In this episode, NACAC Board Director Tahirah Jordan Crawford leads an engaging discussion with two accomplished women leaders in the world of college admission counseling, covering topics such as finding joy in the work, leadership, work-life balance, and overcoming challenges. Gain valuable insights into the experiences and perspectives of women who are shaping the landscape of higher education.
Guests: Whitney Soule, vice provost and dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania, and Joy St. John, director of admissions at Harvard College.
Moderated by Tahirah Jordan Crawford, Senior associate director and director of multicultural recruitment at Columbia College
Tahirah: Hello, and welcome to the College Admissions Decoded Podcast, an occasional series from the National Association for College Admission Counseling, or NACAC. NACAC is an association of more than 26,000 professionals at high schools, colleges, universities, and non-profit organizations, as well as independent counselors who support and advise students and families through the college admission process. I'm your host, Tahirah Jordan Crawford. I am a long time NACAC member and a member of the NACAC board of directors. I'm also a senior associate director and director of multicultural recruitment at Columbia University in New York. I am happy to sit in today for our regular host, my good friend, Eddie Pickett.
Today, we will explore and celebrate the unique experiences and perspectives of women in the college admission profession. We are joined by two of the most notable and accomplished leaders in our profession, who will share invaluable insights. From navigating career challenges, to finding joy in the work, to achieving work life balance, there is a lot of ground to cover. Let's begin.
For this episode, we are happy to welcome Whitney Soule, vice provost and dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania. Welcome, Whitney.
Whitney: Hello. Thank you so much for having me.
Tahirah: We are also joined by Joy St. John, director of admissions at Harvard College. Welcome, Joy.
Joy: Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.
Tahirah: Thank you both for being our guests today. Let's start at the beginning. Tell us about your journey in getting into this profession and how you were initially drawn to this career.
Whitney: I will say this has been an unexpected career for me. I was a student tour guide at my alma mater, an overnight host for prospective students. I did all the admission things, and I really loved my school. After I graduated, I had a job in another industry, and my alma mater was looking for an admission officer. I was freshly out of school, I had been working elsewhere for about a year and thought, "I think I would really love that." I loved the time I spent as a volunteer in the admission office, and I was not clear of what I wanted to do for a direction in my work at that point. It was a nine-month job and I thought, "This will be really fun," and sort of like going home, and given nine months to think about what I want to do next. And was luckily hired into that role.
I loved every part of that cycle. I started right after Labor Day, so I went right into recruitment travel, and visiting high schools, and interviewing students. Then, transitioned into reading applications, and how we do evaluation, and the intricacies of selection, and knowing how many students we could admit to bring in the class. I just loved every element of it and was lucky enough to be hired on permanently. 30 plus years later, I am still working in higher ed admissions.
Joy: My journey is probably a little unusual, although I think everyone has some unexpected element to their journey into admission. It's not something that you say when you're a young kid, "I want to grow up and be an admission officer." That's just not something that you hear very much.
I was a student leader in college. Some of my closest mentors were college administrators. Originally, my thought was, "I think I want to do this college administration work." I went to college in California, I went home to Oregon, and I applied for jobs at universities, and I ended up in an admission office. That's how I got started in admission.
Then, this is by now a famous story about me, but my father was like, "You've got to get a graduate degree." I was like, "You don't even have a college degree, why are you telling me what to do?" He said, "Joy, you always loved Perry Mason, you should go to law school." I went to law school for that reason. Working in admissions, it's embarrassing to say that. It so happened that, while I was in law school at UCLA, California was going through very challenging debates, both in the public arena and in the UC system, around the use of race in admission. Because I had worked for a little bit in an admission office, I was doing a lot of advocacy work in terms of students' groups, and I was also doing some work on a student faculty admissions committee at the law school.
During my time doing that work, the UC Regents passed a mandate that required the UCs to eliminate the consideration of race. Then Prop 209 actually passed, so that made this rule applicable to all public institutions in California. While I was doing that advocacy work, I just realized that perhaps my interest was less legal, and more from the point of a practitioner. How do we operationalize these new rules, and how do we do so in a way that follows the law, but where we're not frozen with fear in our ability to try to reach our goals and our institutional values? I decided that I would go back into admission, and then from there I really stayed in admission because of my interest in that area. Eventually, I just became interested in the whole thing.
