Prashant Sehgal has a son who just finished his third year at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a daughter who will start applying to colleges next year. But he’s also a sort of virtual dad to thousands of strangers on the internet. He’s a moderator for three college-admissions forums on Reddit, including one of Reddit’s largest communities about the topic, called ApplyingToCollege, which has 1.1 million users. Three years ago, a member of ApplyingToCollege posted that Sehgal should have called himself “admissionsdad.” (His username is the more prosaic “prsehgal.”)
On most days, Sehgal gets up at 4 a.m. and takes an hour-and-a-half walk around his neighborhood in Delhi, India. Using his phone’s glide-typing functionality, which allows users to type quickly by swiping on their keyboards, he answers forum questions. He does it again in the evening for an hour, and sometimes during the day as replies come in. His time is unpaid and he has no interest, he said, in starting a consulting business. “I can skip Reddit for a day,” he said, “but if people are dependent on me for their applications, then that becomes a bigger responsibility.” Besides, he already has his dream job. After getting master’s degrees at New York University and Carnegie Mellon University, and working as a programmer for a decade in New York, Silicon Valley, and India, he quit in 2008 to become an independent filmmaker.
In communities that can be hyperfocused on the shiniest names in higher education, he consistently counsels fit and affordability over prestige. He’s a voice of calm in a vortex of teen stress. And he doesn’t hesitate to dole out prescriptive advice.
“No school or its prestige is worth 300K unless your family has that kind of pocket change just lying around. It’s your work and your effort that makes you successful, not your college name,” he wrote in a reply to one recent forum user choosing between an in-state spot at the University of Iowa and the University of California at Los Angeles. In reply to a forum user who was disheartened by friends who called their chosen college “a ‘ivy reject’ school,” Sehgal wrote: “Your friends are idiots, so ignore them.”
The Chronicle chatted with Sehgal recently via video to learn what prospective students are like these days, what crazy things they’re doing to try to get into highly ranked colleges, and how an engineer turned filmmaker ended up serving as an unpaid consultant to the college-yearning masses.
So how did you get into answering strangers’ questions about applying to college?
The Reddit thing started about four years ago. I went to College Confidential and Reddit to get some pointers to help my son with the application process, and I realized that I actually knew more than a lot of other people.
When I was in the United States, I was always very in touch with the universities. Any time I would go to a new city, I would try to visit the universities there, just to get an idea of what opportunities are available. What are the highlights of each university? Slowly, instead of looking for answers, I started answering questions. In a few months, I became popular enough that I became a moderator for three communities. ApplyingToCollege is the biggest one I have. r/SAT is the second biggest. And then there’s a third one, which is a much smaller community, called IntltoUSA. That is for international students who are looking to apply to the United States.
What are the users of the forums you moderate like?
A large number of students come from bigger cities in California, New York, and Texas. Generally pretty rich backgrounds, I would say. They have a sense of the admissions process, but there is also a lot of misinformation out there.
I don’t know if you want to use that term, but a lot of them are prestige whores. “T20” [short for “top 20”] is the big buzzword.
For example, Washington University in St. Louis was No. 16, I think, last year. Now, all of a sudden, it’s No. 26 or 28 or something. [Wash U. was No. 15 in the U.S. News & World Report’s 2022 ranking and is now No. 24.] It’s out of the top 20 and all of a sudden people are like, “Oh, it’s not a good school anymore.” I’m like, it’s the same school. A magazine just changed their formula of how they come up with these things.
Make sure you research the schools and figure out what really works best according to your demands, not according to what some magazine has ranked the particular school.
What would you say is your philosophy about applying to colleges?
My thing has always been the fit.
Make sure you research the schools and figure out what really works best according to your demands, not according to what some magazine has ranked the particular school.
What is it that students are looking to get out of prestige? What do they think prestige will do for them?
A lot of people have this misconception that this prestige will bring them a lot more in the future compared to a less prestigious school. I used to tell people that when I was working at Goldman Sachs [in the technology department], we would go and hire people from Pace University because Pace was literally next door. The investment-banking people used to go to Stern [New York University’s Stern School of Business] a lot more than they used to go to Columbia, because Columbia was way uptown for them. Stern is a 10-minute cab ride. People don’t realize a lot of these factors can play a much bigger role than just prestige.
If you look at the College Scorecard website, which is something I point students to, that’s government data showing what kind of jobs and salaries students at every college are getting. It’s amazing to see some public schools leading to great salaries for some of the more sought-after majors. So I think students are slowly becoming more sensible, but then there are still quite a lot of them who are just hung up on the prestige factor.
