 Hello, welcome to Kwak Tok. I'm Crystal here. And today we have a very important topic where I think the key word is broken. And what does it mean to be broken? You know, when a system doesn't work, when things you think you've made that effort to work your way towards something as a measure of success, and then, huh, maybe it doesn't work. College higher education and the way things are playing out today all over the world, the unemployment rates, the lack of opportunities out there. And, you know, also the lack of positivity around college students in, like, what's this all about and whether it's worth it? So I have with me an amazing college counselor based in Hong Kong, Jen Lee. Jen Lee is the Deputy Director of the University of, sorry, of Counseling of CIS, which is the Chinese International School. And just to give you a little background, when I lived in Hong Kong, my kids went to that school. It's an international school. And yeah, we'll go from there. But so Jen brings over 21 years of related professional experience, having worked in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Korea, and the US and both university admissions and college counseling. And she brings to CIS a wealth of knowledge, garnered from her previous role as Director of College Counseling at the Buckley School in Los Angeles, head of Counseling at the Shanghai American School, the Pushi campus, and who work as an admission officer at Scripps College and an outside admissions reader for UCLA. He was also the inaugural recipient of the International Association for College Admissions Counseling Rising Star Award. And Jen received her bachelor's at Wellesley and earned her master's in education from Harvard. So on that huge, amazing note, welcome, Jen, to our show. Thank you so much, Crystal. What a warm welcome. Really appreciate it and happy to be here today. The honor is mine because, you know, we had casually talked about this over kind of under social backgrounds to just joke about the problems with higher education today. But now we have to really kind of let's crack that nut because a lot of people who are going through it now, and even maybe you can back up and tell us like how much things have changed so that we're here today talking about the problems with the process to get into higher education and also the complexities of how we measure success around this idea of higher education. Right. Goodness. It's such a hot topic. I don't even know where to begin, but I think I think we have to begin with this notion of, you know, achievement culture, especially in those schools that I've worked at in some of the premier international schools here in Asia. And then I've also worked in Los Angeles private schools. So, you know, there is a lot of affluence, but I think all around we know that with higher ed and getting into some of these highly selective universities, it's become quite challenging and challenging because the volume has increased right so students are applying globally all from all over the world and the number of applications have risen. It's not necessarily that the number of applicants have risen per se, but it's this anxiety fear induced culture is my son or daughter are going to be able to guarantee be guaranteed admissions and one of the top highly selective institutions and what do I need to do to prepare them and then this whole cottage industry of outside consultants and SAT prep and, you know, it runs the gamut and then if you're an athlete hiring athletic coaches to build their athletic portfolio. So it goes on and on. Yeah, I feel like sorry, but when my kids were back in school before they did this process, I feel like it was the same thing, but somehow something is different now in a way that it doesn't get like would you say that maybe 10 years ago there was a measure of success in channeling yourself into these higher education spaces these privileged kind of elite schools, whereas now there's no guarantee of anything going into them and spending those the millions of dollars that you do as you had mentioned. Yeah, I think the system. I'd like to say quite frankly, inherently was broken. I mean, we saw the whole scandal with, you know, that that consultant admissions consultant and how parents were willing to allow, you know, X number of millions of dollars to fabricate even the profile of their children. So it's kind of gone really far. And I think COVID definitely exacerbated what was already a system that was kind of on, you know, it's not broken in the sense that yes, it's still it's still running students are still getting in. But I would say the the striving the competition, the outrageous padding of the profiles and what are we really going after and and then the rise in issues of students feeling so despondent and depressed and anxious and we have to touch upon the mental health issues as the result of all. So it's kind of being kind of blanketed. I know that mental health is kind of like a buzzword, but I still feel like there's a long way we need to go to really digging into the core of how these things develop, right? It's not something that happens overnight. There are a multitude of conditions that lead one to have mental health issues. Absolutely. And I've been reading a lot of different books, but one of the books. Never enough. Okay. I don't know the author. She is Jennifer Wallace. And I know she is a former journalist or maybe she is still a journalist, but it's a New York Times bestseller. And basically, it's talking about achievement culture, when achievement culture becomes toxic and what we can do about it. And I feel that this is a book that every parent should read. It touches upon everything, you know, college admissions, parenting, mental health, achievement culture, affluent communities, all of it. And what inherently as parents are parents doing to push their kids to the point of kids kind of breaking and then continuing on to college where they don't maybe have the resilience or the support system and then they turn, you know, I'm talking about extreme cases, but this is a situation where it's unhealthy. It's unhealthy for our adolescents. I know last year when I was working in Los Angeles private schools, one of the schools in the area, there