The Five Year Mission: Awkward First Draft

The recent book, "Dear Los Angeles," contains some 500 pages of diary extracts, letters, and excerpts from memoranda from the 1700s to the 2010's, arranged by date (Jan 1, Jan 2, Jan 3...).

For August 2, 1966, author Gene Roddenberry had penned this:

This is the story of the United Space Ship Enterprise. Assigned a five-year patrol of our galaxy, the giant starship visits Earth colonies, regulates commerce, and explores strange new worlds and civilizations.  These are its voyages - and its adventures.

The series Star Trek premiered in September 1966.  By August 10, Roddenberry had:

Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

10 pm December 23 Hollywood

Many relatives join us for the holiday week.  The slow passage of time led me to notice that there is no name for the second evening before Christmas - December 23.

It fell on a Monday this year, and our dog Trixie and I headed out at 9 or 10 pm into Hollywood.   We drove up La Brea to Sunset & LaBrea, where there is a small mini mall on the west side.  Not the mini-mall facing Sunset from the northwest corner, or the one opposite at the northeast corner, the one just further north on La Brea.

This mini-mall is one of those mysteries of Los Angeles, with shops indiscriminately tossed together.   On the ground floor there is a large laundromat - empty at 10 pm but for one woman.  Next to that, a hole-in-the-wall Middle Eastern place called Sultani where I've stopped a couple times.  Next to that, a dingy dive bar out of either the film noir era or the movie Barflies.  Next to that, a third-rate-looking liquor store.  Next to that, a remarkable Persian ice cream shop.

The Persian ice cream shop, inhabiting this mall for 25 years, is called Mashti Malone's.  Supposedly the prior shop there had paid for a large shamrock on the boulevard sign and they couldn't afford to change it, so Iranian "Mashti" became "Mashti Malone" to fit the shamrock neon sign, the shamrock now embellished with middle eastern letters.   They have over a dozen flavors of ice creams, including exotic Persian flavors like lavendar and rosewater. 

I got my usual - stracciatella, because I know what this means in Italian.   I also got two cartons of Bahklava, which will be a cover for when I get home and there would be doubts I have not walked the dog but only driven for ice cream.   ("Look, I got bakhlava for everybody and all the guests!") 

In the parking lot, which was two-thirds empty, a young black woman wandered around, apparently being the guard to keep non-customers from stealing the spaces.   But there were almost no cars coming and going and most of the spaces were empty.  Walking past her, I nodded hello.  She had a spiral high school style notebook filling top to bottom with handwriting, but what she was writing I have no idea.  It would be interesting to know.   Maybe she will be there another night.  I know the bahklava will be.

As Trixie and I pulled out, Trixie's passenger window was down and she was in Universal Car Position, front paws on the window edge, head out, tongue hanging.  At the corner of the lot a middle-aged woman stood by a misshapen bag of possessions and was ranting loudly into the night sky.   We waiting for an open stretch and pulled out on La Brea, and turned southbound.

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A 1995 essay by Christopher Hitchens, about Sunset Boulevard, quotes Joan Didion as having remarked, the intersection of Sunset and La Brea (shown here) was "the middle of nowhere."

A Feminist Revisioning of "The Trouble With Angels" (And Notes on Other Movies)

Recently, a friend mentioned a favorite movie of his that was always enjoyable to see again. 

A week later, I ran across an interesting short movie video-essay on YouTube on a movie I've liked on multiple viewings - The Trouble With Angels.

The Trouble With Angels doesn't show up on any top-10 lists.  It's a 1966 comedy that follows Mary Clancy (Haley Mills), a teen girl from a single-parent family whose father whom we infer is an orphan and whose uncle has deposited her in one boarding school after another.  Mary runs through boarding schools the way the Von Trapp family went through nannies.   Her guardian/uncle isn't interested in her (he always has a new convertible and a new girlfriend) and she's ended up at an all-girls Catholic school at an old mansion in the woods somewhere.  She quickly acquires a sidekick, and they get into a series of rebellious escapades (from invading the nuns' quarters during Mass to smoking in the attic. )   In a surprise ending, Mary decides to stay at the convent as a novice in the last minutes of the film, as the school-year ends.

It's held my attention on repeated viewings because it's a well-crafted film - like a well-made play, diverse characters are presented ins sequence, protagonists and antagonists align, there are highs and lows and tension and surprises.  The music is a catchy theme (by a major film composer) that's reprised in a variety of orchestrations.   The film has been criticized for Mary's sudden and (to some) unsupported decision to stay as a novice; but I have two takes on that.  First, Mary is clearly a developing character and grows emotionally through her experiences in the film, and develops both insight and affection for the nuns' lives and personalities as the year moves along.  The movie, on second viewing, has a series of very carefully woven set-pieces that expose Mary to puzzlement, insights, and development.   Second, it IS intended to be a surprise that Mary makes that decision, the author intends to make the point that life is an unexpected and mysterious thing, and we should be open to sudden change and new experiences and directions.  Indeed, on second viewing, Trouble With Angels delivers us with a radical challenge: What events and relationships are going on in our lives, earlier today, tomorrow, this year, which if fully understood, would bring us to a radical new insight and new plan, for next year?