You went to New York University and Carnegie Mellon University, which are highly ranked. You worked at well-known companies like Goldman Sachs and Adobe. The stereotype is that a parent like you would be very reputation-oriented.
My son did get into some higher-ranked schools. He got into the University of Rochester. He got into the University of Maryland. But he’s a very nerdy kid — he knew exactly what he wanted for a school. He wanted the school to be very high tech, to have a great computer-science program, and he also wanted that very geeky, very nerdy vibe. RIT fulfilled all of these requirements.
When I went to NYU, 25 years ago, it was actually not a very highly ranked school. It’s just a coincidence that now NYU is highly ranked. Carnegie Mellon, also. I went to Carnegie Mellon in 2005 and at that time, their M.B.A. was not the highest ranking.
It sounds like your experience of looking for fit over prestige worked out well for you.
Absolutely.
Do you have lower-income or first-generation college students in ApplyingToCollege?
A lot of them. Those are the people who genuinely don’t know much about the admissions process. Those students rely a lot on people like me, the other moderators, or the other regular users.
They may not know that some universities do give such students a lot of preference. Once they show that in their application, “Okay, I had these issues with my family, or with my educational background, and still I was able to achieve quite a lot,” universities love students like that.
Are there any trends you’re seeing in college applications?
Every year there’s a different trend. Last year, the trend was self-publishing a book on Amazon. I know so many kids who were self-publishing books. The year before that, it was taking online courses on Udemy or any of these online platforms. Two or three years ago, a lot of students went crazy with “passion projects.” My passion project is this, my passion project is that.
Universities know all this is fake.
How do you know that colleges know these things are fake?
Right before the pandemic, a lot of college-admissions officers would visit India. I got in touch with a lot of them, initially to talk about my son, but then I told them I’m on Reddit; I’m helping students out. I got their business cards. If I have questions, I email a couple of them. We would sometimes do a Zoom call and chat about it.
These admissions officers read 30 to 40 applications a day. Some of these people have read thousands of essays over their careers. They know when an applicant is exaggerating or lying.
When a student comes out of a four-year university or college, it’s not just the skills for their major, but so many other things that they’ve learned in these four years.
Some students try to hire consultants, but they need to understand that they need to do the base work. The consultant might edit them, but they need to write the essays. Too much polishing of essays and activities can actually come off as fake, and that ends up hurting them.
What kinds of colleges do these admissions officers you’re in touch with work for?
Not the very top ones. I would say the middle ones. Public schools, as well as some smaller private and liberal-arts colleges mostly in the Northeast, South, and Midwest.
Are you seeing students questioning whether they should go to college at all?
Yeah, we do. Since last year, we’ve started seeing more students who are trying to decide if they should ever go to college or just go to a trade school or something, and a lot more students who are willing to go to a community college. I hope more people will become aware of the fact that community colleges are a great way for them to start their college journey. They’ll save a ton of money.
What do you think of the trend of questioning the value of college?
It’s a little scary.
At RIT, along with math and computer-science courses, my son took courses in criminal psychology, intro courses in philosophy. He took courses in, I don’t even remember — theater!
All these classes will slowly keep fading away. There is a big trend going on now to convert the four-year degree to a three-year degree. When that happens, the gen-ed courses will be the first to go away because colleges will still try to give you the core courses for your major, but that critical thinking that people get out of all of these disciplines will slowly fade out.
When a student comes out of a four-year university or college, it’s not just the skills for their major, but so many other things that they’ve learned in these four years. When colleges enter into this big rush to just churn out degrees, to make their own institutions the most profitable ones, then the students, in the long run, suffer the most.
What motivates you to spend hours each day advising all these strangers on the internet?
There are some funny applicants, but at the same time, I see a lot of very sincere and smart applicants, too. Sometimes students get a little too panicky about the whole situation. At the end of the day, you have to realize that these are 16-, 17-year-old kids. You have to give them that benefit of the doubt.
I don’t want to name any names, but there are some very frequent users who are parents themselves, and they can be a little rude to these students if they ask funny or basic questions. I think about my own son. He never even used Reddit. So these kids are at least making an effort to use Reddit, and they are pouring their hearts out: “I really don’t know what to do about this.” So rather than making fun of them, I try to be as helpful as possible.
Over all, the larger crowd is very smart, very sincere. That’s why you end up seeing a lot of these kids end up in great schools, not just the prestigious ones but also great public schools, great liberal-arts colleges. I’m hoping some of them will actually end up doing great in the future.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
