it won’t be forced. Your work hours won’t be an obligation. There’ll be something you’re glad to lavish on what you’re doing, and you’ll project a passion for what you’re doing that gives everyone around you confidence that you can do it well.
00:22:04 Frank Bruni: So, students must and I mean must, use college as a laboratory for self-discovery. It’s the best such laboratory I know. Too many students begin college having already decided what they’re going to study, what they’re going to become. But how well does anyone know themself at 17, at 18, at 19, or even at 20? How much have they been exposed to? I love to tell the story of a prominent American whom I wrote about and interacted with frequently back when I covered George W. Bush’s 2,000 campaign for the Presidency, and then the start of his Administration. She was the first black woman to be the United States National Security Adviser, the first black woman to be Secretary of State.
00:22:52 Frank Bruni: I’m speaking of Condoleezza Rice, and years later, when we were chatting about higher education, she told me that students at Stanford, where she was then teaching, often asked her, how do I get to do what you did? and what they meant, she said was, how do I get a job of the magnitude you know, of the stature of Secretary of State? And Condoleezza. Rice said this to me, I tell them, you start out as a failed piano Major.
00:23:20 Frank Bruni: What she was talking about is this. She was an only child, and very protective parents. She finished high school at 16, and she was a piano prodigy. and her parents wanted her close by she grew up in the Denver area, and so she went to the University of Denver, where there was a terrific conservatory, and where she would certainly live her destiny and be a concert pianist.
00:23:43 Frank Bruni: But she didn’t know herself well yet, and she didn’t know the world well yet. She got there, and she realized I’m not nearly as good at this thing that I think is my calling as I thought I was. Maybe it’s not what I’m supposed to do. In an open minded fashion, she looked around. She started taking other courses, and she happened to take one with a gentleman named Joseph Corbel, a distinguished diplomat, who also, as it turns out, is the father of Madeline Albright, one of Condoleezza Rice’s predecessors as Secretary of State.
00:24:15 She fell in love with a course she took with Joseph Corbel. She fell in love with the subject of International Relations. She changed her major to International Relations. And this is one of those cases where we really can say the rest, is history. One of the advantages of my long and very diverse career in journalism, most of it at the New York Times is that I’ve met so many accomplished people from so many walks of life, people in politics, people in business, people in the food world, people in the arts, and I’ve written detailed profiles of them. I’ve spent serious time with them.
00:24:51 Frank Bruni: And when I ask myself what most unites and connects them? What were the attributes most common across this group? The number one answer is that they genuinely and authentically love what they do. They don’t regard it as some onerous obligation. They regard it as an exhilarating adventure. It’s work, sure, but it doesn’t grind them down because they’ve chosen an occupation that lifts them up.
00:25:20 Frank Bruni: So what lifts you up? There’s no better place than college to figure out the answer. At Duke, my best students are the ones who, like Condoleezza Rice, followed their authentic curiosity, remained open to change, and are taking the courses they’re taking, and sitting in my lecture hall or my classroom in particular, because what’s going on there genuinely excites them. They’re the students who organically want to learn what I want to teach them.
00:25:49 Frank Bruni: And they excel because of that. They’re not treating college as a credential. They’re treating it as a gateway to new experiences, as a portal to panoramas wider and grander than the ones that they’ve beheld up until that point. At Duke, my best students, and by best I mean the ones who are the most present, were sponging up the most, who are growing the tallest. They’re also the least programmed. They’re the least high bound. They approach what they’re doing inquisitively, energetically, because what they’re doing juices and jazzes them.
00:26:22 Frank Bruni: The difference between a student who’s exuberant and a student who’s merely diligent is everything. And exuberance always wins the day. That leads me to the third truth. I want to share with you today. My best students at Duke, and the most successful people I’ve met in life are not making their decisions in accordance with some rigid checklist. They’re not meticulously checking off items on some inventory of tasks. They’re not insisting on highly specific operating instructions for everything they do. They’re not the students who come into my office and say, How do you want this or how do you want that?
