On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal included a cover story on the “Fraud Squad” at Caltech, which mentioned their use of VIVA in their application review process. It was very exciting to be included in the article, and as one might expect, there’s more to the story.

~~~~

At our Dialogue Council meeting last year, everyone knew that there was an issue with authorship and authenticity in college admissions, and that these issues were only going to be more acute thanks to AI. We (InitialView) felt that maybe video could be used to address these concerns. Also, as AI was becoming more powerful, it was hallucinating less. This meant that perhaps it was becoming dependable enough to serve as the backbone for a new admissions tool.

With a version hosted locally on my computer, I showed the Dialogue Council a VIVA where it asked our son questions about a piece of response writing that he did back when he was in the IB program at our local high school. When I asked him to do it, I was off to the side watching him respond to the AI voice. I saw him transform from hemming and hawing about my request to find an old paper to intently listening and trying to answer correctly.

When I paused the VIVA video, Ashley Pallie, the dean of admissions at Caltech, raised her hand and said, “If you build it, we will use it.”

Now, if a college says they will use one of our tools in their admissions process, then that’s all we need. This happened when Georgia Tech said they wanted interviews with international applicants, and it was the same when Duke said a simple 90-second video could cut through the clutter of highly polished applications.

Once we got the thumbs up from Caltech, it was off to the races. We had a host of interesting decisions to make around the UI/UX, but for the most part we were building a system that was—other than the AI-powered questioner—very similar to other systems we had built.

One of the more interesting steps in development was a “focus group” that we held at Georgia Tech. We asked our sophomore Yellowjacket son to gather a group of his friends who would be willing to test VIVA over a lunch of free-flowing chicken sandwiches. They were instructed to bring a paper they had written. As we talked with his friends about VIVA, they immediately started brainstorming ways that they might game it. After they had all tried it with their own paper, my cofounder told them to grab a paper they didn’t write and try to fake it.

The “fakers” were evident in interesting ways. Not only did accessing an LLM on the side often appear obvious on camera, but the students also wilted when asked more contextual questions along the lines of “What was the biggest challenge?” or “What inspired you to study this topic?” As one student remarked to us after trying to pawn off a paper as her own, when you didn’t write something yourself, you don’t know what you don’t know. If you did write something, you can be very frank and talk about what you studied and what you didn’t, but if you didn’t write it, you don’t know where that line is.

I was able to demonstrate VIVA this summer at International ACAC. First, I showed the following VIVA (feel free to take a look!). I then asked the 100+ people in the audience, “Who in here is an expert in different types of regression analysis?” (Other than a few sheepish PhD candidates, no one raised their hands). Then I asked: “Who here thinks that he wrote this extended essay?” Everyone’s hands went up.

Here’s the insight: When a student has to answer, on the fly and on video, a set of questions about their work or experience, a reviewer doesn’t have to be a subject matter expert to be confident that a student did the work and knows what they are talking about. Conceivably, an expert con artist/Oscar-winning actor could fool us on video, but it’s much, much harder to do that than to put one’s name on an AI-generated piece of writing. It’s so hard to do, in fact, that when one watches a VIVA where the student is talking about something important to them, one can’t help but be impressed and perhaps even downright inspired.

During the past admissions cycle, as we saw students use VIVA, we were able to experiment with use-cases beyond just research. We confirmed that VIVA could work for the “tinkerers”: students who build something and wanted to show it to the admissions office. We saw that it could also work for a paper or for a presentation. It quickly became a general-purpose tool that, for students, gave them a chance to “go deep” about something they had done, and for admissions offices, gave them the ability to better locate top talent that would thrive at their institution.

In hindsight, there’s nothing more reasonable than requiring a little more disclosure from applicants. The institution needs it, the honest students deserve it, the system requires it. And yet, anyone in the admissions world knows that many admissions offices would not even take that step, so powerful is the concern that any change to the process might negatively impact the all-important goal of increasing app numbers.1 We are very sympathetic to our friends who are subject to these forces. We know they are real and see it as our job to support our colleagues as they are navigating these pressures.

However, I want to salute a client, even though it runs the risk of sounding a bit sycophantic. When we first started in the admissions world, admissions officers, when politely declining our services, would often say, “Oh, such and such institution would really be interested in this”. We would act on their suggestion only to find that such and such institution was in fact not interested in what we were selling.

Eventually we realized that it wasn’t about the type of institution at all; it was about the individuals in the offices. After all, the first two adopters of our interviews way back when were Georgia Tech and Bryn Mawr.2 Sure, each institution brings with it a unique blend of pressures that admissions officers cannot ignore, but at the end of the day it was about the personalities that were in the admissions office. Were they open to new things? Did they see problems around the corner and look for ways to solve them? Were they willing to do what they could with the clout they had?

We’ve heard some say that VIVA got started because of the nature of Caltech, that only a school like Caltech could do something so innovative. But Caltech could have easily decided the opposite. They could have decided that they were so selective that it wasn’t their problem.

In the end, it wasn’t “Caltech”; it was Ashley. It was her leadership that got her office profiled on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, in a career-defining piece that further bolstered the reputation of her institution.

One final note: It’s great that the Wall Street Journal used a cover story to highlight Caltech’s commitment to running a good process that is fair and rewards talent. There is nothing but good to see here, and we should be excited and encouraged by what Caltech as an office is doing. It is very exciting for us to get to play a small role, an opportunity for which we will always be grateful.

A recent conversation in The New York Times between a selection of prominent academics and industry leaders continues the deeply interesting and ultimately unknowable question of how AI will impact our jobs in the future. One offhand comment jumped out, as it could provide a roadmap for higher ed as it looks to prepare students to live with AI. To quote:

[A] lot of knowledge work, in the end . . . comes down to persuading people of things.1

In other words, future successful knowledge workers will be those who can persuade others to join them and contribute either their skills or resources in the pursuit of a certain task. Of course, getting others to adopt your view of the world has always been an important prerequisite to success in any (relatively) free market economy, but unpacking the comment allows us to work backwards to what higher ed should be providing students in preparation for entering the AI world.

Generating Trust

What does it take to persuade people to join your cause, whether it be big or small? It takes trust. And how is trust generated? It is generated by personal relationships combined with demonstrating both a specific and a broad understanding of the task at hand. You can have a personal relationship with someone, but at the same time know you’d never trust them as a business partner. One might have a very niche skill, but if that skill isn’t tied to some greater understanding of how it could help others, then it isn’t going to be adopted, employed, or invested in by someone else. Conversely, many might wax eloquently about big picture ideals, but lack a sufficient understanding of the details required by any particular task. If that’s the case, they’re going to have a hard time getting others to join their grand plans.

So then, how does one go about “getting good” at fostering personal relationships? They spend time with others trying to get things done—in person.2 This strongly suggests that online college learning should be resisted by those who want to thrive in an AI-infused world. It’s too hard to create deep relationships in a class done solely over Zoom.

Conversely, helping students hone their real-time interaction skills can be the raison d'être of traditional residential colleges. After all, writing is becoming less important given that it’s both easy to produce apart from human thinking and, relatedly, losing its ability to persuade. What is not diminishing in impact, however, is the power of an in-person conversation where two people are focused on exchanging ideas. Students’ relationship muscles can be trained in residential halls housing roommates from all over the country, in seminars with quirky professors who start off strict but end beloved, during group work where one member inevitably isn’t pulling their weight, and in the dining halls while enjoying cereal one was never allowed to eat as a kid.

My co-founder and I travel a lot. And we joke that we need to travel more, because nothing innovative ever gets done over Zoom. Of course, when a team knows each other and the task and roles are well-defined, virtual work can be great (for example, almost all of our operations are run virtually, which allows us to give our colleagues flexibility and search for the best talent without geographic constraints). In fact, in a previous life as a corporate lawyer, I’d see billion-dollar-plus deals be executed over conference calls with participants never even knowing what each other looked like.

But since I’m now in the business of coming up with ideas that will solve our clients’ problems, we have to be in person. This allows us to get the undivided attention of our current and potential clients, to be able to iterate in real time, and to ultimately be able to garner trust. Much of the day-to-day of higher ed administration might be on Zoom, but anything new that moves the needle starts with in-person interaction.

The pursuit of knowledge? Ok, sure, fine. But college in the popular mind is about the undergrad experience, where the process of learning is more important than the product of learning. Residential colleges should lean into the fact that they are a low-stakes crucible for helping young adults understand that relationships are needed to get anything done.

