The Coalition for College on Tuesday announced that Stacey Kostell, vice president for enrollment management at the University of Vermont, will become the organization’s new chief executive officer in March.
The Coalition, a membership organization founded in 2015 to promote college access, runs a shared application platform used by 158 colleges. It was formerly known as the Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success.
Last week The Chronicle caught up with Kostell as she was preparing for her new job. She explained why she wanted to take the helm of a high-profile — and sometimes-controversial organization — that competes with the Common Application.
You were a first-generation college student. How does that shape the way you think about your work?
I grew up in a small town in Indiana, a rural student. I always knew that I would go to college, but I don’t think I applied until February of my senior year. I don’t remember anyone having a conversation with me about it. A couple of good friends who were going to Indiana State University came home and told me that I should apply there. That was my whole college search.
I had veteran’s benefits from my dad, who was a disabled vet. So I knew I could go to a public school. But my parents had very limited income, and because they had that waiver, they never applied for financial aid. So they got second jobs to help me pay for housing. Now I think, My God, I think we would’ve been Pell-eligible, especially when my brother went to college. Why didn’t anyone tell us to apply for financial aid?
So one lesson is that if you don’t have help applying to college, you don’t know what you’re missing.
Right. My family was able to make it work, but we were probably one paycheck away from me figuring out how I was going to pay for school myself. Had I done a college search or known about financial-aid options, I may have been better off financially for my family. That’s why, today, I really like making sure that families know that there are affordable options.
The Coalition’s stated mission was to help students, especially low-income and first-generation applicants, get to college. Describe its impact so far.
When the Coalition started, other organizations started paying more attention to access as well. That’s super-important. The more people who invest in making that a priority, the better it is for students. The Coalition really got people thinking meaningfully about what they were doing to provide access to their colleges.
In August, members of the Coalition went down to Tennessee to do some rural travel. That kind of outreach isn’t about recruiting for our schools. It’s about connecting with students and counselors, learning how we can inform them better, asking what we can do to make education seem more possible, and letting them know that we can make college affordable.
Early on, the Coalition said it wanted to “recast” the admissions process. That hasn’t really happened, has it?
The mission of the Coalition, or what we saw in ourselves, was really not just an application, but a college-planning tool.
I would agree. But the mission of the Coalition, or what we saw in ourselves, was really not just an application, but a college-planning tool. That was the basis for talking about recasting the admissions process. It was a good opportunity for all of us to take a step back and ask, Is there anything in our process that might be an obstacle to students? Is there anything in our process that might not be equitable? This has helped us have more-intense conversations about that.
Where has the Coalition fallen short? And what can you do about it?
Most of the criticism at the end of the day hasn’t been about the mission, which I think most people can buy into. It’s been about technology. Our goal was to do a student-centered application, which was very different from other applications. We also wanted to give the members flexibility. It’s different than saying, “If you want to be on this platform, here are the rules that you have to agree to.”
That can be more complicated to use from a counselor’s perspective. We’ve taken some feedback, made some changes. We’re still having conversations about how to make the application more user-friendly, more accessible to students and counselors.
We certainly want to make sure the application is workable and easy and not frustrating. But I also want to continue to work to improve our relationships with high-school counselors. That’s a critically important audience for us.
Let’s pretend I just came down from Mars and asked you this: What can the Coalition app do for me that the Common Application can’t?
It really isn’t about the application itself. It’s about the college-planning tool. You can go on as a freshman or sophomore in high school, and start building out your plan for college. When you sign up, you get some really helpful information about college planning that’s general in nature. High schools do a lot of great work, but to hear information about the Coalition that’s taken from all its members, it’s a great college-planning email.
Right now, applicants can use the Coalition to apply to a limited number of institutions. How much might membership grow?
Our goal is moderate growth. There are still a number of institutions that meet the Coalition’s membership criteria that we hope will want to become members. It would be awesome to get the University of California system to join, because they are really accessible to so many students. What about the Dakotas? The University of Utah? The Coalition isn’t in those spaces yet. I would like to see us get there.
As of late January, the Coalition’s application volume is down 19 percent compared with last year. Why is that?
The biggest change is that the University of Florida, which had been Coalition-exclusive, is now accepting the Common Application, too. It’s natural that some students are going to gravitate toward the Common App based on other schools they’re applying to. So there was an expectation that we would likely be down this year because Florida was such a heavy-volume school for us in the past.
We’re excited about the fact that we’re up in Texas (47 percent) and California (16 percent), and, most importantly, that we’re seeing a huge increase in transfer applications (160 percent). In enrollment management, you always want to be up in applications. I’m hoping that we will shift back up next year.
At Vermont, you introduced the Catamount Commitment Program, which waives tuition and fees for low-income state residents, provides them with a faculty mentor, and brings them together for monthly gatherings. Tell me about something you learned from that.
I learned a lot from the students in the program about what they needed from the university. People who work at universities make a lot of assumptions about what we at universities do well or don’t do well. So it’s been great to have a 100-plus focus group of students to let us know, for example, that they thought it was so confusing to buy books. They said that we needed to tell them how to do that. And then we thought, Wow, we thought we were doing that so well. It was a reminder that we really need to listen to students.
How should people assess the progress of the Coalition going forward?
It’s easy to look at application volume, and say, Oh, it’s going well, or not going so well. But what we’ve really been focused on is, Who accounts for that application volume? For us, at Vermont, it’s asking if we have students using that application who are fee-waiver eligible, who are first-generation or underrepresented. That’s one of the ways that we’ll measure our success.
One of the other ways is finding out how many students are joining the platform early. Are we educating and communicating so that freshmen and sophomores in high school are actually getting on the platform and having an opportunity to learn about the college-selection process? Are member colleges able to reach out to those students to begin relationships to make sure they’ve prepared the best possible application?
So success is not just a number. It’s seeing what the shape of our application pool is.
That makes sense. Still, why wouldn’t an organization founded in the name of access set some benchmarks for those access outcomes?
Just raising your hand and saying “I’m joining the Coalition” is not going to change things for an institution by itself. It’s part of a larger commitment. Our role as an organization is finding out what the goals of members are and how the Coalition can partner with them to get there.
The students coming from the Coalition are more diverse than our regular pool, and we think that’s helping us.
At Vermont, we don’t have a large number of Coalition apps, but I know the ones that we do have are from more-diverse group of students than the ones we receive from the Common Application. So it’s not just about the number. It’s about how the students coming from the Coalition are more diverse than our regular pool, and we think that’s helping us.
Applicant pools are one thing. But access happens when a college accepts those applicants and provides funding that enables them to enroll. If in 10 years the Coalition is full of colleges that haven’t really increased their enrollment of the students it set out to serve, then what good would it be?
I completely hear what you’re saying. I think it’s hard for a member organization to put parameters around an institution’s mission, because what they’re trying to accomplish, or what kind of demographics they’re dealing with, that really varies.
Certainly we should think about how we are going to measure our long-term success as an organization other than looking at application volume and the students who apply. We should think about the students who actually enroll and how successful they are. It’s not just getting in, but getting through and getting out.
Hopefully, we can look back and say we’ve seen an increase in first-generation students, limited-income students, rural students. We all want to see that happen, but how to measure that will take some thinking.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