00:27:04 Frank Bruni: Should I use 4 sources for this paper, or should I use 5? Or should it be 6? Should I have 10 footnotes, or should I have 20? No, the best students are the one who wants to come into my office because some idea popped up in class, and our discussion of it ended before their curiosity was sated, or before they had the opportunity to share a thought that they very much want to hash out now in my office. And so, we hash it out there freely, spontaneously, our conversation going wherever it goes. By the time they leave, both of us are a little bit bigger.
00:27:41 Frank Bruni: They’re the exceptions to a kind of contemporary student that Barry Schwartz, a longtime psychology professor at Swarthmore College, talked to me about. Several years ago, I had a long conversation with Barry about how college students had changed over the years. And the reason I had that conversation with him was because he’d been at the same college, Swarthmore doing exactly what he’d been doing for more than 3 decades, so he could do a fair comparison of students from 3 decades ago versus students today.
00:28:14 Frank Bruni: He was comparing apples with apples. And what struck him most about the students today versus the students of yesterday year?Here’s what he said to me verbatim. I think that kids want to be given a clear and unambiguous path to success. They want a recipe, and that’s the wrong thing to be wanting. Progress isn’t made by recipe. Recipes create cooks. They don’t produce chefs. And if we don’t manage to produce chefs at Swarthmore, where are we going to produce chefs? In college, you want to be a chef. In life, you want to be a chef because a chef is inventing and creating and dreaming and constantly growing.
00:29:07 Frank Bruni: The chef is assembling the ingredients in a fresh way that’s going to draw fresh notice. A chef has turned cooking into a calling. A cook is doing what they’ve been told. A chef is living an authentic life. To live an inauthentic life is to open the door to ways of thinking and to values that aren’t ideal. And before I take your questions, I want to give you 2 glimpses of those values by telling you 2 stories that stick with me. One is from the semester I taught at Princeton.
00:29:43 Frank Bruni: I was asked to teach there and to propose some ideas. I proposed a food writing class because I’ve done a lot of food writing in my career, and, as you may imagine, that sounded great to students and like a lot of fun, and many students buy for the 16 places in that seminar. About 50 of them took the trouble to actually write long letters of application. To put together CV’s, to apply to the courses of applying to college.
00:30:09 Frank Bruni: And I remember downloading those 50 different packages from an email in my inbox, and thinking, how am I ever going to choose among these students? Because they all sounded so wonderful. And they had all written such incredibly good letters of application. I chose 16, almost at random, trying to make sure I had a kind of healthy diversity for the class, and then the semester began, and they began handing in papers, and then more papers, and about halfway through the semester I realized, well, I don’t think any of these students are writing as well in this class, as I recall them, having written in their letters of application. As it turned out, I’d saved that email, with all of those letters I went back and I read them.
00:30:52 Frank Bruni: And if I read the ones of the 16 students who were now in my class, and it confirmed my suspicion that the work they were handing in was not as good as what they’d written to me as making the case for themselves to be chosen for the class. And at 1 point I observed this to a fellow professor at Princeton, actually I observed it to several fellow professors at Princeton, and to a person none of them were surprised, and they said to me, you need to understand the reason all of these young men and women are at Princeton, and I think it then had a 7% acceptance rate, it may be down to negative 4% acceptance right now. They said, they’ve learned that the most important thing in life is getting in to selective and exclusive environments, to breaching these sanctums that other people can’t reach. So, they summon their best self.
00:31:43 And they bring their best effort to the act of getting through a door that not everyone can get through. And they put very little thought to what they do once they’re inside the room. Now, that may have helped them get into my class, although in my case I was choosing at random that may have helped them get into Princeton. It is not going to help them lead on authentic, a meaningful, a successful or contented life.
00:32:11 Frank Bruni: Finally, I want to share one other story, one other memory that really sticks with me. In my reporting over the years, I’ve talked with many, many college counselors and one in the San Diego area. I remember a conversation I had with her so well. It was around, it was in the middle of March, end of March or early April. It was right around the time when students were receiving notices from colleges about whether they’ve been accepted or not.