Professors Provide Glimpses3 into the Real World

One type of college relationship—the relationship with a professor or instructor—helps students understand what it means to have sufficient expertise about a specific topic. A big part of college is adapting to a higher academic standard. This means that papers are more sophisticated, tests cover more material, and studying takes more time. Students receive feedback in the form of comments and grades in a way that prepares them for the feedback that they will receive in the workforce. One professor of mine in college often talked about the learning process that comes when students are forced to do repeated drafts of a paper. They hand in something they think is close to being finished, only to receive detailed comments back that show just how far they still have to go. I still have a vivid memory of when I went to talk with my advisor about the first draft of my graduation thesis, only to be told, “You really can’t write”. Thanks to this straight talk, I got my act together and produced higher-quality work than I otherwise would have.

Students must learn to be detail-oriented and how to create with care. All this feedback, regardless of how it is delivered, is helping 20-year-old students get closer to the standards required for someone to present themselves as truly understanding a certain discrete topic, whether it be the American Revolution, a math proof, or a business plan.

Big Beautiful Pictures

But to be persuasive, one still needs to connect one's discrete expertise with the proverbial big picture. Someone might have great expertise in something that looks impressive (knitting, juggling, solving Rubik’s Cubes), but if they’re not able to connect it to larger ideas that a customer cares about, they are not going to get paid.4

We learned this building InitialView: Our growth hasn’t only come from explaining what our interviews and videos do, but from connecting them to what is being lost in admissions and the classroom—authenticity, voice, and real-time engagement.

This suggests an enduring role for liberal arts. By engaging with big-picture ideas that drive individuals and history, students can better enter the workforce and demonstrate to bosses and clients how their ideas can solve their problems. Learning broad concepts in economics, philosophy, history, sociology, psychology, and literature can foster the ability to make connections and facilitate conversations with more senior decision-makers. The liberal arts are even more valuable now that Claude and ChatGPT can help with analyzing and manipulating data, skills that used to take years to develop. LLMs can’t help you determine what is important or where you should look—but the liberal arts, coupled with deep relationships that are intentionally fostered in a residential community, can.

At the end of the day, we don’t know how our jobs will change because of AI. But we can know that trust will be a necessary component in professional success, fostered by those who are best at real-time engagement. And for young adults who want to start honing their real-time engagement skills, that can best be done in a residential college.5

I love working with my wife. When we tell others we work together, we often hear: “I could never work with my [husband/wife].” But sometimes people want to know more and ask, “How do you and your wife make it work?”

This post veers into personal territory, but it’s a topic that comes up in every client meeting (we have to mention at the beginning of any meeting that we are husband and wife; otherwise, we’ll inadvertently start saying things that sound very weird if we weren’t married). So here are some thoughts on how to run a business with your spouse:

1) Boundaries: We have three kids, and we joke that InitialView is our fourth child. Of course, we love our three kids more than InitialView, but InitialView is still a lot and sometimes threatens to become too much. While we don’t have many boundaries, we do have one: We don’t talk about work on Sundays.

Sundays are for church, having a relaxed lunch with family and friends, perhaps a little exercise and/or napping, and just generally making sure we have quieted the ever-present to-do list we’ve been focused on throughout the week.

In her 2003 oft-quoted article, “Bring Back the Sabbath”, Judith Shulevitz talked about how, after leaving her orthodox Jewish community many years earlier, she began returning because she longed for the benefit of the Sabbath, for how it helped counterbalance her “neurotic drive to achieve”. We would absolutely echo everything she says in her article, while also being challenged by it!1 And to think her article was written before the iPhone!

We’re quite “religious” about not talking about our business on Sundays. This means we often remind each other to wait until Monday to discuss something. We don’t respond to emails. We try hard to not travel on Sunday or have any sort of meetings. Admittedly, one of the reasons we get to observe our Sabbath is that we are our own bosses, but it still takes commitment from both of us to quell the desire to be efficient and responsive.

Back when we lived in Beijing, a group of admissions officers was coming through on Sunday and asked to meet up for drinks. My wife justified joining the event by saying that “It wasn’t really ‘work’” given how she saw it as more like a group of friends meeting up. However, she was a mess for the rest of the week, tired and generally unable to be as productive as she hoped. In hindsight, she realized that the Sunday work event had prevented her from getting the rest she needed to be successful during the week. Even with that lesson, we still sometimes fail to protect our Sundays, but we’re committed to intentionally not working and not even thinking about our business on Sundays. And it’s made all the difference: We shudder to think where our relationship would be if we didn’t use Sunday to prevent the business from being all-consuming.2

However, other than resting on Sunday, we don’t really have any other boundaries between work and life. Our vacations often serve double-duty: As a family, we might be at the beach during spring break, but we’re still online. We might be hanging out in a new city, but we’re also setting up meetings. We talk about our business early in the morning and late at night. Our Saturdays might be a little more relaxed, but they are still considered work days.

2) Skill Sets: My wife often says we have complementary skill sets. I play the role of the “wordsmith” and “strategy” person while she’s more in the weeds of the day-to-day details. I’m not surprisingly the “lawyer”, while she’s the money person, managing cash to make sure that we are meeting all of our commitments.

She claims to like being in the weeds, but her focus on them has the added benefit of preventing me from worrying about money. I know the big things, and we decide big decisions together, but if I were in charge of how the money moves, it would probably only distract me from focusing on areas we can grow.

I do like being the strategy person—it forces me to read broadly and think often about how to capitalize on trends. My wife says that she would hate that role, even going so far as once saying, “I always knew I was good at execution; I just didn’t have any ideas.” While she’s exaggerating, I indeed love ideas.

But complementary doesn’t mean siloed. If someone were a fly following us around, they would likely be surprised by how much we do together. The most important thing we do is have conversations with our clients, and we almost always do that together. It’s where we get our ideas, and fostering these client relationships is one of the most enjoyable things we do. Even though I’m the wordsmith half of our relationship, I almost never send an email without her taking a look and giving me feedback. We tell clients that they can always cc each of us on emails, not only to make it easy on them but also because it ensures we both see it and can individually think about it before we talk about it.

3) Work Content: We’re both jazzed about the content of our work. We joke that our arrangement works because our interests are aligned—and that's true—but we also find what we do fascinating.

There are couple-run businesses where one has the marquee skill and the other provides the discipline/support. That’s not true in our case: We both love the content of what we do and love being a part of college admissions—we see it as a nexus of so many things happening locally, nationally, and internationally. It has both lofty goals and practical aspects. We love working with college students. In fact, thanks to our tools, we “meet” more college-bound seniors than anyone else in the world!

In other words, it’s helpful for each to really love the content of what you do.

4) Successes and Disappointments: When something goes well, or we hit a milestone, it’s great to celebrate together. Work successes double as personal successes that you’re sharing with your spouse. When things don’t go well, it’s of course a challenge. In our best moments, we can prop each other up (“Hey, it’s you and me against the world”). We’ve both made “business” mistakes, and that means we just have to forgive each other and quickly forget about it. No need to focus on it, as (a) mistakes should be made if you’re trying new things, and (b) aligned interests means that each of us is doing our very best for the company and our family.

5) Synergies: I think a married couple running a business can make decisions faster. Internal politics are less of an issue. Each spouse has a natural sounding board they can use at any time. We are often workshopping ideas and honing pitches. It’s presumptuous to say I’m a good boss, but I’m definitely a better boss given that my wife is often persuading me to do the opposite of what I first think I should.

6) A Recommendation: Instead of simply saying, “Here’s how we make it work...”, I’m going to recommend that you should try to make it work! More couples should run businesses together!

Life is short. How you spend your days is how you spend your life. If you’ve married your best friend, why not work hard to make sure you get more time with that best friend? One of my friends who often travels for work commented recently, “So let me get this straight: You get to go on business trips with your wife?”

We do! It’s so great that it pains me to think that most don’t get to do that!

In fact, the question “Should you run a business with your spouse?” is an easy one. But that doesn’t answer the truly hard question: “What business should you run together?”

Just as it is anywhere, AI is a hot topic in admissions. It was a hot topic at the USC CERPP Conference, where I (Terry) got to be a part of a panel assembled by Emily Pacheco, the head of NACAC’s SIG on AI, and it was a hot topic at the NACAC Innovation Summit, where we presented VIVA. It was clear at each that exposure to, and understanding of, AI varied greatly among the admissions leaders. While I’m merely an enthusiastic AI user, I’ve put pen to paper describing what I see as the current state of AI usage in the US admissions process.