Tahirah: We could talk all day, as a fellow law school attendee that also is in the field of admission in that transition role. But thinking about the unique perspectives that your own backgrounds offer you in this work, being women, being leaders, what do you think are the greatest strengths that come about as women in the field? How do you think that contributes to the success of your organizations?
Whitney: I'll start. I think we're all products of the way we experience the world, with our identity, and who is around us, and who teaches us, and influences us. But I think of myself as a very curious person, very relational, and also somewhat bold. I think the combination of those characteristics, particularly in this kind of work but advancing in responsibility, where a role like I have now as a dean of admission in a large university, it's really important to have strong relationships, and to be interested and curious about the roles and responsibilities of those that I work with throughout the university. So that as we're collaborating, I'm well-informed about all of the different intersections of our work. It helps me think about how to frame the work we're building here in the admission office, relative to the university.
I think it's true, also in a number of commitments I have outside of the university, whether it's sitting on committees, or on boards in an advisor role, that relational nature of mine, along with a boldness and a curiosity, works together to be effective as a leader. There's always more to learn, but I do think that in all the ways that I've been influenced growing up, and those who've been around me, and leaders that I have admired, and my own natural instincts, I would say that's how they come together in the leadership roles that I have had and the one that I have now.
Joy: With the ways in which we are socialized in terms of gender, that may contribute to the way that we navigate the world, I believe that it influences the way that I engage with the work. I would agree with Whitney. I'm a very relational person. When I was practicing law, at one point I was like, "I just don't want to have to fight with people all the time." I don't want that to be my starting point with how I approach conversations or engagements professionally.
There's something about higher education that I think does allow leaders to be rewarded for using more intuition and thinking relationally. I do think that many women, because of our experience as women, are better able to imagine themselves in someone else's place. I can understand I'm not like you, but I can try to understand why you're responding or why you feel that way.
Then also, from a leadership perspective and a mentoring perspective, what I really appreciate about being a woman in admissions is that there are many young women who will enter the profession and who will stay in the profession, who are looking for mentoring. My husband says I don't actually really have a natural maternal instinct, even though I do have a 14-year-old child, so I'm not your girlfriend who's like, "Ah, she's everyone's mom." But I am a big sister and I love being a big sister. So I love that aspect of being able to mentor staff through this work, and helping them build skills that I think will be helpful to them professionally and personally.
Tahirah: Can you share a little bit more about how the mentorship that you've received or networking opportunities have created different opportunities for your path to leadership? Or just maybe it's something that you're actually utilizing in this current landscape of admissions.
Whitney: Networking and mentorship go hand-in-hand. I think networking is a really important part of the work because it serves multiple purposes. It provides exposure to other environments, and other people and their way of leading and offering influence, that not only gives scope to your own understanding about how to do the work, but it also introduces you to people who can be supportive.
One of the easiest ways for somebody who's newer to the work to be thinking about networking is how to get involved at committee level work in organizations that are related to the work that you do. Lots of times, committee level work doesn't get the news splash that some other things might, but it's really the work of voices coming together that inform a larger organization, so being on an advisory committee, or a special committee to think about something for a larger organization where they're sourcing voices from lots of different kinds of institutions, and colleges, and high schools, and non-profit organizations at the same time. To get involved in that level earlier in the career informs your own career quite a bit, and your own understanding of all the different things that go on in the work.
But then, it also connects you to people who think of you, if they think about how you contributed to that committee and they have a need somewhere else. Now there is a larger number of people who know you,know where your strengths are, and your skills are, and might think of you and invite you into the next place. Same for you, if you need to be building a committee or an advisory group in your own work, in your own office, you now have a bigger network from which to think about who could be really valuable and who could really help us. Just like anything else in a career, as you advance, so do a lot of those networking opportunities and the level at which you're being asked to participate.