Laura Ivins' Film Essay

Somehow, I stumbled across a four-minute film essay on YouTube, "The Female Gaze in Ida Lupino's The Trouble With Angels."  It's by Laura Ivins of the film program at Indiana University (and there's a blog that complements the video here).   She draws from a feminist viewpoint that's been written about regarding Trouble.   trouble is based on a book written by a woman, the screenplay is by a woman, the director is a woman, nearly all the characters are women.   A to Z, it's about women with diverse ages and personalities learning about each other, building relationships, and navigating largely in a world without men.   Mary's decision to stay as a novice can be seen as her creative and bold escape from a grim vision of the disappointments and limits of classical daughter/mother/wife roles that fail, by far, to live up to their promised stereotypes of happiness. 

The film is available for a few dollars rental from  major VOD venders.

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Core Creative Team for Trouble

Trouble is based on a book by Jane Trahey; a script by Blanche Hanalis; directed by Ida Lupino; music by Jerry Goldsmith.   All four were remarkable people.  Jane Trahey was both a writer and also very successful in advertising.  Blanche Hanalis contributed to many scripts and was the creator of Little House on the Prairie.  Ida Lupino was a successful actress before she became a success director and one of the very few women directors of the 50s and 60s.  Jerry Goldsmith was a very productive film composer with many well-known credits.  They were 42, 50, 47, and 39 in 1965 when the film was made.  Speaking of ages, the lead Haley Mills was 19 in 1965, but her co-star June Harding was 28.  In 2019, Mills is alive at 73; Harding died in 2019 at 81.

More About Craft

Ivins' video notes a moving scene where the normally stiff Mother Superior breaks down alone in the chapel with the casket of another nun.  There is an earlier scene (it takes place at midnight by a fireplace) where there is a 1:1 set piece between Mother Superior and the nun who'll die, carefully placed to provide a backdrop for what the girls see when the Mother Superior responds, publicly and privately, to the death.  This is one of many examples of how carefully crafted the arc of the film is; most every scene is there for a reason playing back to earlier, or forward to later, scenes.  (The scene of a student field trip to a nursing home shows very old women from the secular world abandoned after husbands die and children movie away, one of the things that makes the social life of the convent a little more attractive to Mary.)  I'm the first to say I'd miss 80% of this on  a cold first viewing, which helps to explain why (as Ivins quotes) first-run reviewers for NYT and Washington Post usually felt the movie lacked enough motivation for Mary's character development.  It's one of those movies that is even better to watch for the storytelling when you know what's going to happen in the end.

The Social Clock

It's important to wind back the social clock to take in Trouble With Angels.  Today, the setting of a convent and the plot twist of a bright young girl becoming a nun is frankly bizarre, like having a character having three heads.  In the 1950s and early 1960s, entering training as a priest or nun was an unusual choice, and a head-turning one, but in a strongly Catholic community it wouldn't be bizarre.

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Sequel

The nuns appear in a 1968 sequel, Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows.  "Trouble" is essentially a 1950s film, probably conceived around '64.   "Where Angels Go" has definite allusions to a changing culture, if embryonic, and there are two versions of the "Where Angels Go" poster, one old-fashioned and one in a "mod" 1968 style.   (1968 is same year as "Yellow Submarine" and just one year before 1969's "Easy Rider.")

Humor

YouTube has a recut of the Trouble With Angels in the format of the trailer for a horror film - here.

A Few More Actresses

The cast.  Some of the background actors had interesting stories.  Camilla Sparv, a Swedish actress who plays the "young beautiful sexy nun," was married to Herbert Hoover III, of the Hoover vacuum fortune, then Robert Evans, a very successful film producer.  Another young background nun, Dolores Sutton, had a long film and stage career.  Portia Nelson, known as a nun both in Troubles and in Sound of Music, had a long cabaret career, was a prolific songwriter, and composed a poem often quoted in 12-step programs.  Rosalind Russell, of course, had a long acting career ranging from His Girl Friday in 1940 to Auntie Mame and Gypsy  in 1958 and 1962.  She was a devoted Catholic and won a special Humanitarian Academy Award for her work with medical and social causes.  Russell also uses a classic mid-Atlantic accent, more familiar from the 1930s and 1940s.

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I had remembered Mary's guardian as her father, but he's her uncle, so it's implied she's an orphan.  Maybe the hands-off detachment he exhibits toward her is too grim or upsetting to attribute to a father, and it's more survivable that an uncle would treat her so off-handedly.  If her father was the awful one, it would attract too much emotional attention from the viewer, whereas the uncle can appear on stage once or twice briefly and we just brush him off and focus on Mary.

For a TCM Robert Osborne intro to Trouble, here.

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I don't think I could ever make a best-5 or best-10 movie list, but on a plane recently I jotted down some favorite movies of mine.