The Four “E’s” OF AI in College Admissions

1) ENDPOINTS: In his book “Futureproof”, the New York Times reporter Kevin Roose presents one of his “rules” for humans in the age of automation as “Don’t be an endpoint.” As Roose explains, in computer programming, endpoints allow computer programs to communicate with other programs using what’s known as an application programming interface, or API.

He tells a story about a tech pundit’s response to the Google AI demo where a computer called a hair salon to book an appointment. The pundit commented: “Humans are quickly becoming expensive API endpoints.” In other words, the salon receptionist was merely the connection between two systems: (a) Google’s AI and (b) the calendar system that kept track of the appointments. The two systems needed the receptionist to communicate with each other, but we can also imagine how receptionists might soon be replaced.

Roose gives more examples of “human endpoints”: a security guard checking someone into a system before allowing them into the building, or an Uber driver that “connects” the car (which is really just a mobile computer) to its ride-hailing algorithm.

Admissions officers can think of examples in their own offices when they themselves are human endpoints, whether it be doing data entry or answering admissions questions from students. To some extent, the question is not whether admissions officers are human endpoints—they are—but rather to what extent do they provide services that can’t be supplanted by AI?

One example is recalculating GPA. It used to be the first step of reviewing an application as admissions officers wrangled myriad types of student transcripts into a consistent form that allowed more of an “apples to apples” comparison. Many offices are finding success with AI-based tools that now do these types of “transcript processing” jobs for them, and as a result, many are saving hundreds of employee hours each year.

Many would likely see the removal of this human endpoint as a positive step.

2) ENGAGEMENT: On the exhibit hall floor at the Fall 2025 NACAC Conference, many of the vendors to admissions offices were suddenly touting their AI agents, promising that prospective applicants could interact with a bot to get any answer they might need. We even had one well-known senior salesperson tell us that her entire company—a company that always has one of the “big booths” on the exhibit floor—had pivoted completely to AI agents. If AI can write canned responses and answer questions 24/7, that’s much more responsive than work-study interns manning the admissions hotline. With AI, colleges can do a better job of recruiting around the clock.

Indeed, AI agents are here and are going to continue to become more useful. However, universities need to make sure that these agents have strong guardrails. For example, a savvy chatter might be able to get a chatbot to agree to crazy things, and then the university might be legally liable! Imagine an influencer trying to get an admissions chatbot to say something controversial politically—from any number of perspectives—and then recording the exchange and posting it on social media. Any AI agent provider needs to have a very good answer to this issue. At a minimum, disclaimers are going to need to be everywhere, indicating that the bots cannot contractually bind the institution. Bots are not yet ready to negotiate financial aid packages.

But the use of bots to communicate with students brings up even more fundamental issues for admissions offices. Stay tuned for more on this in #4 below!

3) ESSAYS. If you want to make an admissions officer squirm, ask them about the role of essays in the admissions process. Ask them how often a student’s Common App essay is so compelling that it helps make a positive difference in the result.

The answer is that it almost never does. But it almost never did—and now, thanks to AI, the chance of an essay making a difference is almost nil.

A generation ago, one’s college essay was a carefully crafted statement that applicants labored over to ensure that it made sense and didn’t have grammatical errors. Admissions officers would look negatively upon essays that didn’t seem polished or had mistakes.

Now, thanks to ChatGPT, the grammatical mistakes are gone! Admissions officers miss the errors because at least with errors, they knew they were written by humans. Essays have always sounded similar—now they are all the same, and any chance at hearing a student’s voice has been wiped clean by ChatGPT and Grammarly.

Here’s how admissions officers do use essays: First, they make sure that an essay lines up with the rest of the application (many don’t). Second, they use them to see if students themselves line up with an institutional priority (for example, the student writes about a major that is looking for students). Third, they use the essays to determine if the student is truly interested. The “optional” short supplemental essays? If a student doesn’t take time with them, then it indicates they are not interested in the school (and therefore unlikely to attend if admitted).

But are admissions officers using essays to determine whether applicants are college-level writers? Definitely not. Application essays allow everyone to pretend that the college application process is one of reflection and self-discovery, and not just the giant sorting process that it is.

Now, admissions offices have the same issue as Facebook: they are being overrun with AI slop. And Facebook, one of the world’s most famous platforms, is not going away just because of the rise of AI slop. And neither is the college application essay.

The college essay is dead. Long live the essay!

4) EFFICIENCY: This could be seen as the overall driver for any AI adoption in admissions. Managers want to save time and resources. But for admissions leaders, any desire for efficiency has to be countered with the understanding that human involvement, even if “inefficient”, might be critical to what college offers.

Adam Ozimek, the chief economist at the think tank Economic Innovation Group, writes about the example of the player piano in a recent Substack titled “AI and the Economics of Human Touch”. The player piano, invented in 1895, essentially allowed a piano to play music by itself; the human’s only job was to pump the pneumatic pedals that powered the air-powered contraption. In other words, for over 100 years, we’ve been able to automatically create perfect piano music.

And yet, in many contexts and many ways, people still want to hear piano music—or really any music—played live by an individual. At any time, we could turn on Spotify and hear perfect renditions of classical music, but instead, millions of people pay to go to the symphony. We can hear Taylor Swift at any time, and yet we will pay thousands of dollars to go hear her in person. We will even “pay” to hear bad renditions of popular songs by a live wedding band.

The point is that there are still many parts of our economy that have the human touch, and if history is our guide, then we can expect the desire for the human touch in our economy to continue.

In the case of admissions offices, this is perhaps the key issue for leaders. What part of the admissions process requires the human touch? Many admissions offices take the approach that if they require students to fill out an application and jump through hoops, then it is important to have humans review applications. For most families, college will be one of their largest expenses, and they are going to compare institutions closely. Where did I feel welcomed? Where was I an afterthought, and where did they treat me like I was a VIP? To maintain the human touch, admissions offices are going to need to retain humans, which in turn will require advocating within the institution for a budget that involves “high touch” activity, like in-person recruiting, trained tour guides, and easy access to individuals who can advise on financial aid packages. If parents don’t feel like they are receiving the human touch, even at a large institution, then they are going to take their tuition dollars elsewhere.

If one shells out for a nice hotel or a nice meal, they expect good, personal, human service. It’s the same for college.

Indeed, the question of human touch reverberates throughout the academy. Offering asynchronous online classes at first seems to solve a lot of problems. Classroom scheduling issues go away, and professors don’t have to jockey for the good times to teach. Students don’t need to go to class when they can just log in. However, this makes college like just watching YouTube. If everything is online, conversations with classmates are harder to have, and relationships with professors and classmates are less likely to develop. In other words, if higher education institutions want to have a life-changing impact on individuals, then they need to have more of the human touch, not less. It will be more expensive. It will be more challenging. But it will also be more meaningful.

And back at the admissions office, it is the demand for the human touch that will justify the continued existence of admissions officers.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Some final words of advice to admissions leaders (a bonus “E”!):

5) EXPERIMENTATION: Admissions leaders should ensure that their staff is experimenting with AI regularly. They should purchase “enterprise access” to one of the foundation LLMs and give it to staff to use. If they don’t have a sense right now of which to use or have one offered to them, then they can have a junior colleague research the options and report back (but here’s what it will be between: OpenAI, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, & Claude). Part of the junior colleague’s job should be to get clearance from IT colleagues in the university.

The main issue with individual use in an office is one of student data and privacy. As long as you are paying for an enterprise version and making sure to opt out of sharing data with models, you’re complying with what seems to be the current accepted practice for having LLMs handle sensitive data (many of these “foundation models” are even being used for military secrets, so it should be OK for complying with privacy rules involving student data—but get your IT colleagues to confirm!).

You’ll want to make sure that your staff understands that only an approved model version can handle student data; you don’t want them mistakenly thinking that any OpenAI chat window is ok.

Your team members will be keen to use AI, and they will likely discover novel insights that will make your office run better. As a general rule, innovation comes from the bottom up, not top down; therefore, it’s the leaders’ job to create an environment where good ideas rise to the top.