I'll give one example. Much earlier in my career, probably in the late 1990s, I was on an advisory committee for Common App. This was when we were still reading paper applications. There was an opportunity for students to apply online, but I think we were all, in admission offices, printing all the ... We were receiving them online, and then printing them out and reading them. But this advisory committee was a group of probably about 30 or 35 professionals from all kinds of different high school and higher ed institutions, so small, private, large, state, and everything in between. These were conference calls on the phone, so this is 35 people on a phone call, you can't see anybody. I just remember being struck by how complicated any issue was for us to work through as a group of 35, because the variety of interests and needs that were being represented were so vastly different that it was really challenging to find our way to a recommendation to give back to Common App about what they should do with whatever the question was at hand for the application the next year.
I still think about that, this many years later, because it was such an introduction to the complexity so far outside of what I had worked with in my own office up to that point. Not only do I appreciate that, but I also think it's really important as a leader in my office to make sure that we're uncovering opportunities for staff to get involved in things like that as they grow.
Joy: I think of two things when I think of mentoring in my career. The first one was, when I entered admissions, I remember going to my first NACAC. It seemed like everyone knew each other. I actually found it irritating. I was like, "Why do all these people know each other? It's so cliquey." Of course, now I go to NACAC and I know everybody. But I think what I didn't appreciate is that you grow up with a group of people in the profession. The importance of networking for me was not usually about networking with someone who was more advanced in their career than me, it was networking with my own peers. Because over time, we have new opportunities and we rely on each other for advice, we rely on each other to push each other to explore new leadership opportunities.
For me, one of my first experiences with that was working as a faculty member at the NACAC summer institute. It was a three-year commitment. We were rotating on and off, but I was with this group of people for three years, and it was at the point when I was an associate director. Looking back on that group now, a good number of those people are deans and directors now. At the time, we just wanted to hang out with each other, and work with the new folks in our profession. But looking back on that time that we spent together, just sharing the issues that we were dealing with in our own offices, trying to help mentor new people in the profession, now I realize how important that was in my own professional development and building a network. I didn't think I was building a network, but in fact, I was.
Then the second thing I'll say about mentoring is, every time I do talks like this, I talk about my former boss, who Whitney knows, at Amherst College, Tom Parker, who was the dean of admission and financial aid there for a long time. He was very supportive of me. But I tell people all the time when people say to me, "When did you decide that you wanted to be a director or a dean?" I remember Tom came in one summer and sits on a chair in my office. He goes, "Joy, I think you could do my job." I was like, "Tom, get out of my office. What are you talking about? I don't even want to do your job." Then he got up and walked away, but it stuck with me.
I didn't go up to him and say, "Tom, I'd like to talk to you about what you do and learn more about what it means to be a dean." It was literally just this moment where I was like, "Here was someone who I really respected, and I thought was so bright, and so good at what he did, and he thinks I could do what he does? Well, if he thinks that I can do it, then maybe I can." That type of mentoring I think is so important, which is why I try to pay it forward now in my own career.
Tahirah: Both of you have also mentioned something in your answer, similar answers here. You've done this work for years and decades, and it's something that you continually choose to do, even as things may have peaks and valleys within the work and profession. If you're talking to someone who is questioning and saying, "Is this the right profession or field for me," what are some thoughts, or advice, or nuggets that you would share with them? And what has kept you continuing to do the work?
Whitney: I'm going to take that in reverse order. I'm going to answer with what keeps me doing the work, and then the advice I would give to somebody who's trying to assess whether or not this is something they would want to try, or if they're doing it, if they would want to keep doing it.
Joy talked about how a lot of us have grown up thinking in this work, and that's so true. I think I have matured in understanding the impact of this work. When I took my first admission job, it was an opportunity and I thought it would be fun. That's not a career plan, and it's certainly not a value driven decision. But in doing the work, and the more responsibility that I had over time, the more I had an understanding of the impact of what we were offering through higher education, and the ways that we were thinking about deploying the resources of whatever school I was working in, how can we maximize what it is that we're trying to do and delivering education with what we have available to use.