00:32:35 Frank Bruni: And she said per usual, she was having students come into her office in tears because maybe they hadn’t gotten into one of their top 3 choices. They’d gotten into places where they were going to have wonderful experiences and excellent educations, but maybe not the school it was their dream. And she said many of them would utter some version of the following phrase, “I did all of this for nothing.”
00:32:58 Frank Bruni: Meaning all the effort that they’ve spent in their secondary school careers, and she was gob smacked and just gutted by that because she thought, Okay, student, A, you were the president of the student body. You learned invaluable lessons about leading people, about working with people, about collaboration, about compromise, and that’s for nothing if a bunch of strangers in New Haven, Connecticut, didn’t invite you to their school?
00:33:26 Frank Bruni: Or student B, you were the best biology student at our high school. You understand the wonders of the natural world better than any of your peers, and will be set up to experience that natural world in a fresh and an open hearted way for the rest of your life. And that’s not worth anything, if a bunch of strangers in Palo Alto, California didn’t invite you to go where they are? That sort of thinking, those sorts of values are not what you want to cultivate.
00:33:58 Frank Bruni: We have made a big mistake in this country, in this culture, by sending you the message that you should be thinking that way, and I’ll take questions now. But I just want to leave you with a thought. We need to work on that sort of sensibility. We need to push back against that mentality because it doesn’t lead to an authentic life, and it doesn’t lead to a contented one. Anyway, thanks for listening to me. And I look forward to your questions.
00:34:22 Brett Fuller (Pioneer Academics): Thank you so much, Frank. As a former admissions officer myself at some of the institutions, are the type of institutions you were speaking about. I was nodding my head silently, quite a bit in the background. A lot of that resonated very deeply, and I’m sure I was not alone.
00:34:37 Brett Fuller (Pioneer Academics): Our audience is full of students, parents, educators, counselors. I’m sure your message resonated quite deeply. I’ll invite folks to use the Q&A function at the bottom of their screen to send in questions and I’ll pose them as I can to Frank. Just to get the ball rolling, we had a question from the perspective of parents. So, many parents, I think, have internalize the message that you that you’ve put across. They know that US News rankings are not the gold standard. They’re not the end. All be all. But they still feel immense pressure to support their students in reaching their goals, reaching the heights that you know they’ve set out for themselves. Do you have any advice for parents, in navigating this process, or in communicating the message that you’ve tried to get across today?
00:35:28 Frank Bruni: Yeah, no, I think my best piece of advice is to be very clear and consistent on what is it you’re trying to help your child achieve? You’re trying to help your child grow into a contented and fulfilled person who is living the life that they want to live. And that doesn’t line up neatly with getting into a certain kind of school. There’s nothing wrong with reaching for a certain kind of school and the schools that a lot of kids put on their dream list are wonderful places that you know as I said, I teach at Duke, and I think it’s a wonderful school, and the students around me are getting fantastic education. But I think they could get fantastic education at a whole lot of places. And I think parents need to say, what am I really trying?
00:36:15 Frank Bruni: What sort of adulthood am I really trying to deliver my child into? And if I become, too worked up and bound up in this notion of a certain kind of school that has an acceptance rate below 10% or 15%, or whatever the marker is. And if I let my child, get all worked up about that, and bound up in that, what message am I sending? What values am I teaching? And also, what am I risking? You know we see right now among children, high school age, a mental health crisis.
00:36:46 Frank Bruni: Unlike anything we’ve seen before, and it has many different components and many explanations. But part of the picture is the amount of stress that some children feel about the stakes of the college admissions process. If you don’t lower the emotional temperature on those stakes, what sort of risks are you taking? What sort of how are you jeopardizing the health of your child in those terms in another. So, I think it’s a matter of being really clear about what the priorities are here, what values you’re trying to teach and what risks you take if you become too focused on a certain outcome.