were a number of death by suicides of our teenagers and that should not be the case. So what are we teaching our students? What are we teaching our adolescents? And in Asia, as you know, it's all about education and, you know, it's all about name brand recognition. So when they talk about, you have to get into a good school. You know, what, what is the definition of a good school? You and I both know in the grand scheme of life. College is important. Yes. However, there are many different roads to success. Exactly. And everybody learns differently. So you can't apply the same rules to every individual. Right. Right. And so it's all of it. It's, it's a topic that, you know, I, I didn't think in college when I was going to attending Wellesley that I would one day become an admission officer and then a college counselor. It wasn't, it wasn't in my mind. I actually wanted to be the next Connie Chung because growing up in, in New York, in Long Island, I didn't see many Asian Americans on TV. But now, as you know, yeah, there are many. But so going back to the popularity, I mean, the competition, the fierce competition within Asian communities, because first of all, you have, like you say, it's that support system and the pressures that a lot of Asian parents put on their kids from day one. Right. I mean, like at CIS, you know, these, these parents are from kindergarten, they are putting them in all these special support systems to already kind of check those boxes to build them up to wherever they are to, to have this so-called ideal resume, which doesn't guarantee anything anyway, because everybody on paper has the perfect marks. And so when you do that, you start cancelling each other out, colleges are starting to kind of pick up on these perfect papers and they, they're looking for alternatives. But then are the Asian parents that you see, are they picking up on the fact that they are looking for other things and encouraging them to do some more creative endeavors? Or do you think that they're still cycling and recycling this old idea of measures of success? I think, I think it's all of it, right? I think no matter how much you may counsel, advise parents, and we do, in our, in our university counseling office, we are very intentional. And now we incorporate kind of the social-emotional wellness factors into our counseling to make it a lot more holistic. You know, I think that that's always going to be there. And what I found, whether I'm in Asia or an affluent suburb somewhere in the US or New York City, Los Angeles, wherever, it's this notion of achievement culture because right now, as you know, the world is on fire. It's uncertain. And I think lots of parents, they, they want, of course, what parent wouldn't want the best for their child. And education is, you know, definitely a value that everyone holds dear, not everyone, but many people. So, so-and-so is going this route, you know? Right. But really, I really emphasize to my students to take the time to have some introspection in this. And, you know, a lot of this process, it's a self-actualizing process, right? For adolescents who are just thinking about their future, their identity is still being developed. And to really ask the hard questions, the problem is our culture doesn't always encourage it, right? You can say you can have great formalities yourself and have a dream to do something to change the world, but the world doesn't necessarily see your talents in that way. So you kind of still have to play a game in the way that the system works. Or do you? Yeah, I think, yeah, I mean, listen, we, there is always a system, right? There is always a system. With that said, I also have kind of a different way of thinking about things. And maybe this is just the way I grew up in my liberal arts background. And also just the strong will in terms of, I believe, in possibilities and intention and growth mindset. So if I were to fail, I have the wherewithal, right? The resilience to pick myself up and get back again, get back up again and try. And these are the deposits, I think, you know, when it comes to parenting, I think these are the things that the parents need to really deposit and encourage and parent well with their children, especially in this generation. Right? How many wars, how many wars are going on? It's, it's a negative, it can be a negative, gloomy outlook. Yeah, but with that said, I think when I, when I talk about core values, it's what, what does your family esteem? I think this notion of students who are what, what, what they're called healthy strivers, right? There's this term, right? And even in that book, never enough, healthy strivers. They knew that they mattered, okay? They know their worth. They know that despite setbacks, failures or challenges, that it's not, it's not an indictment on who they are. If they fail, they still know they mattered and they have the resilience and the wherewithal to bounce back and try again, right? So it's this notion of kids having adolescence, having a healthy sense of self, a healthy sense of self esteem that they matter to their family, that they matter to their community. And this, this notion of worth and mattering, I think is, is really going to be crucial. And that involves parents and family and all of that. Absolutely. And I feel like traditional Chinese are still not getting it. They're still putting that same pressure, you know, having been in Hong Kong for it again. I hear people always, you know, even growing up, parents are always comparing with other kids. Like, oh, how come so-and-so is doing this? You know, and that's really brutal for, you know, the self esteem of a kid who's striving to do their best and they might not be the best at a certain thing or, you know, it doesn't work that way for everyone. Right. I mean, we live in social media culture, right? Yeah. It's comparison culture. And, you know, there's research on this, how harmful and detrimental, detrimental social media is to adolescents, especially adolescent girls and phones and all of that. So, yeah, I just, I think, I think this notion of self worth, mattering, knowing themselves, I think this is really crucial in terms of parents really cultivating that in their child, because, you know, I'm