Strategic thinking about that, as it related to impact and thinking about principles and values, is something that I learned more about as I became a more mature person, but also more responsibility within the work. When I think where I am now, and I'm at the University of Pennsylvania, and it's 30-something years after I got started in higher ed, and the challenges that exist for higher education now, what keeps me in it is that I have such strong feelings and commitment to the power of higher education. There are amazing students absolutely everywhere. Our responsibility is to get better and better at finding the ways to invite them into higher education and make the process one that can work for students, no matter where they're applying from and what kind of support they have. It just feels like this is a really critical time to be remaining committed to that.
Giving advice to somebody who's new to it or imagining taking it on, I think it's hard for anybody to imagine the whole trajectory of a career, at whatever point that question comes up. It's a lot of what we tell college applicants to think about when they're thinking about what schools to have on their list, is what energizes you? What helps you think about what you want to focus on? You can concentrate on it for a really long time, and it feels like it really matters, and you want to talk about it, you enjoy being in conversations about it. The skills that are being asked of you to do whatever job you have in admissions, let's say, does that resonate with how you feel energized and can see a path of the next thing you'd want to do with it? Then you follow that, wherever that path may take you, which may keep you in higher ed admissions for decades, as it has for me. Or it may be an entry point into something where, then you move in a different direction with that skill development in mind.
There were a number of times over my career where I considered exiting higher ed admissions because the skills we use are applicable in so many places. There would be really interesting opportunities to think about pivoting and still developing as a professional, and I obviously made a decision to stay in higher ed.
Joy: If I look at times in my career, I never could have predicted that this would have been my career. I think that's true for many professions. Two things keep me in the profession. One is that I did take a little time to try something else. It took two years, and I worked in a high school. I was like, "I don't like it on this side. I liked the other side." I can't even really articulate why that was, because I love working with high school students, that's part of what I like about working in admissions, but I just didn't like working in a school environment. I remember that. I remind myself, "You tried some other things, you just weren't as passionate about them as you are about this," and that's what keeps me here.
Then the other thing is that I have a sister who works in a major corporation. We will talk on the phone all the time. You know what? It's like she's dealing with the same problems. What she will often say to me is, "At least the problems that you're dealing with are actually going to significantly change people's lives. The problems that I'm dealing with are about our business's bottom line. I can tell myself it matters, my product matters in people's lives, but I don't get to see the way that I'm able to influence people's individual lives in the way that you get to see them in the work that you do."
It's those two things that keep me there, because trust me, when she gets her bonus and it's more than my annual salary, it hurts a little bit. But I'm a very curious person, and I like to be highly engaged, and I like to be challenged. I've just figured out that this work does that for me.
Tahirah: The passion that you have for the work comes through in every answer that you all give, which leads me to believe that there's a lot of emotional investment in the work that you're doing, a lot of energy that you're expanding. We cannot end this conversation in any way without asking about balance. One of the common themes when we talk to our members is burnout, work life balance. We are in March, this is now a timely conversation, for the work that we do.
How do you balance it all? How do you keep yourselves healthy and still come with the same passion that you all are bringing today?
Joy: Every time someone says work-life balance, I know it's an inappropriate response, but I just laugh. Balance, I don't know what that would look like, but honestly, I also don't know actually many people in many other professions that really feel that they have that as well.
What I think influences how I feel about the work is, quite frankly, my own self-work. How do I protect myself from the stress of this job, which exists in any job. I worked at McDonald's when I was in high school, the drive through, very stressful. If I was still working in the drive through at McDonald's, I would be stressed out a lot. Where I have grown is learning how to take care of myself, and maybe also as a woman, learning how to feel okay about being selfish and taking care of myself.
I've always had a movement practice, a regular movement practice. I'm fortunate that my partner, my husband, that is something in our marriage that we highly value. When we go look at a place that we are going to live, whether it's renting or buying a house, our first thought is, "Where are we going to put the gym?" I've always had regular movement practice. It's not always hardcore. Over time, I've done yoga practice, I've done marathons, I've done triathlons. I try to do a lot of different things. Sometimes I'm like, "You know what, at this period of my life, I might need to go talk to a therapist," and I do that. I will tell people that I do that. Or I've been doing the infrared sauna, the cold bath thing, and I am not someone who likes the cold.
