The Vanderbilt Effect
Growth is easy to measure. Identity is harder.
I can tell you exactly when I started paying attention to how colleges tell their own stories.
It wasn’t on a campus tour.
It wasn’t in an admissions presentation.
It wasn’t even during a conversation with an admissions officer.
It was June 2014, sitting in an auditorium at Vanderbilt University during the Annual Conference of the Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools.
In the middle of a presentation on presidential rhetoric, the keynote speaker put a photograph on the screen.
For everyone else in the room, it was an image from Grant Park on election night in 2008.
For me, it was one of my best friends, sitting on his twin brother’s shoulders, holding a handmade sign that read:
We Have Overcome.
For a moment, I stopped listening.
Of all of the honky tonks in Nashville ...
...why this photo?
I don’t remember much of the rest of the presentation.
I remember wondering something else entirely.
What story was Vanderbilt trying to tell?
Looking back, I think that was the moment I started visiting colleges differently.
I’ve visited enough campuses to know that colleges tell on themselves if you pay attention.
Not in the rankings.
Not on the admissions tour.
Not even in the strategic plan.
They tell on themselves in the stories they choose to tell.
The buildings they proudly walk you past.
The students they celebrate.
The questions they answer before anyone asks them.
The problems they acknowledge.
And, sometimes, the things they quietly stop talking about.
One of the unexpected gifts of spending more than twenty years in admissions is that I’ve stopped asking whether I like a college.
Instead, I find myself asking a different question.
Who does this college think it is?
That question has followed me through hundreds of campus visits.
It’s why I notice which building becomes the centerpiece of the tour. Why I ask what happens when a student begins to struggle instead of asking about the newest residence hall. Why I pay attention to what colleges celebrate—and just as importantly, what they don’t.
Yesterday, after client meetings and somewhere around the twelfth text telling me to read Anne Helen Petersen’s latest Culture Study, I read it.
Anne was interviewing journalist Claire Suddath about Vanderbilt University’s transformation over the past two decades.
On the surface, it was the story of one institution.
A university that deliberately transformed itself from a respected regional institution into one of the country’s most sought-after private universities.
Applications exploded.
The admit rate dropped below five percent.
The student body became more geographically diverse.
The university invested heavily in financial aid, research, athletics, and even new campuses beyond Nashville.
It’s an extraordinary story.
But somewhere in the middle of the interview, I realized I wasn’t reading about admissions anymore.
I was reading about identity.
Claire’s reporting kept circling the same question.
Not How did Vanderbilt become more prestigious?
But Who did Vanderbilt become?
That question surfaced over and over again.
In the decision to recruit nationally instead of primarily across the South.
In the decision to remove “Confederate” from the name of a residence hall despite enormous backlash.
In the redesign of financial aid.
Then I reached one sentence from Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier.
I stopped.
“When you say, ‘We’re going to be a national university,’ now your identity is up for grabs. You have to know who you are.”
You have to know who you are.
I spend my days drinking too much coffee and asking seventeen-year-olds versions of that same question.
Who are you?
How have you changed?
What matters enough that you’ll carry it with you?
What parts of yourself have stayed remarkably constant?
Students often think college essays are about accomplishments.
They’re usually about identity.
The activities list tells me what you’ve done.
The essay tells me who is doing it.
One of the biggest mistakes students make is trying to become the applicant they think colleges want.
The strongest applications rarely work that way.
The students I remember most aren’t the ones who reverse-engineered an admissions office.
They’re the ones who understood themselves first.
Reading Anne Helen and Claire’s conversation, I found myself wondering whether colleges wrestle with the same temptation.
Every strategic plan seems to promise more.
More applications.
More prestige.
More research.
More national recognition.
Growth is easy to measure.
Applications.
Acceptance rates.
Rankings.
Endowment.
Research dollars.
Those numbers matter.
They’re also the easiest part of the story to tell.
Identity is harder.
You can’t chart it on a spreadsheet.
You hear it in the language a college uses to describe itself.
You see it in the choices it makes when those choices are unpopular.
You recognize it in what an institution refuses to give up—even when it would be easier to do so.
Every decision to become something is also a decision not to remain exactly as you were.
Those are strategic decisions.
They’re also identity decisions.
Last night, I was meeting with a student who was debating whether Vanderbilt belonged on her college list.
We started to talk about Vandy’s supplement.
I’ll admit it: I have a soft spot for Vanderbilt’s motto, Crescere aude.
Maybe it’s because I like the sentiment.
Maybe it’s because, after years of the Jesuits teaching me Latin, I was irrationally pleased to realize I could still recognize enough of it to know what it meant.
Dare to grow.
Vanderbilt’s supplemental essay literally asks applicants to reflect on how an aspect of their identity, culture, or background has shaped their personal growth and how they will contribute to the Vanderbilt community.
I smiled. Because I’d spent the last hour asking Vanderbilt the exact same question.
Then, almost as if the universe wanted to underline the point, another student and I found ourselves talking about Stanford.
In December 2024, the Stanford Review interviewed Stanford’s new president, Jonathan Levin, and asked him what he thought was the most important problem in the world.
His answer?
There isn’t one.
There are simply too many important problems to name a single most important one.
The interviewer responded:
“That’s an application question that we have to answer to apply here.”
I snort laughed.
Not because Stanford had contradicted itself.
Because it reminded me of something I spend a lot of time trying to explain to students.
The question is almost never the question.
Vanderbilt isn’t really asking students to write about growth.
Stanford isn’t really asking students to identify the single most important problem in the world.
They’re asking something much harder.
How do you think?
How do you wrestle with complexity?
How do you make meaning?
How do you understand yourself well enough to explain why you believe what you believe?
Maybe that’s why I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that photograph from 2014.
Not because it was my best friend.
Because Vanderbilt chose it.
Out of every photograph available that could have somehow connected to presidential rhetoric, that was the story the university wanted a room full of educators to see.
I’ve come to believe colleges are always answering supplemental essays.
Not with words.
With the stories they choose to tell.
Sometimes it’s a campus tour.
Sometimes it’s a strategic plan.
Sometimes it’s a motto.
Sometimes it’s a photograph projected onto a screen.
The question has never really changed.
Who do you think you are?
It’s a good question for a seventeen-year-old.
I suspect it’s an even better one for a university.