One more caveat: Your staff will need to understand that they alone are responsible for the results, not the AI. We’ve all heard stories about AI-generated materials being used in official settings, only to be exposed as incorrect or even completely made up. AI is like the extremely talented and positive intern who can do challenging, discrete tasks but who also lies and confidently creates reports with errors, all while complimenting you. Its prodigious capabilities could easily lull one into a false sense of complacency. Part of learning how to use AI is knowing when not to trust AI.

One way to innovate in higher ed admissions is to look at tech trends elsewhere in society and then ask why that tech trend doesn’t show up in the application process. There’s an inherent conservatism in admissions offices, as the security guards/admissions officers1 guide a process that preserves and protects their institution’s reputation.

Nonetheless, if one can figure out a way to adapt a trend so that it (a) works for students (i.e., it’s something that students will appreciate and take advantage of) and (b) works for admissions officers (i.e., it brings them useful information they don’t already have in an easy-to-process format), then one might have something with enough inertia to overcome these institutional guardians’ resistance to change.

One trend with undeniable inertia is video. A few months back, social commentator Derek Thomson wrote a popular Substack entry, “Everything is Television”. His point is that the different types of media we consume are converging from disparate forms into one thing: “the continuous flow of episodic video”. It’s a great article full of interesting cultural observations.

Of course, we’re all living this. Video is becoming easier to participate in, produce, and distribute, so there’s more of it. Video conferencing is so straightforward that we do it instead of making a phone call. All of our phones have front- and rear-facing video cameras and contain the ability to edit video with an ease that wasn’t even possible just a short time ago.

In the life of the student, Thomson’s assertion could be rephrased as “Everything is Video”. Not only are students spending hours on TikTok and Instagram and consuming much of their “traditional” entertainment via Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube, but they are also taking online classes and interviewing for jobs over Zoom.

And while video is becoming even more prevalent for students, the written word is losing its power. Authorship has always been an issue with the written word—ghost writers are not new—but now the ghost writer is ChatGPT and right at everyone’s fingertips. Before ChatGPT, administrators and educators typically assumed student authorship of writing they received (and maybe even then they shouldn’t have). Now, administrators realize that assigned papers have plummeted in educational value, and admissions officers can’t deny that the college essay emperor has no clothes.

Video is attractive precisely because it can reinforce authenticity. While yes, video can be edited and filtered, if it’s produced in a context that restricts the bells and whistles of modern video production, it can provide a needed, authentic look at the student (this is what Glimpse does, and our interviews go even further in this regard). Ironically, the desire of many applicants to come across as “perfect” hurts their chances, as it makes them look fake and dull. Instead, better to be authentic, because then you also have the chance to be inspiring.

But it is not just students who are being impacted by ChatGPT. Teachers, as well, cannot resist the temptation to get some help from LLMs with repetitive tasks, like writing recommendation letters. Admissions officers see ChatGPT impacting teacher rec letters in a similar way as it has impacted essays—they are all starting to sound the same and becoming less useful.

This is why we launched ECHO. When video has thoughtful constraints, it can preserve authenticity. When easy to use, video can be the preferred medium. For many, recording an ECHO is easier than writing a recommendation letter. It’s more authentic as well—an admissions officer is able to receive a more nuanced look into what makes a student special. It can become an important data point in trying to understand the impact of an applicant in high school and then extrapolate their potential as a college student.

One of our favorite ECHOs this cycle was from a wrestling coach. As he recorded it with his phone while swiveling in a chair in his office, the viewer learned about this student from an adult who had spent hours with this applicant in stressful and challenging situations. The viewer gets the sense not only that the applicant was special but also that the coach would have seen writing a recommendation as an onerous chore. Anyone watching couldn’t help but smile.

We literally “see” the college admissions process more than anyone in the world. We have a clear “picture” of what applicants are doing in a way that no one else does. We love love love the impact of video and how it preserves authenticity. It does so in a process where the siren’s song of polish and perfection leads to many an applicant’s demise in the admissions committee room.

ECHO—along with our other video-based tools—neatly aligns with how video is simply everywhere. Of course, the admissions process will always lag behind broader cultural trends. But if one can help a security guard enjoy something that everyone else around them is already using, then maybe even admissions officers might be willing to try new things.

If you’re currently waiting, fingers crossed and wondering if there’s anything else you can do now that you’ve submitted your applications, here are a few thoughts:

1) Send Your Glimpse Everywhere You Are Applying. Is large State U going to look at it? We can’t guarantee it, but we know that some do. We can, however, guarantee that if you don’t send it, they won’t see it. But seriously, if you’re happy with your Glimpse, send it everywhere you’re applying. We’re pretty good at getting materials in the hands of admissions officers, and at the end of each cycle, admissions officers we don’t know come up to us and tell us how our materials helped some student get in.

One more thing to realize: We know from admissions officers that a Glimpse-giver often gets more merit aid. When you get 20 grand a year of merit aid for four years, that’s almost $1000 for each second1 of your Glimpse. Not a bad deal!

2) Use Your Two Virtual Stars. Virtual Stars are tracked by many colleges (to the point where admissions offices run searches for these at different stages of the admissions process). A few rules of thumb: Don’t use a Star on an “ED” school—an “ED” school already knows that you are serious about them. If you want, send an email to each “Star” school with the simple language: “Hi Awesome U: I’ve applied, and I just wanted to let you know that I also gave you an InitialView Virtual Star that you can see with my [Glimpse/interview]. Thank you!” You shouldn’t need to do so, but again, why not?

Schools only know that they received a Star and have no idea which school received your other one. Stars appear as they are given, so it’s not apparent in our materials that you haven’t given a Star, particularly in the early winter months.

3) Add an ECHO: Anyone who does a Glimpse or our interview/writing sample has a chance to ask for an ECHO from an adult who’s been impactful in their life. This does not have to be a teacher, but instead could be a coach, a youth group leader, a boss, etc. Have it be someone who knows you well and who has seen what you’ve done in your junior and senior years of high school (those are the years that admissions officers focus on). ECHOs sit right with your InitialView materials and are easily viewed by admissions officers.

ECHOs work because they reinforce that you’ve got a group of adults who will go to bat for you. If you can show that as a high schooler you got one or two adults on your side, then there’s a good chance that you can “recruit” adults for you when you are in college. Whether you like it or not, your ability to succeed in college and beyond will depend on your ability to get adults with resources on your side.

4) Keep Checking Your Email: I know that you want to think that it is all done. You want to check out and enjoy your senior year. But the reality is that colleges are still processing data about applications. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you’re a viable candidate at each school you applied to. You’re what’s referred to as a “bubble” kid, meaning that you’re on the line and it could go either way.

In the world of selective admissions, this is where many or even most applicants are! It could be something “minor” that gets you in, or a last-minute addition that gets you more merit aid! So stay focused on your emails and don’t hesitate to keep taking advantage of opportunities to show yourself to colleges (it’s even not too late to do a Glimpse or interview if you haven’t).

It’s easy to think that admissions decisions are being made by an equation (or even worse, an AI bot), but the reality is that it’s still a human-run process. And success in a human process rests upon being noticed.

Both the dating “market” and the higher ed admissions “market” are about more than just what you can pay. Both are two-sided markets, where each side has to agree before a “transaction” is made (this is in contrast to a typical one-sided market, where all one needs to complete a transaction is money). Each side sizes up the other and takes subjective factors into account. Since each side knows this, both sides try to put their best foot forward, which can sometimes lead to a little embellishment (or a lot).

As a result of these incentives, both the dating and admissions markets suffer from a surfeit of what economists call “cheap talk”—an actual technical term—which can be thought of as posturing, bravado, or puffery, if not outright deceit. Cheap talk is a cost that is incurred by market participants, and if these costs become too high, then the matching market will fall apart, and participants will go elsewhere.

It’s easy to imagine examples of cheap talk in both the dating and admissions contexts. Suitors make themselves look good in their dating profiles, with the archetypal example being that men often say they are taller than they actually are. In the case of college admissions, the “I set up a non-profit” (with daddy’s help) is a trope among admissions officers who suspect that many activities lack depth, have significant “adult” assistance behind the scenes, and are done only for one’s college application.

One example of “cheap talk” in college admissions is when students say in their application that “X college is my dream school”. While admissions officers might downplay it in info sessions, all admissions offices are concerned with selectivity1. Their leadership wants them to preserve it or improve it, and alumni love to say, “I couldn’t even get in today if I applied.” One of the ways admissions offices preserve this selectivity is by trying to predict—using any number of historical data points that correlate to matriculation—whether a student is really serious about their school. Students know this at least intuitively, which is why they often express their devotion to an institution in its application. Of course, this is also a great candidate for cheap talk, as applicants could be saying it to each school in each application.