• Smashed (2012) LA-set movie about a Gen-X couple with alcoholism, sort of an updated Days of Wine and Roses; with Mary Kate Winstead.
• Trouble with Angels (1966)
• Children of a Lesser God (1986) From a play; about a young deaf woman and a teacher who falls in love with her; from a play.  With Marlee Matlin and William Hurt.
• Cinema Paradiso (1988)  Set in Italy in the 1980s and 1940s; this one does make some best-10 lists.
• Being There (1979)  A slow-moving and surreal film; for me, it's engrossing to watch for development and detail from beginning to end.  Peter Sellers' last film; Shirley MacLaine.
• Mary Poppins (1964) and Sound of Music (1965).   The Julie Andrews fan club? Surprisingly, I find I can watch both of these beginning to end every year without a moment's loss of attention.  There's a school of thought that the main character in Mary Poppins is actually the father - he has the most challenges and the biggest character development, and it's interesting to watch from that viewpoint.  
• Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)  Seven independent short films bundled together.  By the Coen Brothers (I also loved the very different Fargo); in Buster, the first and last chapters are my favorites.
• Celluloid Closet (1995)  This is a documentary about the history of gays portrayed in film.  I've felt it's one of the best documentaries I know, and it is not only a history of 100 years of film, but also a 90 minute tour of 100 years of American history and visual and social change.
• Beautiful Mind (2001)  Award-winning movie of John Nash, a Nobel Laureate burdened by schizophrenia.  It swept Best Picture, Best Director, Best screenplay, Best Actress, and nominated for Best Actor.
• Threepenny Opera.  I love this originally German musical or operetta by Brecht and Weill, 1929.  There are three filmed versions, 1931 (original German with English subtitles); as "Mack the Knife," a 1989 US version with Raul Julia; and finally, there was a stunningly well done 2018 German version released as "Mackie Messer: Dreigroschenfilm" only in German and I've seen the DVD which sadly lacks English subtitles.  This last version brilliantly cuts back and forth between Brecht and his colleagues and a filmed version of the play and ends with characters marching out of the play and into present-day London.   (E.g. breaking the fourth wall, as Brecht did).   Really well done; ought to be released on Netflix with subtitles.
• Nothing in Common (1986)  Not-well-known film about Tom Hanks and Jackie Gleason in a difficult but evolving father-son relatinoship.
• Downfall (2004)  Famous modern drama about the last ten days of Berlin before the Russian military victory; most of it set in Hitler's bunker. 
• Casino Jack (2010) and Miss Sloane (2016).  Two very different movies about Washington behind-the-scenes and lobbyists.   Casino Jack is a hoot to watch (Kevin Spacey stars), while Miss Sloane has one of the best surprise endings of any movie, for my money.  
• Chicago (2002) and Cabaret (1972).  Two all-time successful musicals.
• Love Actually (2003) and Magnolia (199).   Not usually placed together, both are famous for being big-cast, extra-complicated but slickly-moving films with a half-dozen or more major subplots going on at once.
• The Expert (YouTube, 2014, 7 minutes).  Incredibly funny and para-realistic view of strategy consulting and working with clients.   Every character represents a real-world role.   23M views on YouTube.

Three Books I Skimmed That Weren't Very Good

It's a cliche' to make best-ten lists or talk about favorite books that you read lately.   Here are three I picked up from the library, skimmed, and turned right back in.

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

Arlie Russell Hochschild (2018)

Amazon: 621 reviews x 4.5 Stars

Great title, timely topic.  Skimmed it to find very predictable material: people at the bottom, lots of them, mad at people at the top, few of them.  Marx noticed this too.

Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company

Marc Benioff (and Carlye Adler) (2009)

Amazon: 155 reviews x 4.5 Stars

Great title.  I love learning about the history of technology and technologic change, from the 1800s right up to today and tomorrow.  But this book is one- or two-page sections about obvious cliche's.  Along the lines of: "Focus on Making The Customer Happy!" and "Make Your Customer Your #1 Sales Agent!"  Sure, these are true, but Winston Churchill won WW-II with the rule, "Never never give up" and yet there's a lot more to say about how he did it.   

I would have liked, and might have expected, cases studies about Salesforce at inflection points - "A" was going wrong, and we considering doing B or C, and chose B, but it didn't work, so then we argued about trying D or E, choosing E for these reasons.   That's not this book, despite the title.

Our Dogs, Ourselves: The Story of a Singular Bond

Alexandra Horowitz (2019)

Amazon: 14 reviews x 4 stars

Great cover.   How could you not pick up this book?   Flipped through it; it's the 30th book about human-dog relationships in five years, I think.

Interesting 1939 Film: Confessions of a Nazi Spy

Amazon Prime Video served up a little known free movie to me recently, HOLLYWOODISM, a 1998 documentary about the history of Jewish pioneers in the film industry from 1910 to the 1950s. 

Based on a book by Neal Gabler and first aired on A&E,  I'd give HOLLYWOODISM a B-rating but it has some interesting points. 

I'd previously read that in the 1930s, American Jews in leadership positions were reluctant to say too much about Hitler and German anti-semitism.  In some cases, the U.S. government told them not too. 

Yet at the same time, there was a largely forgotten level of interest in Nazism in America in the 1930s; it was far from a taboo subject.   See the ten minute recent documentary, A Night at the Garden (here), about the mass-scale 1939 New York Pro-German (Pro-Nazi) rally (Wiki here).  That rally wasn't an isolated event.  See recent books like Hitler's American Friends (here).  And Hitler in Los Angeles (here).  There was also the pro-fascist book by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Wave of the Future, appearing as late as 1940 (here).

Just two months after that landmark scale of that Pro Nazi rally, in Spring 1939, Warner Brothers released "Confessions of a Nazi Spy," which was intended to make real the breadth and energy of pro-Nazi interests in the United States.   Thus, the movie falls between the Anschluss of Austria (March 1938), Kristallnacht (November 1938), and the invasion of Poland (September 1939).

Confessions of a Nazi Spy

Confessions of a Nazi Spy isn't a class-A film, but it was a very interesting one.  See Wikipedia here, see an online ten-page deep dive article by S.J. Ross, here.

The plot.  Basically, we are introduced to some unhappy or disgruntled German-Americans who are lured into the spy world by ringleaders of Nazi interests in America, playing out against a background of "German Bund" or German-American clubs, associations, and summer camps.    Eventually, the Feds are tipped off and a film noir detective drama ensues.   German-Americans are made more sympathetic because if they try to turn down Nazi requests they are brutally threatened for life and limb.