The balance is not so much about the job, because I feel like when I take care of myself, then I can create the appropriate boundaries that I need to create with the people that I'm working with, and with the work that I'm asked to do. I just always focus on what is in my control, and what I use to protect myself, and to give me the energy I need to keep doing this.
Whitney: I also, when you were asking about balance, was thinking, "I don't know if there is a balance." I do think that self-awareness is a key part of this. That's what I heard Joy describing in being really committed to movement. I don't think that all leaders need to run marathons, but I have done that as well. Honestly, I don't really enjoy that. Each time I've done a marathon, it has been during an incredibly stressful time. For whatever reason, I've never been inspired to do that when I'm not feeling also really challenged by stressful things that are outside of my control. There's something about each time I've run a marathon was, "I am choosing this particularly hard thing that I am committing to, and I'm going to see it through, and this one is mine."
On the day-to-day, what I find rejuvenating, or how I found an opportunity to relax my mind in some way, changes. I think the boundary setting keeps changing. Sometimes I can set a boundary and have more time for myself, and sometimes that needs to be less because the urgency and seriousness of what's required in my work life is hard to draw any other way. But I think not losing sight of how important it is, in the bigger picture, to have both is a really important way to do the work.
I think having commitments, whatever they are, that are not related to your work is just essential, however that might show up for somebody.
Joy: Can I just say, really quickly too, boundary setting doesn't mean if my boss comes in and says this has to be done tomorrow, "I'm sorry, I'm setting a boundary." To me, boundary setting is about how I respond to that. Boundary setting is actually my ability to say, "Okay." Take a deep breath, "I will not let this external thing disrupt my calm." That's setting a boundary. You always control that.
I think of people who have been prisoners of war ... I'm not comparing our work to being in prison. But if you think about it, the human body and the human brain are these amazingly strong tools. We have much more control over our circumstances, work circumstances, personal circumstances, than we often realize.
Tahirah: I know we're running out of time, but my quick/close up question is what do you want your legacy and imprint on the profession and professional in our field to be?
Joy: Oh, jeez. Honestly, my greatest hope is that I can convince people who might, based on their identity or their circumstance, might otherwise not see themselves as leaders, that I can convince them to at least try it, and to develop the skills they need to develop to get those opportunities. For me, when I came into the profession, leaders were disproportionately male and white. I look at the leadership now, it's much more diverse. I think of the poor people, like Yolanda Copeland Morgan, who were out there as very lone figures. I think, "Well, if she could do it, I can do this, too." That's what I hope my legacy is. I hope that I change the lives of students, but in terms of the profession, I hope I keep good people in this profession.
Whitney: I love that. I hope when I'm no longer doing this work and people reflect on my contribution that they would think of me as being really committed and generous with opportunity, to look for opportunity for people, much like what Joy's talking about. As leaders at the level that we are, we get a lot of opportunities. Sometimes invitations come to me because I'm the one that people thought of, but I can think of somebody who would be really great in that opportunity, and it doesn't have to be me. When I think about professional development for people, I hope that I'm remembered for having thought about it that way.
Then in the work more broadly, I really hope that my intention to use this work to do good in the world is greater than any one of us. The role that I have allows me to be a vehicle in moving an agenda forward. To take our principles and find ways to deploy them in the circumstances that we live with now, and whatever they might be five years from now, or 10 years from now, that's how I hope people will think of me when I'm no longer doing this work.
Tahirah: What a wonderful way to end our conversation and time together. I want to thank Joy and Whitney again, for taking time out to have such a wonderful conversation.
Thanks to our audiences for joining us for another great episode. College Admissions Decoded is a podcast from NACAC, the National Association for College Admission Counseling. It is produced by Phantom Center Media. Kojin Tashiro produced this episode. If you'd like to learn more about NACAC's mission and the college admission process, visit our website at www.nacacnet.org. That's N-A-C-A-C-N-E-T-DOT-O-R-G. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review.
CITATION: National Association for College Admission Counseling. “
Empowering Perspectives: Women Leaders in College Admission Counseling” NACAC College Admissions Decoded,
National Association for College Admissions Counseling, April 2024.