A prominent market design paper2 came up with an interesting way to deal with “cheap talk” that they tested on a dating website. On a Korean dating website, it was easy to engage in a chat with someone else, but it became too time-consuming for participants to navigate all the messages and to guess from the interactions who was really serious about taking it to the next step, i.e., meeting in person.

Because of this, the website operators came up with the idea of letting users have “virtual roses”. These roses were limited in number so that if someone received a rose, they knew that the sender was presumably more serious than other suitors who didn’t send a rose. Empirically, the economists were able to show how these roses improved the quality of matches that were made on the website; they helped cut through the cheap talk.

It’s from this paper that we got the idea for Virtual Stars3. Every cycle, each applicant who either does Glimpse or the InitialView interview receives two “Virtual Stars” that they can assign to two of their top choices. The Virtual Stars are not available until after December 15th because their target use is during the “regular decision” time period, when students apply to many institutions.

Regular Decision can be contrasted with the “early decision” or “early action” time period, when students use either “early decision” to demonstrate intent by undertaking that they will go to that college if they get in, or “early action” to demonstrate their interest by getting their ducks in a row a bit earlier in the application cycle (Early Action isn’t binding like Early Decision, but getting one’s application in early in the process typically shows that that school is a bit higher on one’s personal list).

Regular Decision is when everyone applies everywhere, and before Virtual Stars, there was no way to cut through the cheap talk. Now, if a college receives a Virtual Star from a student, then the college knows that it is one of the student’s two top choices.

There are a few more things to understand about the design of the Virtual Stars. After December 15th, Virtual Stars can be used at any time. Thanks to additional permutations on “Early Decision”, one’s strategy can be a bit murkier if one is applying to a later ED round. Our advice is simply to wait until you hear from your ED/EA schools before you use your Virtual Stars. To put another way, you want to have as much information as you can about your chances everywhere before you use your Virtual Stars during Regular Decision.

Admissions officers only see if you gave them a Virtual Star; they don’t know what you’ve done with the other one. You can use them at any time, at which point the Virtual Star will appear in your InitialView materials. These Virtual Stars have proved to be so popular that tools have been created so that colleges can track them internally. Nonetheless, we still think it’s a good idea for you (the student) to send a separate email to admissions officers when you give a Virtual Star to their school. All you need to say is “You’ll note in my InitialView materials that I gave you a Virtual Star”. Admissions offices are pretty good at tracking student information, but they are even better at tracking email correspondence (you should email from the email account you used to apply, however).

Does it hurt my application if I don’t give a college a Virtual Star? We don’t think so. We don’t highlight it if you don’t give a Virtual Star, and the Virtual Stars show up at various times throughout the winter/spring. Even apart from the Virtual Stars, we see that our materials themselves tend to improve applicants’ chances. Remember, admissions officers are looking for multiple things: They are trying to assess your interest, sure, but they are also trying to assess your ability, maturity, “compellingness”, etc. Our materials are optional, and in the minds of many admissions officers, this is by design—they want to see what you do. We know from some admissions offices that our materials play a large role in merit aid, which is one of the most powerful tools colleges have to get you to matriculate, regardless of where their school might have been on your own personal college list in September.

Regardless, above all else, make sure you use your Virtual Stars!

Don’t forget the rule of thumb: If you like your Glimpse or interview, send them everywhere. No need to be strategic. Save the strategy for the Virtual Stars, where thoughtfully indicating your interest with a tool that cuts through the “cheap talk” is most likely to give you a bump up.

And in selective admissions, a “bump” can make all the difference.

Throughout the history of our organization, one of the most common questions from counselors is, “Do you have a list of schools that use you?”

When we first started, it was easy to respond because there were only one or two, and we could answer without thinking about it. However, in a matter of months, it was 50+ schools using us, and the question became a bit harder and more nuanced. Now, instead of attempting to hand out a list, we think it’s more important to shift how one thinks about the question.

This was our recent email response to the “Do you have a list?” question:

Hi [NAME REDACTED],

I know that this won’t be the answer that you’re looking for, but we’ve pretty much given up on trying to provide a “list” of colleges that use us. We can now comfortably say that most of the top colleges use us to some degree, but even then, we are not able to definitively guarantee in each case (even when we are on the website!). We do have a technical integration with most top colleges, but other than the fact that the institution set it up, we are not able to see what they do after they receive materials. And even for those schools that don’t have the integration set up, many receive our materials via their documents email.

I wish that colleges were more definitive, but in our experience, in selective admissions, you’re just typically not going to get colleges to confirm how they use optional materials. Each cycle, we even hear about interns manning the front desk saying one thing while we hear something completely different from the VP.

As we joke, the only thing we can guarantee is that colleges won’t see your Glimpse1 if you don’t send it.

I can, however, tell you what we—Gloria and I—told our own kids: We basically said that if they were happy with their InitialView materials, then they should send them everywhere. We also focused on the Virtual Stars, and we even think having kids send follow-up emails (“You’ll note that I gave you one of my Virtual Stars”) is a good idea given how hard it is to stand out during Regular Decision (we know in many cases the Stars make a difference, but we only hear these stories after the fact, unfortunately).

And now we have ECHOs, so make sure to have your students find someone to do them as well.

I hope this helps! As you may know, many IECs use Glimpse on the front end of their own process, as part of the “get to know you” onboarding. That keeps the first draft of the Glimpse low-pressure and gives you important information about students early on. And this hopefully makes it easier when it comes time to submit Glimpses.

At the end of the day, admissions offices want to preserve flexibility for themselves. There’s no way that they are going to box themselves in with definitive language to potential applicants about how they use materials in the process. And, in the defense of admissions offices, they often receive apps in ways they didn’t anticipate. They’ll see a jump or decline in a certain area of their applicant pool and have no idea why. They know that there are some levers they can use to impact their app numbers, but they don’t know the degree to which such levers will be successful. Despite this uncertainty, their senior administration will be focused on app numbers and will be looking for explanations right after the app numbers are tallied.

Since admissions officers won’t know what they’re working with until after deadlines, they want to ensure maximum flexibility—i.e., the maximum amount of tools at their disposal—that will help them craft the class to meet their other goals, like increasing selectivity and yield, satisfying various institutional priorities, and optimizing financial aid.

It’s helpful to understand this dynamic because it explains why the “Does X school use you?” question might not be productive. Instead, we think the applicant should focus on what they can control, and this means trying to be as compelling as possible using the tools at their disposal. “Compelling” should be defined by the student, with perhaps some input from the caring adults and educators in their lives. But once the student thinks they’ve created something compelling, then they should send it everywhere—and forget about it.

While the uncertainty may not be pleasant, it is real life.

Now that we’ve seen thousands and thousands of Glimpses, it’s time to share some advice on what makes a good Glimpse. While this is a bit long, make sure to at least read the final paragraph.

When recording your Glimpse, here are some rules of thumb and thoughts about what to avoid:

1) Don’t Read: This is the lowest of low-hanging fruit. Most students know that this is important, yet they still end up reading something. Perhaps it is because students feel like they need to say everything perfectly, or perhaps one cannot resist the crutch of a script.

Fundamentally, the problem with reading something is that the viewer doesn’t feel like you, the speaker, are trying to connect. It suggests that you aren’t able to be in the head of the viewer and anticipate what the viewer is thinking. But being able to connect with your audience while speaking is a critical skill that everyone needs to work on. It’s what separates a bad lecturer from a good one, a boring politician from a dynamic one, an impactful community member from one who cannot seem to ever get anything done. You might think, I’m just going to put a couple of notes here next to my webcam where I can glance at them if I need to. But don’t even do that!

Now, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write down notes about what you want to say; you should. But you should do this because the process of making notes will help your brain focus on what you want to convey. When it comes time to record, however, put it all away.

Glimpse is designed to be low-pressure—you can do it as many times as you want until you’re happy with it. But at some point after multiple tries, diminishing returns kick in, and you start to lose focus. If that happens, you may need to take a break and come back to it—or just be happy with your most recent take because you realize you’re fixating on things that others are unlikely to notice.