00:37:22 Brett Fuller (Pioneer Academics): Thank you. I think that’s immensely helpful for the parents in our audience. We had, questions are flooding in by the way. Thank you all so much for your questions for Frank. I’m parsing through them as best I can. We have a few questions that fall under the general umbrella of on this, in this college search there is pressure to specialize. Students are feeling this pressure to find their niche and to dive deeply, and to say, This is my thing. This is what I’m bringing to your college campus, and in some ways they see that at odds with finding their genuine interest and you, you’ve talked a lot about authenticity. Do you see that push and pull in terms of specialization and trying new things, and finding that authentic interest that you spoke about with, for example, the anecdote about Condoleezza Rice, wondering what feedback you might have for those students.
00:38:20 Frank Bruni: Well, I think, they, those students and their parents are absolutely right to notice sort of cognitive dissonance here. It can, if one is treating getting into a certain kind of school in a strategic way, if one is plotting and strategizing, it absolutely can be the case that developing and then communicating a certain specialty, especially if it’s rare can be an enormous asset in the admissions process at that moment in time. But I think it’s antithetical to what is going to get you, what is going to end up leading you toward a fulfilling life because it may lock you way too soon into a certain kind of thinking and into a box that’s not the box that’s right for you. You can play this one or 2 ways. You can play that game, understanding that the moment you get to college you’re there, and you are not tethered to whatever case you made for yourself, or you can say, I’m going to be genuine from the get go.
00:39:18 Frank Bruni: And it may be that I don’t get into the school with a 6% acceptance rate. And I get into one with 12% acceptance rate because I wasn’t playing the game. But there’s not going to be an enormous difference in your life between that 6% school and the 12% school. And you may be on the path toward a meaningful life and a healthy one faster than your peers. So I mean, that’s what I would say. I would say, you’re never tethered to the case you made to the college you’re going to go to. But you also can just decide to think about it a different way, and not worry so much about the exact what you perceive to be the magnitude of the luster of the name of the school you’re attending.
00:39:59 Brett Fuller (Pioneer Academics): Thank you. There are a couple of questions about a maybe heightened scrutiny around U.S News College Rankings, and maybe a better understanding among students these days that these rankings are not the end all, be all and yet this machine keeps running, right. And the admissions numbers are not going down, and the rankings continue to come out, and they get all sorts of publication and media attention. What do you see? What has to happen to sort of turn the tide you know, how do we turn this into actionable change.
00:40:40 Frank Bruni: Well, parents mostly but also high school educators, and then students and I do it in that order, because I think asking young people of 15, 16 and 17 to lead the charge, and changing the way we think is a little bit unrealistic and not very fair to them. The adults in their lives need to think differently and the answer is sort of in your question. We all know and you know, when we kind of pull back from the situation and when we reflect, we all know those rankings are gamed by the schools who end up in high places.
00:41:13 Frank Bruni: The biggest dynamic in those rankings is school reputation, which manifests itself in various ways, and various of the metrics and school reputation is a sort of self, perpetuating thing. It has nothing to do with reality. If we know that to be the case we need to stop investing so much importance in them, and I think the minute that people stop outsourcing their judgment to lists like US News and World Report, there are other places that do rankings too, the minute we start we stop outsourcing our judgment to those places and stop making decisions based on what those rankings say, they will lose some of their cachet, and they will begin to fade away.
00:41:53 Frank Bruni: But it requires an active will, and it requires the ability to say, I know that I’m buying into an illusion. And I’m going to stop.
00:42:04 Brett Fuller (Pioneer Academics): Yeah, thank you. And you know, I do think, anecdotally speaking, those conversations happen more and more frequently, but when push comes to shove, and college lists are built, and you know the aunts and uncles are asking around the holidays, where do you apply to college, it’s a lot of the similar conversations. And I think that could be really challenging.