As noted in HOLLYWOODISM, Confessions never mentions anti semitism directly but there are several clear indirect references, e.g. a reference to rights of man regardless of religion.

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Tidbits

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There are numerous references to Hitler's social engineering and propaganda, something timely today in 2019 as we discuss politics, social media, and fake news. 

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The movie Confessions builds up to wide arrests of infiltrated Nazi spies in American military and industry, which is hailed as a victory.  However, just the same spirit of bravely ferreting out and rounding up the enemy in his stateside nooks and crannies also occurred, largely falsely, as part of McCarthyism. 

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Confessions also shows many "bad Germans" in the US amongst the acknowledged "good Germans," but it's impossible not to forsage the concentration camps for Japanese of 1942, in this 1939 movie.

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Edward G. Robinson has a lead role as an FBI agent.  EGR was born Emanuel Goldenberg in a Yiddish-speaking family and came to the US age 10 in 1904.   (He attended City College of New York with the plan to become an attorney.)

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As mentioned in HOLLYWOODISM, there is another obscure and unusual 1940s movie with Cary Grant about anti-semiticism in the executive world of New York, Gentleman's Agreement (1947).   This too was part of an era when Hollywood dealt rarely and gingerly with anti-semiticism, even less so as the McCarthy hearings dawned and often associated Jewishness with Communism.

Three Movies About Washington (1979, 2010, 2016)

In the past month, I saw the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (James Stewart, 1939), which I knew about but don't recall seeing before.   However, that's not one of the three movies discussed here.

BEING THERE (1979)

Being There is a classy film top-notch playwright Jerzy Kosinski, expertly directly by Hal Ashby, and starring winners like Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Jack Warden, Melvyn Douglas.  It's a satire, or fantasy, or "magical realism" since much of the film is played seriously yet it is constantly interlaced with events that are not actually believable.

The movie deliberately unfolds very slowly.   Sellers pays a severely mentally challenged 50-year-old-man, functioning at about the level of a four-year-old, who is a political expert on TV and potentially on his way to the White House by the end of the film.   People constantly miscommunicate with each other and nearly everything Sellers says is misunderstood by at least one other character.   Throughout the film, TV's are playing in the background with content irrelevant to the action, yet intruding on it.  The content streams non-stop and one-way into the environment of the characters.   Familiar character actor Richard Dysart plays a physician who's involved in the story and is an audience surrogate, as he spends most of this time and viewpoint watching the other characters and trying to figure out what is going on.   Shirley Maclaine's character is beautifully acted, via subtle sexual tension building with Sellers' character in their every scene throughout the film.

CASINO JACK (2010)

For me, one of Kevin Spacey's most enjoyable roles, in a high key comedy-satire based on real events surrounding Jack Abramoff, a big-spending, uninhibited lobbyst circa 1990.  Abramoff is on his way to a six-year prison sentence by the end of the movie, most of which is played for comedy.   It's meant to be a behind-the-scenes view of big-money lobbying and Washington back hallways and tactics.

It was a low-impact movie theatrically ($12M budget, $1M box office) but I've seen it several times and enjoyed it just as much on reviewing.  In short, I'm not in tune with the 39% rating on Rotten Tomatoes; for the right viewer, it's a damn fun movie.

MISS SLOANE (2016)

I've also seen this movie three or four times and enjoyed it on every re-viewing.  Jessica Chastain plays a driven, ruthless Washington lobbyist.  She must have a complicated back story, given what we see of both her tortured personal and professional life, but the movie leaves the back story entirely to our imaginations.   Like Casino Jack, it was low impact in the public eye ($13M budget, $9M box office).   I find it entertaning both for characters and plot, and it has one of the best switcheroo O.-Henry endings of any movie.   John Lithgow is a delight playing the bad guy.

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Personal Notes

When Being There came out at Christmas 1979, I was a junior pre-med at Stanford,  The next summer, in July 1980, Sellers died at 53 of a heart attack.  That month, through the pre-med association, I had dinner with a San Francisco psychiatrist who was training as a Jungian analyst and I remember that Seller's death that week was a topic we mentioned.

In Being There, the plot is unfurled very slowly.  For most of the first several scenes, there is minimal dialog: we just watch Peter Seller's character. 

Late in the movie, the cutting becomes much more lively, cutting back and forth between four or five different story lines in scenes only a few lines long. 

A favorite moment: Melvyn Howard, an 80 year old billionaire, is visited by the President (Jack Warden) at an enormous country estate.  Howard has the President sent to the grand library room, and Howard tips off Sellers this is a trick to "keep him waiting."  Entering the library, Sellers and Howard at first don't see the President, who must have used the enforced delay to quickly climb to the second floor, looking steeply down at them when then enter, and thus seizing priority.

I see Being There as a form of fantasy-realism or magical-realism, since much of the setting is very realistic, yet Sellers' character is like a Martian moving about the other characters and speaking at the level of a four year old.   Everyone responds differently to him, conveying the idea that 90% of our responses to others are in our own heads. 

For a nice 12-minute review and clips from Being There, at YouTube, Essential Films, here.

14-year-old Illeana Douglas visited the set to see her grandfather and her favorite actor, Peter Sellers.  She later said this contributed to her career choice to be an actress.

