Who Your Admissions Website Leaves Out

I know I've heard you talk about language being, in particular, a barrier to education when it comes to web content on a university or college website. How do you make that case to a provost or a board full of trustees that feels like if we take all that big, flowery, intellectually rigorous-sounding language out of it, it's going to dumb down the institution, or not seem serious enough for the academic place that it is?

This is an example of where research and data actually do help. There's looking at it from multiple lenses. I am a big fan of UX user research in general and what the Nielsen Norman Group has created for the industry in terms of how people read websites and engage with language. The case starts there for me. It is well studied and well known that when language is at a certain level, eighth-grade, ninth-grade, seventh-grade reading level, people understand faster, people have less anxiety about what you're saying, people are less confused. And because of those things, they're more likely to do what you're asking them to do. We want that, right? We want people to apply. We want people to do the thing. So that is studied and it can be shown if they're research-oriented or data-oriented that way.

But I have found most success when I pair that with an actual story or an actual use case. I use myself a lot in this. I'm glad you're bringing this up, because this is why I didn't get into school in the U.S. after I moved to Mexico. I'm a first-generation college student, as are many people that I know, but I was coming into it also from abroad. So my parents had even less familiarity with the U.S. university system. They didn't go to university in Venezuela either. And my dad spoke English, but my mom did not. But it's not about fluency. It's about how complicated the process is. I was very fluent. I was an International Baccalaureate student. I learned English in Florida. It wasn't fluency. It wasn't English.

So I didn't know anything about universities. I was like, okay, I'm going to apply to the schools I know because of TV: Harvard, Cornell. And my husband, my crush back then, he was going to apply to MIT. So was I, because we were going to be together forever, obviously. So I applied to three of the hardest schools in the whole world to get into. And I'm on their websites. I speak English. I understand. I have perfect TOEFL scores, if that's what you want to prove. But I missed an obvious requirement, which is: we need your full four-year transcripts from high school. I thought that sending my International Baccalaureate transcripts was enough, of my time that I did in Mexico, and not necessarily the time that I had done in the U.S. I missed it. I just simply did not know.

And it's because when you go on any admissions website anywhere, first of all, you have to consolidate 20 different pages of information in your mind. And then you have to understand what applies to you and what doesn't, and what those specifics mean. What's secondary school versus high school versus pre-baccalaureate? What are these things? And we just make all of these assumptions that this language, even at its simplest level, makes sense. Then you add complication in terms of reading level. You can imagine how that just stands up this gigantic wall.

And who that wall is leaving out are the students who don't have university-educated adults sitting next to them with a thesaurus, also trying to understand it, but with a lot more practice and life experience to know how to decipher that kind of language. So it's not about looking smarter, feeling smarter. It's access. Using complicated language, just for a minute, think about who are you leaving out.

I worked in admissions for a long time myself. And one of the hardest things for me was to have these conversations with admission counselors and provosts and enrollment leaders, and for them to be like, well, if they can't make it through that, then they're not going to make it through the university. And I'm like, well, is your job to provide opportunity, or is your job to close these doors in their face? Because I thought it was the first. And they're taken aback a little bit. But our job is not to make it hard. Our job is to make it doable.

And equitable and fair.

And fair. And it isn't a fluency thing. It isn't the student themselves. What we're doing with those systems is favoring those who have the context and the resources, because it has nothing to do with the student themselves. So back to your question: how do you make a case? You show the research, you show the studies, you show in your own applicant pool, what do application trends look like? Who is not showing up in your pool that you want in your pool? And then you surface the stories from those people, because those stories actually illustrate what's wrong, versus just showing a study or the data.

You've worked with a lot of higher eds, right? When you're doing this work, is there anything that consistently shows up as a red flag for you, where you start to realize that maybe what they need isn't what they're going to want or be able to do? Is there a reluctance? I'm just curious if you've seen a trend in the red flag department.

To be honest, in more recent years, no. What I've seen is the opposite. It's: how do we make this easier? Because everything else has already made it harder.

That's true.

I used to see a lot more red flags before, when I was working in admissions myself. And the decisions were made based on: we don't want to increase the workload. Or, if they can't do this, they can't make it in. They're not going to make it through. What I'm seeing more now is a willingness to create access and just not really knowing how to do it. And language is the solution, folks, if you're listening, truly.

So here's one of my favorite examples. Every single school that I work with, I do this. It's so fun. Go to the financial aid pages that explain what you're eligible for, what scholarships, whatever, especially DREAM Act, that kind of content. And take it, copy it, and paste it into something like the Hemingway Editor, the Hemingway app, which is an evaluator of how complicated your content is. What I love about the Hemingway app is that it makes a visual case for why you need to change your content, because it highlights the complicated sentences in red. So most of those financial aid pages are red, just red. And it looks like a red brick wall. It looks like a wall, literally. And it's like, well, this is what you're putting up on your page. This is what you're putting up in front of people.

Most of the time these schools are coming to us asking: we have this incredible financial aid policy, and we want to attract more students from low socioeconomic backgrounds with this policy. Why isn't it working? And you're like, well, look at it. Look at it. It's red. That's another way to make the case. It's this visual aha moment of: you might have just instituted this free tuition initiative for families with income under blank. But the way that you're talking about it, especially for those families, first-generation students who may not have the context themselves, they don't get it because of the language that you're using.