2) Don’t Mention Your “Dream School”: Glimpse is about you. Admissions officers, while they may on some level want to suss out your level of interest in their institution, don’t need your Glimpse to do that. You are already applying to their school, and you are already doing a Glimpse (which is optional). If you are applying ED or EA, you are already expressing greater interest than those who apply regular decision (RD). This is particularly true if you are applying ED, which is the ultimate expression of interest. If you are using Glimpse to apply RD, then you have the benefit of the Virtual Stars (if you don’t know what we’re talking about, make a cup of tea and read this).

Glimpse is your opportunity to add something to your application that will help admissions officers know what makes you tick. It’s something that an admissions officer can point to when they advocate for you in committee. It’s not you repeating what’s on the school website (which is just marketing verbiage struggling to be unique) or talking about the research of a particular professor (which the admissions officer won’t even know). Instead, make the Glimpse about you.

3) Talking about Two Things is One Thing Too Many: Aim to have a Glimpse that allows admissions officers to easily finish this sentence when talking about your application: “They’re the one who talked about _____ in their Glimpse.” Two topics mean that nothing is remembered; having only one increases your chances.

4) Don’t Say Your Qualities; Tell a Story that Demonstrates Them: Stating adjectives that your friends use to describe you is overdone and uninspiring. Telling a story about how you raised $10,000 for your club is very inspiring. Everyone will say they are hardworking and like challenges; few will tell stories where their work ethic and love for challenges are self-evident.

A cool thing about telling stories is that you can ask those around you—including adults—about which story they think you should tell about yourself.

5) Glimpse is Great for Introverts: We always get this question: “Won’t this disadvantage introverts?” After doing this for years and years and talking personally to thousands of applicants all over the world, I can unequivocally state that it does not. In fact, it’s a medium that often plays to the strengths of an introvert. It’s just them and the camera; they can take as much time as they need, and they can do it in the privacy of their own room. And they do great! Their answers are thoughtful in a way that is typically impressive to adults.

It may be that thinking about recording a video about yourself makes you uncomfortable, and you may even have a good reason for why it does. But Glimpse mimics something you’re going to have to do over and over again in college and in life: engage with others. You’ll have group projects in college. You’ll have a roommate. You’ll have activities and responsibilities if you want to be a contributing member to said activity. You’ll have to go to a professor’s office and talk about something you didn’t understand. You’ll have to interview (online) with strangers for jobs.

You’ll be able to decide how you want to approach all those things, but if you want to thrive in college, you’ll have to get comfortable engaging with others in all sorts of situations. Why not see Glimpse as a chance to practice engaging?

6) If You’re Demonstrating a Skill on Camera, Be Good at It. If a skill that you demonstrate on camera isn’t impressive, then the viewer just wonders why you picked what you did. If you sing off-key, are horrible at breakdancing, or clumsy with cards, it’s not likely you benefit from showing that. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be impressive. Instead of showing a skill, tell a story (see #4 above).

7) Stressed? You’re Overthinking It: If you are stressing about your Glimpse, then you might be trying to be someone you are not, and being someone you are not comes across as fake. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to be creative—if you feel like creativity is something you want to demonstrate—or that you shouldn’t talk to one or two trusted adults about what you should do. However, once you decide what to do, do your Glimpse and move on.

CODA: Talking about what makes a good Glimpse is like trying to explain why a comedian is funny. Why is Nate Bargatze funny (to some)? How about Hasan Minhaj? If you try to explain why they are funny, you eventually end up just telling their jokes.

Hopefully, this advice above will help ensure that your Glimpse is “additive” (as admissions officers say) to your application. We’ve seen a lot of them, so it feels like we should share some observations.

But even after seeing so, so many of Glimpses, we continue to be surprised on a daily basis. Our ability to predict what works and what doesn’t is very limited! Some Glimpses are on topics that one wouldn’t expect to be compelling—but then they are! Many are filmed in nondescript rooms where students are wearing nondescript outfits—but then the content is unforgettable! And the only way to explain how it’s unforgettable is to say exactly what they did. There wasn’t a formula, it wasn’t predictable, but it’s completely compelling, like nothing else in the application.

These surprises happened the first year Glimpse launched, and they happen to this day. And they can happen for you.

As you may have heard, we’ve created this nifty tool in connection with Caltech that we’re calling “VIVA”. We think it has broad implications. Now that we’ve gotten through the first round of submissions, we can catch our breath and provide more context as to how this tool came to be.

The success(ful pilot) of VIVA is the result of responding to several trends.

1) First, ChatGPT. Most teachers and professors seem to underestimate the extent of students’ reliance upon ChatGPT. Similarly, many admissions officers don’t want to (publicly) admit that application essays have been rendered practically useless given how proficient ChatGPT is at shortening the “personal essay” writing process. There needs to be new ways of demonstrating learning now that ChatGPT and other foundation LLMs can easily produce content that used to be used as evidence of student learning and their authentic voice.

We saw the impact of ChatGPT on our own two sons. One was a senior in high school when ChatGPT came out, so he—generally speaking—received the intended educational benefit of his public high school’s IB program. His younger brother, however, was a junior when ChatGPT came out, and we’re convinced that his IB experience was “powered by ChatGPT”. And (unfortunately) his grades were fine!

Those of us who went to school long ago remember how we struggled with writing and labored over papers—and hopefully we now see those struggles as critical to developing critical thinking and communication skills. ChatGPT makes those important “micro struggles” go away, but at the same time, it seems as though high schools are powerless to do anything about it. Students—like all of us—don’t like hard work and can easily rationalize taking the easy approach, even if deep down they know they’re not learning the material or developing skills. Imploring teenagers to forego ChatGPT because of its negative impact on “traditional learning” is as pollyannish as believing that an American teenager (or really any American?) will see the harms of sugar and then forgo sweets.

The response by the educational world to ChatGPT has focused on using AI detection tools, but their efficacy or usefulness continues to be debated. However, these debates miss the point: A new learning paradigm has arrived, and tools need to adjust in a way that helps develop human-centered skills. Learning and mastery must still be demonstrated, but in a way that is more “human” than just stringing words together in a way that makes sense probabilistically, which is what today’s LLM models do. This leads us to point number two.

2) The Overriding, Lifelong Importance of Effective Oral Communication: The second trend is more of a realization: Everyone knows that being able to communicate effectively with an adult is a critical skill. After all, adults are the decision makers with all of the resources, so it’s not an understatement to say that a student’s ability to get “buy-in” from the adults they interact with is the most important skill they can hone. It’s much more important than one’s ability to take tests or memorize answers.

Here’s a talk by an MIT professor that encapsulates this realization:

We all intuitively know this! The problem is that there’s never been a great way to have students practice these skills at scale, so instead they develop those skills throughout the hurly-burly of high school and college. But that ability has taken a beating in recent years thanks to another phenomenon . . .

3) The Overhang of COVID Continues to Impact Students’ Willingness to Engage: We keep hearing from teachers that students are getting worse at the ability to communicate. Post-COVID, presentation opportunities have decreased, class discussion has diminished, and students see public speaking as an anxiety-inducing experience to be avoided at all costs. To make matters worse, a fraught political atmosphere combined with a plethora of always accessible online entertainment creates an environment where students are incentivized to avoid engaging with anyone (or, as Jonathan Haidt says in his book, we have to acknowledge the problematic trend of “overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world”. But wait, there’s still more going on:

4) The Booming Industry Offering “Research: Opportunities to College Applicants: We know that more and more students are submitting “research” as part of their college application. This trend is facilitated by many companies that provide research opportunities to students for a hefty fee. It’s widely known that many of these opportunities are of dubious value academically, and admissions offices will admit that they are not able to evaluate effectively the value of a student’s purported research. In case you can’t tell, the value of written materials in the application process is being undermined from multiple directions. So how does anyone authentically demonstrate their learning or motivations?

5) Video Can Preserve Authenticity: Video is what is going to preserve authenticity in the admissions process. We’ve seen this for years with InitialView’s interviews for international applicants: Our unscripted, recorded conversations show how a student is ready to thrive both in the classroom and in a residential community.

Without them, it’s hard for admissions officers to know what’s real in the application. Admissions offices have felt for years that the essays were declining in value as more students hired application coaches, and then ChatGPT was the final nail in the coffin. If there’s no authenticity in the process, then admissions officers are just admitting avatars, not real 17-year-olds.

All of this has led to VIVA.

How it works: A student uploads their research/project/paper to our system, which in turn asks them customized questions based on the research itself. The student responds on the fly, demonstrating both mastery and providing confirmation that they did the work.