Several of the artists didn't live long after the film.  Sellers died in July 1980 (53).  Melvyn Douglas died in August 1981 (80).  The great writer Kosinski, born 1933 in Poland, lived to 1991 but died at age 57 as a suicide.  I tend to think of Kosinski and Being There as being of a piece with Paddy Chayefsky's Network (1976).  Chayefsky died age 58 in 1981.

Podcast Interview with Dean of Admissions at Stanford (2018): Richard Shaw

2018

30 minutes

https://ed.stanford.edu/news/we-re-looking-good-match-stanford-s-dean-admissions-getting-college

See also a 2013 article in Stanford Magazine

https://stanfordmag.org/contents/what-it-takes

Speaker 1:                        From the campus of Stanford University. This is School's In.

Speaker 2:                        They believe that what they're being told is everything they need to know and they just pay attention to that.

Speaker 3:                         You actually have to teach the teachers how to teach for innovation.

Speaker 1:                        With your hosts, Dan Schwartz and Denise Pope.

Denise Pope:                    Welcome to School's In. I'm Denise Pope, senior lecturer with the Graduate School of Education here at Stanford with my cohost Dan Schwartz, the Dean of the Graduate School of Education.

Dan Schwartz:                 Hello Denise, anti-stress, because today we're talking about a lifelong stressor for parents, for many parents.

Denise Pope:                    Yes, and kids.

Dan Schwartz:                 And kids.

Denise Pope:                    And kids.

Dan Schwartz:                 We're fortunate, we're going to be talking to the Dean of admissions at Stanford. It's not really about getting into Stanford, but I do have one story about getting into Stanford.

Denise Pope:                    Okay.

Dan Schwartz:                 Ingram Olken, God bless his soul, was a professor in the GSE. In his final years he was telling me how he was trying to donate his body when he passed away to the medical school and they rejected him. He said, "I can't even get into Stanford on my death bed."

Denise Pope:                    That's a great story, that's a great story. Well, I decided that it was time for me to stump you, Dan. Yeah, so Dan usually stumps me. I'm going to try to stump him today. We'll see how I do. I've got a couple of questions about college admissions.

                                           First of all, how many students are enrolled in undergraduate education in the United States?

Dan Schwartz:                 10 million.

Denise Pope:                    That is how many were enrolled in the 1970s, 10 million. What is it today?

Dan Schwartz:                 10 million.

Denise Pope:                    No, Dan, that's what you just said. That was what it was in the 1970s, okay? It is double. I'm just going to tell you, it is double, over 20 million college students enrolled undergraduate right now, okay?

Dan Schwartz:                 Wow.

Denise Pope:                    Look at that jump from the 1970s to 2015. Okay.

Dan Schwartz:                 No, I'm just thinking of sales of Plato have gone through the roof.

Denise Pope:                    Exactly, exactly. Okay, here's another one. What percent of applicants turned in four or more applications to colleges? They applied to four or more colleges or university. What percent, of all the applicants who are applying?

Dan Schwartz:                 Can I have a lifeline?

Denise Pope:                    Okay, lifeline. What do you need?

Dan Schwartz:                 When I take the SAT, don't I get a certain number free to get sent out?

Denise Pope:                    It's built into the price, yes, yes.

Dan Schwartz:                 How many?

Denise Pope:                    I don't know, three or four.

Dan Schwartz:                 Then I would say 85%.

Denise Pope:                    Oh, you're pretty good. Okay, so 80% did four or more applications in 2015, but this may shock you. Seven or more applications, seven or more of ... I don't know how many colleges you applied to when you were applying to college. Do you remember?

Dan Schwartz:                 I do.

Denise Pope:                    How many did you apply to?

Dan Schwartz:                 One.

Denise Pope:                    Okay.

Dan Schwartz:                 My parents wouldn't let me go to that one, so they applied me to another.

Denise Pope:                    I love that, my parents applied me to another school. Okay, well I will tell you, seven or more applications.

Dan Schwartz:                 That's complicated. It used to be your top and then your safe school. Now it's like I've got five top schools, a medium school and a safe school? Are these the categories that have evolved?

Denise Pope:                    I don't think people are as thoughtful as that. I can tell you that part of this is because there's something called the Common App. It's a little bit easier just to push that button once you've got that -

Dan Schwartz:                 I don't have like who's the person I respect the most for one college? Then another one's like, which person do I wish I could have met?

Denise Pope:                    Well, interestingly, so the Common Application has an essay or a choice of essays that you write. That's your main essay and you could turn that in with your application where you turn in and everywhere. Then any school that you're applying to has the right to ask for additional, it's called supplemental questions.

                                           Stanford is one of them that has supplemental questions. It's not as easy as just pushing a button, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Do you want -

Dan Schwartz:                 This is fun, yeah, I'm one for two.

Denise Pope:                    Okay, it's 30% of kids -

Dan Schwartz:                 Apply to seven or more?

Denise Pope:                    Seven or more. I personally know kids who apply to 20.

Dan Schwartz:                 Their hit rate is 5%.

Denise Pope:                    Well, no, I mean that's the thing. I know a kid who literally got into 15 out of 20 and they're only going to one school. Think of what that does to the system.

Dan Schwartz:                 You mean to the poor staff that's reading -

Denise Pope:                    Yes. Yes, and then they're admitting kids and then they might say no, and then you've got to go to your wait list, and it's a very complex thing.

Dan Schwartz:                 Why do you apply to 20?

Denise Pope:                    Out of the fear that you won't get into any. That's why I want to end with this one last one and then we're going to get to our guest. What percent, in 2015, of kids attended their first or second choice college?