00:42:23 Frank Bruni: You just said something I’d love to just kind of tag something on to cause it’s important what you just said. You just said when you’re asked where you applying to college, where you’re going to go to college. One of the things that those of us can do, those of us with kids, those of us without children, one of the things all of us adults can do is start having a different kind of conversation, and more diverse conversations with the teenagers and high school students in our lives. We need to check ourselves, because for some reason there’s an easy bridge,
00:42:53 Frank Bruni: there’s a shorthand people meet someone 16, 17 and they say, Oh, where are you thinking of going to college? Where are you applying to colleges? And it is just a kind of conversational tick, right? It’s spontaneous. It’s not meant to be freighted with meaning. But if you’re a 16 or 17 year old, and every time you meet a new adult or 2 out of 3 every new adults you meet ask you that question, you end up getting a message that they don’t mean to be delivering to you.
00:43:22 Frank Bruni: That you’re going to be defined by the college you choose, so I wish those I wish we adults would be more conscious of the conversations we have with teenagers and censor ourselves because we’re being, they’re hearing things in our questions and our conversations that we don’t mean to be saying and it can be very damaging.
00:43:41 Brett Fuller (Pioneer Academics): I think that’s an excellent point. Yeah. And one that all of us can take away from this conversation as well, myself included. We have, a number of international students and counselors and parents in the audience as well, and one of the sort of additional layers of this conversation for them is not only do they feel pressure to seek some of the most selective institutions, but they’re seeking institutions abroad right in the United States and we’re getting questions about, you know, from your perspective as both a journalist and an educator is there something to this drive to attend one of the highly selective institutions in the U.S specifically? Is there something about the American higher education system that they should be seeing value in? Or is this another step back moment and say, you know, maybe there are institutions in my home country, or in another region of the world that might be a better fit for me.
00:44:38 Frank Bruni: Well, there, there are wonderful institutions of higher education all around the world, and that question of a fit is important. I want to come back to that, though, because I don’t look at fit exactly the way that a lot of students do. But I understand. And I don’t think it’s illogical that a lot of students want to come to college here. We are, our system of higher education for all of its faults, flaws, is the envy of the world for a reason. But what I would say to those international students is it’s the envy of the world, not just because of the 8 schools in the Ivy League. It’s the envy of the world, not just because of the 20 top ranked colleges or universities in the 2 separate U.S News and World Report List. It’s the envy of the world, because our bench is so deep because, our, you know, our best public universities are extraordinary laboratories of research, and all of that. So, I would say to them a version of what I say to domestic students, which is, when you’re thinking about where you want to go to college, be more expansive than restrictive, and understand that there are many more excellent options than you often find yourself pulled toward when you think in the most narrow and brand driven ways. But I want to say something about fit, too, so I’m glad you use that word. We too often use the word fit to mean a school at which I will be instantly comfortable.
00:45:57 Frank Bruni: I know so many students who are looking for a college that feels like an upsized version of whatever their high school was. I think fit should be the exact opposite thing. I think college is this amazing opportunity. To make sure you’re exposed to things that you haven’t been exposed to until that moment in time to sort of challenge yourself by making yourself a little bit uncomfortable, because I think it’s when you’re uncomfortable, and when you’re stretching in new directions, I think that’s when you grow and you discover new sources of strength, new muscles, all of that.
00:46:30 Frank Bruni: I remember when I chose, I’ve done a lot wrong in my life. And there are many modes of thinking in my life that I wish I could revisit in reverse but one of the things I think I did right is when I was choosing college it came down to would I go to Yale, where I had been fortunate enough to get in early admission, or would I go to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I’d received a full ride, free merit scholarship.
00:46:53 Frank Bruni: I was then living 50 min from Yale. I was attending a private school, at which a half a dozen seniors every year went to Yale. Yale was going to feel really, really, familiar to me. UNC was south of the Mason Dixon line, and I’ve never been south of the Mason Dixon line unless you count Disney world then I think it’s accepted. I think it has an asterisk. UNC was 85% students from North Carolina, and I’d never been to North Carolina. It was big. It was socio economically diverse,
00:47:26 Frank Bruni: in a way that my private school in Connecticut hadn’t been, and that, and in a way that Yale then wasn’t, and still isn’t as much as it should be. And I thought, this place sounds strange. This place sounds new. I think I just had a feeling that’s going to challenge me and stretch me in ways that are really important. And that was the right decision. And I wish when we talked about fit, we wouldn’t mean fit, we wouldn’t connote fit as snub, comfy. Fit means what school is going to do the most to expand me as a human being.