If the student did the work, VIVA is an easy process. In fact, we see students excited for the chance to talk about an impactful academic experience. (If they didn’t do the work? Then it is evident in how they are not able to answer the questions. In practice, this means that most don’t send a VIVA they struggled through to admissions offices, and they second-guess the value in including their research on their college application at all.)

Fittingly, the name “VIVA” comes from the “viva voce”, which is the traditional final oral examination at Oxford and Cambridge that students must go through before receiving their degree.

Demo: Here’s a teacher at our pilot high school (Episcopal Academy; more below) giving it a shot using his old master’s dissertation: https://initialview.com/viva/review-student/?v=Y48Bgq55QsYTMtABSxsnWZwvPesthdsD7TJPgYYa

With VIVA, admissions offices can literally see proof on video of a student’s academic chops. As with all of our products, students pay one price—$22, in the case of VIVA—which allows them to send their VIVA anywhere. Fee waivers are broadly and easily available. Admissions officers, through Slate, can receive the annotated VIVA video along with a copy of the research itself.

Interest in VIVA is coming from all directions. Episcopal Academy outside of Philly is already piloting its use in curriculum (write a paper; hand it in with a VIVA); scholarship competitions and honors programs are drawn to VIVA as a better tool to make decisions (instead of using an arbitrary test score cutoff, why not see if recipients can communicate effectively before you give them your campus’s most prestigious scholarship?).

Best of all, VIVA emphasizes what will matter in a post-AI world: Communicating complex ideas with others in a succinct and engaging way. Viva VIVA!

As many of you know—and perhaps even experienced yourself—we just completed our fall China tour with 30+ colleges and universities. This is the third time we’ve done this, and each time we get to see first-hand how China has changed. Now that we’ve all returned to our respective offices with our souvenir tea sets and miniature Terra Cotta Warriors, I figured I’d share some observations about how the economy in China is impacting Chinese applications to U.S. colleges. 

China Ten Years Ago

Let’s start with the “good ole’ days”. A decade ago China applicant numbers were through the roof. It seemed that the numbers just kept going up, and Chinese families were delightfully and dependably in the “full-pay” category. While fraud might have been rampant (and of course it was: the U.S. application system had merely been superimposed on a society with none of the history/culture/infrastructure surrounding college applications), the ease of students from China who paid the sticker price was too difficult to resist. 

This was a good deal for Chinese families as well, given the limitations they were facing. One of their best ways to invest in the future was to send their child—and typically their only child—abroad for college. They were in an economy that was growing fast but that still restricted their ability to invest in the global economy. College options within China were determined by results on a national exam, and even the best colleges in China did not contain the resources—or level of fun—offered by hundreds of colleges in the U.S. The U.S. sat at the top of the study abroad pyramid, with a long history of providing opportunity to the best students in China, many of whom converted a successful period of study into a job, a green card and then ultimately citizenship. Information in China might be restricted, but not so restricted that individuals in China couldn’t see the fun and freedom that friends and friends of friends had when they moved to America. 

Since the 1970s, the economy in China had grown at a breakneck speed, bolstered by liberalization of the economy (but not politics), the migration of its massive population from the countryside to the cities, and the mastery of manufacturing processes and the global supply chain. This economic growth supported an incredible building spree, with families all over China viewing investment in real estate—single-family apartments—as the best place to park their nest egg. Since real estate prices kept going up, the conventional wisdom in China was that apartments were the safe, tangible investment, particularly when contrasted with China’s volatile stock market. And it wasn’t hard to turn paper gains into cold, hard RMB: One could cash out of real estate relatively easily by selling into a frothy real estate market. At its peak, the real estate market in China made up 30% of China’s economy (it only makes up about 16% of the economy in the U.S.). 

This appreciation of real estate values meant that parents in China would often fund overseas study by selling an apartment and then using the proceeds for their child’s tuition and living expenses. This windfall would often be combined with the collective savings of two parents and four grandparents. It is not an exaggeration that a large portion of full-pay Chinese students in U.S. higher ed was supported by China’s booming property market.  

Now

While there was hope that post-COVID China would return to its pre-COVID bustling self, the government has instead found itself in a situation where its citizens are tightening their purse strings. This is caused by multiple issues, which were only exacerbated by COVID. For one, the government had already been cracking down on private enterprise through well-publicized actions against prominent entrepreneurs and venture-backed technology companies. Even though the government continues to talk about the importance of entrepreneurship, the go-go days of flowing investment, high growth, and light regulatory touch seem a distant memory. The US has also looked for ways to “decouple” from China, in particular in high-tech areas like semiconductor technology, where restrictions from the Biden administration have hampered both the growth of high-tech manufacturing and the expansion of technical infrastructure needed for AI advancement. But perhaps most importantly, the housing market has been in trouble since 2020, with the value of apartments declining all over China. This causes families to feel less wealthy and in turn restrain their spending. Students still have dreams of studying in the U.S., but this desire often faces a grim reality: the family’s primary source of wealth—their apartment(s)—has declined in value and only appears poised to drop more. 

This means that the days of endless full-pay students from China are over. Of course, the impact will be felt unevenly. Fortunately for selective universities, Chinese families continue to see an overseas education for their children as the best way to spend their savings. However, less selective U.S. colleges are going to continue to see a decline in full-pay students, particularly when the options for going abroad might include Hong Kong or Singapore, thereby allowing a family to “save” resources by staying closer to home for college and then going to the U.S. for graduate school (graduate schools continue to be hungry for students from China, and one-year programs are seen as better “deals” than four years of undergrad plus graduate school). 

The periodically recycled articles about Chinese students studying in the U.S. tend to ascribe multiple reasons to any decline in students from China: geopolitical friction between the U.S. and China; better, more cost-effective alternatives in other countries, concerns about safety, etc. And it’s true that some people in China will say those are concerns. But the primary factor limiting Chinese students isn’t any of those; it’s China’s slumping property market. The financial health of colleges in the U.S. might not have anything to do with the price of tea in China, but it does have a surprising connection to the price of Chinese apartments.

Let’s talk about “demonstrated interest”.

Typically, when a college says that they consider “demonstrated interest”, they are referring to the practice of analyzing the actions of a student during the application process for hints as to where they are ranked in that student’s college list. Is the college one of their top choices or are they a safety school that sits at the bottom? If a student really likes your college, they should apply binding early decision—the ultimate expression of interest, if it’s an option—but for all other application windows and types demonstrated interest might play a role.

Demonstrated interest matters to admissions offices because, if colleges can predict with some level of success where they sit in each student’s list, the colleges can admit fewer students knowing that a higher percentage of them will ultimately matriculate. In other words, a higher “yield rate” allows admissions offices to be more selective, and as we all know, selectivity is the coin of the college admissions realm.

Some “demonstrated interest” tools are well-known. Internal college CRMs can track email open rates and numbers of visits to a college website. Colleges also track whether a student has visited campus and done a campus tour. Some colleges have told us that if a student signs up for an online info session but then doesn’t show up, they interpret that as a lack of interest, and subsequently will either deny or put the student on the waitlist. Not surprisingly, many students are told about demonstrated interest, and as a result spend time trying to game it in the hope that it helps them in the process. Obviously, this is all behind the scenes and students almost never know how their behavior could make an impact on their admissions decision. Some colleges now pronounce that they no longer consider demonstrated interest with the goal of tamping down any strategic behavior of students.

However, even for those colleges that claim to not use demonstrated interest, the intent of applicants can still matter. Here’s a thought experiment: Suppose a student made a “cut and paste” mistake in an essay so that College B realized that they already used the essay for another school, College A (e.g., the student used the name of the other college instead of the college to which they were applying). If the two colleges were competitors with an overlapping applicant pool, I think there’s no doubt the student would find themselves rejected by college B.

Here’s another way that colleges look to interest: during the “sculpting” stage of creating the admitted class. All colleges put students in buckets—like international, in-state, or intended computer science major—that reflect how it sees those students in light of their institutional priorities. Colleges also know the historical yield numbers for students in buckets down to a granular level. So an admissions leader at an institution might look at their tentatively “admitted” pool after finishing file review and see that they are about to offer admission to too many computer science majors, a prediction they can only make by looking at the historical yield of students in that bucket. If you are in a bucket that historically yields at a low rate, you might find yourself cut out of the class—but of course you’ll never know that was the reason.