Dan Schwartz:                 I would say it's pretty high. I think people probably slot it pretty well, so let's say two thirds.

Denise Pope:                    85% get into their first or second choice college. 94% get into one of their top three. We've got kids applying to 15, 20 it's a crazy thing. We are super lucky to have such an expert here with us, Richard Shaw, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at Stanford, otherwise known as the man everybody wants as their best friend.

                                           Thank you for being here, Richard. Thank you.

Richard Shaw:                  It's my pleasure.

Denise Pope:                    Rick, I'm going to call you Rick, because we go back. What do you think of all these numbers? You've been in admissions for a long time. You've been at public universities, private universities. You've been doing this for a while. What do you think?

Richard Shaw:                  Well, let me start by first saying that I applied to six. I had one top and one safety school and four in the middle. That seemed to be a pretty good way to approach this process. I've seen over time that in fact fear is a driver. Most students who are thinking about higher education really are not too sure if they're going to fare well in any of this process.

                                           It's unfortunate, and part of it is because the national press drives people's awareness of schools. Your other statistic was quite interesting that many get into their first or second choice.

Denise Pope:                    Yeah.

Richard Shaw:                  The press would make you believe it's impossible to get into college. They focus on schools that are certainly the most competitive and most selective in the country. I think for a lot of students, they become fearful that there might be a trickle down effect. If they apply to that other school, they don't get in, then they're going to go to the one I want to go to.

Denise Pope:                    Right.

Richard Shaw:                  The reality is that they ... They up the ante, and I have seen the same thing you have. In fact, when I was traveling with my own daughter to look at colleges, I remember sitting in a waiting room and somebody asked the audience, how many schools did you apply to?

                                           This student had been admitted to that school. She stood up and said 17, and she'd gotten into quite a number of them. What happens is that every school has to admit to a number where they think they're going to be successful in enrolling the right number of students.

                                           There is a push out effect in all of this, or many of the same kids getting into a whole bunch of schools. It does create some anxiety, and in some cases that means that schools that haven't met their enrollment goals are pushed down to the wait list.

                                           I think Denise, you are correct in saying the ease of application has changed all of this over the last couple of decades. That is now everything's web based, so you can apply pretty easily to almost anywhere in the world. That's true internationally as well.

                                           Many of us see applications increasing from every constituent group, although certainly the student has to take on some challenge as it relates to applying to places like Stanford, because you have to answer a lot of questions, but they do that.

                                           We're seeing a ballooning of demand, and I think a lot of students, at least on the front end, don't believe that they might be successful.

Denise Pope:                    This is School's In with Dan Schwartz and Denise Pope. We're speaking with Rick Shaw, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at Stanford. I know that those applications to Stanford go up every year. More and more kids want to go. I know it's a good thing we have more kids than ever going to college these days, but we have only increased our incoming class by what? Like 100 over the time that you've been here, how many slots?

Richard Shaw:                  Good question. We really have not increased it much of any over a period of time. Maybe 50 spaces over at least 10 or even more years. That's a challenge -

Dan Schwartz:                 Although enrollment in graduate has gone up quite a bit at Stanford.

Denise Pope:                    Graduate students, yeah.

Richard Shaw:                  I'm speaking only about the undergraduate environment and that's right. Demand for graduate programs has gone up as well, and actually space for graduate students. It's an important issue for Stanford. It's an important issue for a lot of places.

                                           We anticipate we're going to see some growth of that number in the future. Right now in the midst of a strategic plan in which we can hopefully increase the size of the class. Not there yet, but obviously not increasing the size and seeing more applicants has an impact.

Dan Schwartz:                 I want to return to the fear, and your proposition is the media make it seem that way, because they focus on the elite. I do think universities contribute. There is a lack of transparency on whether I'll get in. I have a colleague at a public university where they do the salary setting very specifically.

                                           If you get a journal article published, you get like three points.

Denise Pope:                    If you're a professor.

Dan Schwartz:                 If you're a professor. If you do a book chapter, you get one point. If you're on a national panel, you get 20 points, so only the very senior faculty get that. Then they add these up, and they use that algorithmically to decide what is your salary, so it's bad, but it's incredibly transparent.

                                           The lack of transparency means I don't really know whether I'm going to get in or not. Of course I'm going to apply to a lot of places, and it's not the media that's doing that, it's the ambiguity. Why do we do that? Why don't we just say? "If you cross this line, you're in."

Richard Shaw:                  Yeah, that's a good question. I used to work at a public university in which there was a formula. The formula did exactly what you suggest, said if you meet these conditions, you are eligible for this system. We guarantee you'll be admitted.

                                           Public system and formula driven test scores, grades, not a lot of flexibility in terms of looking at other characteristics. We don't mean not to be transparent, but it's really important to emphasize that we care about every characteristic of the candidate who's applying to the university.

                                           We approach this by doing what we call holistic admissions, in which we look at autobiography. We look at not just the academic record or the courses they've taken or test scores, but we actually look at the students personally, or listen to the personal voice.

                                           We look at the things they've done outside the classroom. We look at their hopes and aspirations, their dreams about what they'd like to do. Because of that, I can't build that into a formula. I can't make a formula out of something like that.

                                           I can tell you that we take all of those sorts of things into account. We're not trying to stress out the student by doing that, but we do want to hear their perspective and their voice. To be honest, among those students that apply to our institution, well above 80% are highly qualified and competitive for a position in the class, 80% of the applicants.

                                           We find ourselves in a very selective environment where we're trying to make very hard decisions and establish a match between those that we finally offer a position to, and those that we don't. Now the reality is many of the students, vast majority of the students who are highly qualified and competitive don't get in.

                                           Our approach is one in which we really take into account the human aspects of the candidates and all of the things they've done.

Denise Pope:                    This is School's In with Dan Schwartz and Denise Pope. We are speaking today with Rick Shaw, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at Stanford. Really talking about the fact that you're doing holistic review. That 80% who apply to Stanford are qualified.

                                           We take less than 5%, that sounds scary on the one hand. On the other hand, the good news is that for the first time we have the largest group of first generation to go to college, students accepted here. Can you talk a little bit about that? I was so excited to hear that.

Richard Shaw:                  The reality is that one of the founding principles at Stanford from its very beginning was that it wanted to be a university that would be open and accessible to all people, men and women from all walks of life. That sounds a little bit silly today because of the demand, but the reality is we are open and accessible to all students from all walks of life.

                                           We really go about reviewing our candidates in the context of each individuals, in the context of where they live and learn, that individual student. No matter what we do, there's no favored nation status. There's no feeder high schools or preference for any part of the world or preference for any part of the country.

                                           We go right to that kid's home environment, their school, their experience, and we look at how they've succeeded in terms of the resources they have available to them when applying to college. Many of the students that are interested in Stanford, and we have a major commitment to them, are first generation, low income kids, who in many cases in years past, wouldn't apply to a place like Stanford, but now they realize that in fact, they have a shot at being students here.

                                           They've chosen to apply, and we look again holistically at the application. They're very competitive along with the other many students that are competitive and very deserving, and actually the best of the best in the context of where they've lived and learned.

                                           We're very fortunate to have been over time growing the interest on the part of low income students. We are committed to one of our own faculty members, Raj Chetty, has taken a hard look at selective higher education and we're interested in mobility.

                                           That is young people who perhaps don't have parents who have gone to college or graduated from a four year institution. Having the opportunity to come in a place like this and then move on to graduate and have lots of options for the life that they live.

Denise Pope:                    I think a lot of people don't realize that with that comes financial aid. That you are committed to these students monetarily, as well as giving them the support they need when they're here. A lot of institutions are doing this, we're seeing more do this. For those folks out there who wouldn't think that this is a place that they could ever go to, I think that, that would be important.

Richard Shaw:                  Right, I think a lot of people actually, first generation kids, historically have said they see the price, or their parents see the price and they go, "We can't go there."

Denise Pope:                    Right.

Richard Shaw:                  They don't even apply, and in fact, the truth is that they can go to Stanford in most cases, with just a very small contribution that the student makes by doing some work while they're going to school, but a very small contribution.

                                           Most of it, room and board, tuition and fees, tuition, is paid for by the university and they don't have to repay it. That's an important message. That's one of the great challenges for first gen low income kids though nationally. You have to take a close look at where affordability plays a role.

                                           Of course, that's in most places, but in fact, you might be eligible and competitive for a highly selective university, and you don't simply have to go to the one that's in your hometown.

Denise Pope:                    This is School's In with Dan Schwartz and Denise Pope. We will have more with Rick Shaw, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at Stanford next on Sirius XM Insight, 121.

Speaker 2:                        Students focus on what they were told, not paying attention to the situation.

Speaker 1:                        This is School's In with Dan Schwartz and Denise Pope.

Speaker 2:                        They're not going to see anything new, because they're so busy trying to copy what you told them.

Speaker 1:                        From the campus of Stanford University.

Denise Pope:                    Welcome back to School's In with Dan Schwartz and Denise Pope. We are talking today with Rick Shaw, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at Stanford University.

Dan Schwartz:                 I want to go back to this question of how we decide admissions, and how in general Stanford, but everywhere else. I'm going to back into it a little bit. There's a story that the taste tester for Campbell soup was dying, and this was the guy whose taste determined what all Campbell soups tasted like.

                                           Something, some signature quality that only he could taste. Before they died, they spent a lot of time trying to do what's called knowledge engineering. What is it that this guy's tasting, so we can reimplement that? I get that feeling here, right?

                                           That when Rick Shaw decides to retire, nobody else is going to have the same taste on who gets admitted. It's going to be hard to keep it going forward, because it's a certain je ne sais quoi. I'm not sure that's the case. In some ways I'm thinking a certain lack of transparency about admissions is good and for two reasons.

                                           One, it allows you flexibility to say, "We're going to try and make this kind of community now and see if we can nudge society by who we admit." The other is if we told you exactly what the rules were, you would just continually train your child just for those rules.

Denise Pope:                    Yeah.

Dan Schwartz:                 Yeah, I thought you might like that one. Help me understand again, because I'm a parent, I've got a kid, I want him to get into Yale, for example. We never talk about Yale, so I thought I'd say Yale. They won't tell me exactly what I need dammit.

Richard Shaw:                  Right, well, yeah, and I by the way, was the Dean of Admissions at Yale too, so I can -

Denise Pope:                    I thought that's why you said it Dan. I looked over at Rick like of course.

Richard Shaw:                  I'm thinking boy, and then when I quit tasting the soup there, I don't know what happened, it probably went down.

Denise Pope:                    Yeah, they just fell apart.

Richard Shaw:                  Yeah, actually, I think one of the most important parts of this across the nation and by college and university is that the admissions office does not drive the decisions, the university does. I have a faculty committee and instruction from the faculty that tells me what it is that we should value in this process.

                                           If I'm gone tomorrow, it will continue very effectively to do the important work that it does.

Dan Schwartz:                 The Stanford soup will taste the same.

Richard Shaw:                  It should taste the same. Again, really, I want to emphasize the fact that it really is important for students to be successful in school. I mean, the common denominator across the nation is that you go to school, you work hard, you do well in your courses, you're preparing for college, so some sense of what the expectations are.

                                           That also that you don't only just go to school to regurgitate what you learn, but those students that emerge in this process across the nation and in lots of committee rooms around the nation, are kids who actually have embraced their secondary education in a way in which you have a sense of their love for what they do.

                                           Whatever that might be, it might be academic, it might be extracurricular. They approach the process by not being formulaic, not being controlled by others, but in fact finding a place within their secondary experience in which they experience love, love of doing drama, love of the orchestra, love of the respective coursework they're in.

                                           In a lot of ways, these schools are looking for the energy and the innovation and the excitement that kids have about, not only what they've been through. I know this is driven or impacted by the fact they feel so much stress, which is unfortunate, but also the potential that they have to do what they can do in higher education as well.

                                           There is no formula, but there is a sense in our review process across the nation and small colleges, large colleges, public universities, that we're looking for young people who will be a good match for our institutions. It might be here, it might be somewhere else.

                                           To be honest with you, you would say, "Well, what was the paradigm difference between Yale and Stanford?" The fact is we really looked for the same things, which was this energy and this potential. A lot of cases, it's the first generation kid who hasn't had any resources, but you see the glimmer, you see the grit, you see the possibilities of that young person.

                                           You realize that if they have the resources in college, they'll take it the distance. I think that's what happens.

Denise Pope:                    This is School's In with Dan Schwartz and Denise Pope. We are speaking with Rick Shaw, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at Stanford. I've got a question Rick, we're hearing a lot about the college admission process changing. There are some organizations out there that are trying to make changes in college admission.

                                           I know in my own organization we're trying to tamp down on the stress around college admissions. Where do you see college admissions going? Do you see the changes happening?

Richard Shaw:                  Yeah, this is the toughest question, and you know and your organization and others do, caring matters, things like that, that there's concern that there's too much pressure on young people. In school, that is, they're forced to take, instead of some AP's, they take 10 AP's or whatever the case may be.

                                           They're not, in fact, having an opportunity to embrace the secondary experience in a way which would reflect what I said a minute ago, which is the love of learning and the love of the experience. The difficulty in all of this is that we have a lot of applicants to our institutions.

                                           Kids are approaching this and coming from ... They aren't all the same. We're assuming everybody is the same in applying. Kids are in different places in terms of their secondary experience and the courses they take and what they think want to take.

                                           I would say that we don't really spend a lot of time counting advanced placement courses. We really, again, are coming back to look at the kid. We do want them to challenge themselves, but we know that in some cases it may not be appropriate for them to do all of these things, because that's not where their aptitude is.

                                           There's a myth, I think to some extent, that we only count all of these things. Those are only the kids that get in. In fact, it isn't just about the courses or the grades or the scores, it's also about the human being behind all of it.

                                           We're reading for that. We understand that we don't want to drive kids to distraction before they get to college. In fact, what we're finding in higher education, is a lot of students are arriving and then seeking out counseling, because they arrive being relatively stressed out.

                                           We certainly don't want to contribute to that. We've been given the moniker that we do, and I think that's what our intent is.

Denise Pope:                    Yeah, I don't think it's intentional. I think it's the nature of it. In our studies, when we ask kids the top source of stress in their life, they could say anything. Alcoholic parent, boyfriend broke up with them. Sometimes up to 30% say the top source of stress is getting into college.

                                           If you're constantly living your life for that future, which you feel you don't have control over. Here's the thing that I want folks to know, and Rick, I've heard you, you can back me up on this. There are over 4,000 accredited universities in the United States.

                                           Over 4,000, there is almost 3000 that are four year colleges in the United States. 3000, not 13, not the whatever, however Ivy's plus Stanford plus MIT, you just said 80% are qualified. Those kids are going to go to great schools. You're going to have great peers anywhere you go.

Richard Shaw:                  Right, I think it's really unfortunate that again, press drives the top 20 or 50 or whatever the case may be. That drives people towards where they think they should apply, even though they may not know a lot about those institutions.

                                           At the end of every cycle I get phone calls.

Denise Pope:                    I'm sure you do.

Richard Shaw:                  Often from parents, in fact, mostly from parents who love their children and care deeply about their future. They're perplexed, but the first thing I do, because their son or daughter didn't get in. The first thing I do when I answer the phone and they begin the conversation is, where did she get in?

                                           Then they tell me, and I say, "No, really, seriously, where did she get in?" They tell me the school, and I say, "This is an incredible day. This is a wonderful day to celebrate. You must be so excited about this," because in fact, there are all of these opportunities, all of these places, all of these amazing colleges and universities that young people can go to.

                                           We know, even from our position, that they will get in many of them. I think the kids understand that too a little bit better. I think they're more resilient. I think the families need to chill out.

Denise Pope:                    You heard it here. Chill out about college admissions.

Dan Schwartz:                 Chill out.

Denise Pope:                    Thank you for being here, Rick. Thank you listeners for listening to School's In with Dan Schwartz and Denise Pope. If you missed any of this episode, listen anytime on demand with the Sirius XM app.