00:48:00 Brett Fuller (Pioneer Academics): I think that’s a really interesting point, and certainly something I was probably guilty of as a former admissions officer when we when we described fit. I don’t know that we are describing something that is potentially abrasive in a positive way. And I think that’s a really great way to think about that. I also wonder if you had to turn over your UNC Chapel Hill card when you started to join the faculty at Duke? I’m not sure how they would have received that.
00:48:35 Frank Bruni: I was never one of those, I loved my years at UNC. I now live in Chapel Hill. I’ve I’m looking to my left, because the university is just 5 miles through the trees over there. But I never understood sort of college tribalism when I was at UNC. I did not despise and root against Duke the way so many people do. And now that I’m at Duke, I don’t, I don’t view the rivalry from a Duke perspective. I, to me they’re just 2 excellent schools that happened to occupy a real estate near each other.
00:49:03 Frank Bruni: In fact, there’s a wonderful scholarship called the Robertson Scholarship that shuttle students back and forth between UNC and Duke. And if you have a Robertson scholarship, whether you’re rooted at UNC or whether you’re rooted at Duke, you’re obliged to take a certain number of campuses at the other school, and there’s a dedicated bus that brings them back and forth.
00:49:26 Frank Bruni: I view the universities that way, as collaborative and as added value to each other, and not as rivals. Although I will tell you, I gave the commencement address at UNC 2 years ago or a year and a half ago and both times from the stage when they read my biography and said that I was teaching at Duke, the students booed loudly, and I would just say of the many life experiences that I wish upon the students who are listening today. Getting booed before you address 50,000 people is not something I recommend.
00:49:57 Brett Fuller (Pioneer Academics): I’m sure it was all in a loving manner. It was a growing experience. Yeah, all in good fun. We have a question here, which is a sort of different perspective on a theme we’ve been touching on, which is students aiming for these highly selective institutions and potentially coming up short. And this student was asking, you know that they applied to some of these most selective, you know, quote unquote, prestigious institutions because they viewed it as a safety net, almost professionally right? So, we’ve discussed that so much is changing, you know, we don’t know what the career prospects are going to be 5, 10, 15 years from now and they thought, Okay, if I have that degree stamped on my resume, I at least know I’m going to get attention professionally.
00:50:44 Brett Fuller (Pioneer Academics): I guess the question is, you know, he notes here that you’ve done some to a suasive concern. But the question is, what can they do at that whatever institution they do end up at to make sure they’re in a position to find their authentic, best self, their interests, and develop themselves for successful career?
00:51:08 Frank Bruni: Well, I mean, I think what we just say is what kind of safety net that is comparable to the brand name of a Duke, or a Harvard or an MIT? Right? Here’s what I would say to that. A lot of students there, there can be a danger. A lot of students get into a Duke or Harvard or Rice or Georgetown, or what have you. And like those students in my Princeton class, they believe, because of that kind of safety net – Now I’m set – idea that their hardest work is done and they coast, and that catches up with them. And what they meant to be an insurance policy actually becomes something else. It becomes something that is not helpful.
00:51:49 Frank Bruni: Conversely, a lot of students who don’t get into the 7% acceptance rate school that they were angling for and end up at one with a 20% acceptance rate. They go to that school feeling a little bit more, a little, a little bit scarer or more scared, excuse me, a little bit hungrier, they work harder. They stand out more because they don’t feel quite as intimidated by the people around them. They maybe make more of an effort to get to know faculty, and what I would say is what you do when you get to campus is so much more important than that safety net of the college’s name.