This balancing or sculpting is the last step for admissions offices before they release decisions, and it is typically only done by the most senior leaders, institutional research offices, and perhaps even with the help of outside consultants. In the minds of admissions officers, this is not “demonstrated interest”, even though it is an assigning of a yield probability because you’re part of a group that historically hasn’t put the college at the top of the list.

This is of course unfair to the student who really does want to attend said college, and it’s also a loss for the college as they denied a qualified student who would have been a lock! If you know anything about InitialView, by now you will be rolling your eyes and thinking, “We get it; we should use the Virtual Stars to solve this problem” (for those not yet inundated with our marketing material, all students who use our services get two Virtual Stars that they can use in the process to avoid this very problem).

At the end of the day, this is a good example of a part of the admissions process that students have no control over. Other than broad initiatives (a new data science major that was funded by a $100 million donation, for example), it’s going to be hard to determine the institutional priorities and then estimate how those would impact your application. And it may seem unfair. However, one thing is sure: given the pressures upon college presidents—and by extension admissions officers—to continue to protect (and increase) an institution’s level of selectivity, students would use the same tools if they were in admissions officers’ shoes.

Have you ever heard the phrase, “Love is a verb”? What does that mean?

When you first hear “love” you probably think about being attracted to another person, that you have those gushy warm feelings when you are in the presence of a special someone. Or maybe you use it when you say that you emphatically like something (“I love biology”; “I love playing basketball”, “I love pizza”).

However, if someone says that love is a verb, they mean that you show your love by your actions. You have to decide to do something, something that implicitly involves sacrifice or discomfort. In other words, you can love someone by your actions, even though the person receiving your care may not be very lovable. In fact, you may not even “like” them very much at the moment.

Paradoxically, one will often find that after completing a loving action, a loving feeling will follow. What’s great about this is that love is not necessarily some feeling that strikes when we least suspect it (even though indeed that can happen a few times in life, just like in a rom-com), but rather it’s something we can wake up and decide to do. We are in control of who we love!

In high school, and particularly in the college admissions process, you might have been asked about your “passion”. The implication is that your feelings should by now have guided you to what you want to do in life. You should have a focus and not have to struggle to spend a large amount of your time on something productive.

Unfortunately, this is not typically how one discovers what they want to do with their life. Instead, they have to try a lot of things to see what they can do reasonably well. But while they might need to try multiple things, they also have to stick with one or two things for an extended period to see if it is really something they like. That’s because many things only become “fun” or “enjoyable” after a lot of hard work. Think of playing the piano. Or running a marathon. Or speaking a foreign language. Almost universally, people who develop those skills are looked up to. But those skills are definitely not fun to practice, perhaps not even most of the time! In other words, your passion doesn’t come from a feeling that hits you someday, but rather from trying something that you could imagine not hating and then gradually getting good at it. Once you achieve some level of mastery, then the positive reinforcement makes it easier to practice. The feeling that you might describe as your “passion” comes from action.

What’s great about actions is that you are in control. You can go do something, even if you don’t like it or would prefer to do something easier or more instantly pleasurable. Your feelings on the other hand, are less trustworthy. Much of our lives is lived in the space between our two ears, and often we can ruminate ad nauseam about our feelings as though they were the lodestars for our life. Our feelings are impacted by our decisions, and thankfully by realizing the role we have in our actions we can, by extension, also take responsibility for our feelings we want to have.

Communicating wisdom to teenagers requires pithy sayings. A rhetorical question I’ve recently found useful is, “Are you a contributor or a consumer?”

This question can be used to evaluate long-term goals, short-term goals, and even minor decisions throughout the day. The answer isn’t always straightforward, since we’re often a combination of both. When we are infants we just consume and don’t contribute at all to the society around us. But at some point, we all grow up and get jobs, which is the primary way we contribute to our family and our society.

This question is particularly helpful to teenagers because they can make significant moves toward becoming contributors. They can get their first job, hold positions of leadership in their school clubs or sports teams, and just generally take more initiative and seize opportunities. The earlier that one becomes committed to being a contributor, the more opportunities one is going to receive. All organizations, all teachers, all bosses, all communities, etc., are looking for people who are contributors.

Indeed, the “consumer vs. contributor” question can be a posture that one takes towards life. You, O Teenager, can just sit back and consume by being passive in class, taking a back seat to others in clubs, or scrolling on your phone. In fact, you are most “consumer-y” when you are on your phone. Are you honest with yourself about how much time a day you spend scrolling? Do what it takes to significantly reduce your time on social media, which is engineered to keep you engaged with the platform and not with your friends. You have to put your phone away or give it to a friend when you are studying, even if it is inconvenient to do so or if it causes you to miss out on what your friends are talking about. Sure, there could be times when you’re connecting with friends on your phone, but its impact—particularly TikTok, Reels, Shorts, Snapchat—is almost uniformly negative.

I’m sure that heroin addicts tell some good jokes from time to time, but it’s clear that you need to get away from heroin addicts no matter what. Social media is the same and we need to be honest about that.

But it’s more than just putting away your phone. Indeed, learning how to be a contributor takes practice. It takes intentionally interacting with others, something that is fraught with challenges but also good to get better at. The more you take interest in others, the more that others will want to be around you and say good things about you. There will come times when you need someone to stick up for you, maybe in the form of a recommendation letter, assistance with a scholarship application, or a job reference. When that time comes, you want to be known as a contributor.

Guess who else wants to know if you’re a contributor? Admissions officers. They may not say it explicitly, but this is a big reason why admissions offices ask for recommendation letters. They want to see if your teachers have stories about your contributions to their classes or the student body. If you are considering what extracurricular activities to be involved in, don’t just think about how much fun something is, but also think about how you can contribute to the group of people involved. Just listing club membership is not as impressive as talking about the impact you had on your classmates (“membership increased by X after your publicity drive, my fundraiser raised X dollars, your team reached the state championships for the first time since X after you instituted morning weight training”, etc.). I would go so far as to say that this is what admissions officers are really considering when they look at your application, once they have determined that academically you can do college-level work.

A lot of activities may make you feel like you are a contributor but in reality you are more of a consumer. An exciting summer experience in Europe? Did you get that experience because you raised the money as the person in charge of fundraising for the French club, or did your parents just pay the bill? Did you show up for cross country from time to time just to hang out with friends after school, or did you as captain implement a morning practice that led to greater weekly mileage and better results for your team?

You want to be a contributor and show concrete ways that your contributions led to the success of others. You might study hard and get good grades, but if that’s all you did in high school, then you are not contributing to the extent that you could. Consider the “consumer vs. contributor” analysis a skeleton key that helps you understand how admissions officers view your extracurriculars (and might impact how you spend your own time).

At the end of the day, colleges want (1) smart (enough) students who (2) are contributors. The value of your college experience will come not just from your classes but also from the community. If the community is full of contributors, it’s going to be a more meaningful four years than if it just has students who are “consuming” class content and then “consuming” videos on their phone. If you’ve shown your ability to (a) get good grades in hard classes and (b) contribute in big ways to your community, you will get into more selective schools.

Here’s a final secret about being a contributor. It of course takes discipline, the willingness to take risks that might involve rejection or failure, and the ability to do something you naturally wouldn’t want to do. In other words, it’s hard. But ultimately it is going to lead to tighter bonds to those in your community and a sense of purpose that you do not have if you are just a consumer.

So consider for a bit how you can be more of a contributor, and then make a commitment to do so. Get off your phone—even if you have to institute rules that others might think are silly—and go and make connections with others. Colleges are looking for contributors, but everyone around you is, too.

Subscribe now

We interact with more students from more countries than anyone else in the world. So many interesting stories!

One of the very best parts of InitialView—the company I run with my wife—is that we are involved with students and their stories. On a daily basis we are surprised, moved, and educated by the stories that students tell our interviewers or insert into their Glimpses. At the same time, we interact with admissions officers at colleges who tell us about their challenges and how their process really works.

For years, these stories and words of advice have remained in our home office, around the dinner table, or in industry presentations. We’ve decided to launch this blog to more systematically record these thoughts for those who might be interested.

This blog will touch on many topics—applying to college, how admissions offices work, the “secrets” of “success”, the US and its place in the world, higher education, etc. As parents, we also see our own high school-age kids going through these processes, so we get to try out (and suffer from) our own theories on how to help teenagers become productive young adults.

Please consider subscribing—and in addition to reading, providing us with your thoughts! After all, life is not a test—it’s a conversation!