not trying to, you know, I'm not trying to give parenting advice here, but what I've seen in my time of students and counseling students is that the students who have the strong sense of self, the strong sense of community, a strong sense of family, all of these things, they know that at the end of the day, despite their outcome, right, wherever they get in, they will be happy and be successful according to their measure of success. Well, that's the ideal, you know, situation, but then again, there's a lot of students who slip through the cracks where they have the pressure of maybe other siblings who've been successful. They've already gotten into these top schools and then they're like, oh gosh, all eyes on me to perform the same way. Or my daughter was just telling me that she has an old high school friend who got into a top school because her friend had actually helped her throughout the whole application process. So it was like, wow, so you can get through the system, but then what happens to you as a person when you slide through in different supportive ways and you didn't make that for yourself. So how do you feel about those types of situations? Yeah, I mean, we had it. Like I remember even back in the day when I was at Wellesley and like I heard about these international students at Boston University, you know, they have a very strong international community even for long history of that. And I hear about students being on academic probation or they can't hack it, you know, so even if they get admitted, when they get to university, they're going to have to be able to balance all of it, right? And you know, American higher education, it's not just about academics, you know, there's the social life, right? There's a social aspect. So that's a problem that filled the documentary I retire, which is quite old now, but I remember it showing the kind of the aliteness of these college students who are just partying and just filling their parents' hard earned money on just this frivolous four years of nothingness. And then again, questioning what the purpose of education is when you work your way, you think you work hard in there to assume the successful path beyond. And yet, you're just pouring it away because you never really appreciated that process yourself. So does it come down to the person, the type of person who's going into that school, no matter what kind of support system you have? Or, you know, what is it you think that actually ticks the proper kind of qualities? Yeah, I think it's, it's, it's what, you know, it's what you said, it depends on the student, but it really depends again. I'm going to go back to their values, their intentions, their goals, what their interests are in knowing themselves and then how much of a drive they have, how much are they motivated to kind of see that through and how important is it, right? If their, if their intention is, you know, to become a doctor or to become a dancer, everyone's goals are different, right? The effort, the integrity was whatever your own, whatever it feels. I want to say, I know we only have a couple of minutes left, but based in my experience teaching at Hong Kong U.N., a lot of the grad students are from mainland China, and I am so blown away by how hard they work. Of course, people say, oh, it's the Chinese work ethics, but it's not just that, you know, and there's, there's a competition to be able to, you know, there's a huge competition within that culture and country with the numbers of vast numbers. But yet you still have to just admire their sense of integrity that I don't see happening in a lot of U.S. systems. Yeah, I think, I think, you know, different environments, different upbringings, different values, different, different mindsets. I think with China, the competition is so, so strict because of the gauk how, and, and, you know, that that's a, it's a really challenging exam. Not everyone is able to be successful in that. You know, growing up in that kind of context, it's a little different than growing up maybe in suburbs of New York. We don't see the Chinese culture. Yeah, you talked about the consequences. You don't know what's really broken inside a person who's gone through this vigorous training where, you know, I don't know. I mean, where, where is that the balance of happiness and pursuing your own passions and working hard to get where you want to in life. In a short minute left, would you have, yeah, what would your suggestions be based on a college counselor to these kids who are just really struggling to, to navigate their path and what it means to succeed in this world today? Yeah, I think know, know that you matter. Okay, I think having a healthy sense of who you are. Understand, understanding who you are, your strengths. It's important to have a big dream, right? I know this sounds kind of, it might be a little bit more just untraditional, right, of what I'm saying, but I think when you know yourself, you're going to have more clarity in where you're going and the vision you have for your next educational career and the next chapter. Because otherwise you're going to get swept away by other people's expectations, your parents' expectations, the school's expectations. And so it's really important to get clear about your strengths, your intentions, your goals, your dreams and taking the time for that. I can't emphasize that enough because it's the flip side of that is, you know, they always ask, oh, what do I need to do to get into this top school? I know, and you're going that way. And the parents here, what you have to say and you said that book was it called Never Enough is something you recommended and I just feel like there, you know, there's a push pull. There's a lot support system going on and I hope parents really kind of reassess how a kid's mental health and well-being and you said, you know, how they kind of find themselves is so crucial. So thank you so much for your time. I'm just hoping that the system doesn't get, they might get uglier before it gets fixed, but, you know, we're dealing with a time that's so uncertain and we're just all navigating it together. So I appreciate your perspective as a counselor extraordinaire. This is Jen Lee. Thank you so much. Thank you, Crystal.