00:52:28 Frank Bruni: And on some campuses, if getting in was less cutthroat, you will be able to stand out a little bit more easily. You will, when I was at UNC, which is an excellent school and is hardly easy to get into but I developed relationships with professors in the English department, I was an English major. Because I think it was a little bit easier for me to stand out than it would have been at Yale and because I kind of took it as a matter of importance that I make the absolute most of this environment.
00:52:58 Frank Bruni: Get to know faculty members use them as mentors, plug into alumni networks. The alumni networks at schools that aren’t in the Ivy League are every bit as committed and active as schools in the Ivy League. You will have as guaranteed a future out of out of college. You’ll have this guaranteed a future as the energy you put into that college experience, and the thoughtfulness you put into how you spent those college days.
00:53:28 Frank Bruni: And the greatest danger of the culture of admissions. Right now, the greatest danger of this fiction we’ve put forward that it’s all that you that the die is cast based on what happens when you get into or don’t get into certain schools is we’ve completely forgotten to tell young men and women that the way they use each semester of their college experience and the breadth of their college experience is so much more consequential to their careers, to their success, to find the right way to their contentment than a few months in their senior year, and the decisions of a bunch of strangers around the country and admissions offices.
00:54:05 Brett Fuller (Pioneer Academics): Well said, and I think that’s excellent advice. And I’m sure it’s appreciated by our audience member there. I think we have probably 1 one more time for one more question. And this is a bit of a tangent, but an excellent opportunity for this student, and it’s very much your wheelhouse. The student aspires to be a journalist. And they wonder if you have advice for them. They’re currently in high school, seeking not yet a senior and wondering what advice you have for the next generation of journalists.
00:54:35 Frank Bruni: Well, thanks for that question. I love getting that question. I’m going to give you maybe a surprising piece of advice, but I am telling you this is the best advice there is. Read, and then read some more and then read some more. Many of the young people I’ve met at Duke, who take journalism, oriented classes with me, they put the cart before the horse. They’re so eager to write, and they’ve started writing, but they haven’t read as much as they need to read. And I say that because the way people become better writers, better communicators, and the better a writer and a communicator, you are the better chance you have at the journalism career you want, is by exposing themselves to that work done at its highest level. To read and read and read some more, and I feel so passionately about that, about this, that in fact I’ve been fortunate enough since I began teaching at Duke, that most of the courses I’ve taught are courses of my own invention.
00:55:29 Frank Bruni: And I’m teaching a course this semester called Master Works of Journalism, and it is just about reading some of the best journalistic books that have ever been produced. Some of the classic magazine articles. The whole reason I invented that course, and the whole reason I’m teaching it right now is because I wanted to send the message to students before you can write. You have to read. Read all of this, and then you will understand better what you’re trying to write, and you will have absorbed the lessons and the rhythms of writing done well.
00:55:59 Frank Bruni: If you will forgive a crude metaphor that I nonetheless always use or think of in my head, because it’s correct. You are when you are writing, be it journalism, fiction, or whatever, you’re sort of pasta machine, and if you don’t put eggs, flour, and water in one side of that machine, you’re not going to be able to pump out linguine, spaghetti, vermicelli, etc. You have, that’s what reading is. It’s putting all of the ingredients into your brain, so that what comes out of it is as dazzling and varied and nimble as you want it to be. So, my advice is read.
00:56:33 Brett Fuller (Pioneer Academics): There you go. Fantastic advice, and probably frankly fantastic advice for all of our students in the audience, read and prepare for the next journey in your life. I think we are out of time, Frank. Thank you so much for joining us this morning. It was a real privilege to hear what you had to say, to ask you some questions. I know our audience is grateful. If they were live, I’m sure they’d be clapping right now. But it’s and not booing you off stage, that’s for sure as the Duke and UNC crowd may have in different exchanges. Thank you so much. It was a privilege and we appreciate having you. Have a great rest of your weekend!
Frank Bruni: It was my privilege, thank you!
Sign up to receive alerts for upcoming deadlines and other opportunities for high-achieving students.
Thank you for your interest in Pioneer’s Global Problem-Solving Institute (GPSI). The application for the Fall 2025 terms is now available. Please select your country/region below:
