welcome to the secrets of college planning on the host anthony and today we're going to get some insight into the ivy league my guest today is robin hires she's the executive director of the ivy league and welcome to the show thank you good to be here so usually i goal start for you to think about college was a freshman you are senior year how did it all begin for you that's a great question it's hard to remember back that far i you know i think back then things were so much later it was really more civilized than i think the pressure high school students and their parents feel today and i i hope we can get back to those days which we can talk about later i think maybe towards the end of my junior year i started you know taking the  set of standardized tests and started getting shorts in the mail and really the old school way and applied my fall of my senior year in high school and so somewhere over the summer probably narrowed my list down no duke university and i was it or did you have a wide right the the from school i had no idea what i wanted i had absolutely no idea i started out thinking i wanted a northeastern city school as long as it wasn't in new york city because that was too close to where i grew up in new york to ending up in north carolina and it really came down to the campus visits and when i started to visit all the campuses and just fell in love with the duke campus in warm weather and the climate student climate at the university so that brings me to when you get to college so what happened when you got to college was it everything you thought it was a terrific experience i learned as much outside the classroom as i did in the classroom just from the other students and i think that's such an important part of the college experience is of course you're going to learn from fabulous professors you're going to also though learn from the people you're going to school with and so who are your friends who are the other people in your classes and it was such a wonderful opportunity to also be involved in extracurricular activities outside the classroom so you graduate from duke and then graduate from law school how does one go from there to becoming the executive director of the ivy league though it's funny i actually i did work for three years before going to law school back at duke i worked in government consulting and i had no idea what i wanted to do with my life when i was a senior at duke both my parents a lawyers i did not want to go to law school by default and i was looking for other work and i took one of those career placement tests and i honestly should have saved it because it said i should be an athletic director which was actually amusing because i was not a student athletes and i really had no involvement in athletics other than loving sports and so it was funny that there's something in my personality that len lead me in that direction so when i went to law school and i thought i would go work in the government while in law school someone the marry your interests with your career and you'll never work a day in your life and i thought wow what's what's in my interest i love the new york yankees and duke basketball what am i going to do with that and here i am in college sports but mostly good that's how you got to the executive director well so in law school i got some internships i worked in the do compliance office i worked at the c c and their compliance office i talked to a lot of individuals who work in college and professional sports to learn more about their jobs and see what interested me and i found i have a true passion for college sports and the idea that student athletes are getting both an education and a terrific athletic experience and that they're learning important life lessons that led me  to a position at the n c a a i wrote a large view article while i was in law school on the n c a a and i started working at the n c a a about in december after i graduated from law school so i worked at a law firm for several months before i got the n c a a job and then from there became the second so no i had another step in the way so i was at the n c a a for nine years half of my time working on the end with the enforcement process basically  clerk to the committee that decides the cases which was the subject of my larger article so everything kind of fit together and then i was the associate chief of staff or division one where i was responsible for  staffing the board of directors the which has presidents the management council comprised of athletic directors faculty other administrators and really responsible for managing all issues that pertain to division one in all sports and from there i went and when i got married and i moved i had to find another job and i worked for a law firm co chairing the collegiate sports practice where i got the business side of courts and then the search firm came calling about the ivy league executive director position which really blends all of my experiences if i could have mapped out my career path i would have this is where i would have ended up but it all just all the roads lead me here that's fantastic so let's get into the the council the ideally for president what what exactly is that what is a do so the ivy league of our formal title is the ivy league council of presidents and it's a con it's a group of eight schools brown columbia cornell dartmouth harvard penn princeton and yale that form together for an athletics purpose we've been competing against each other since the eight hundred we form of formalized the arrangement in one nine hundred fifty four with a signed agreement where the president came together because they were concerned about the corruption in college football in one nine hundred fifty four why can you believe that and at that time we put in place our president at that time put in place some fundamental principles that while they've evolved in modernize remained true to our core and so our athletic programs operate truly in balance where our student athletes are able to have both an academic and athletic experience and they're treated as closely as possible to the rest of the student body both in terms of admissions and their financial aid certainly and their experience while they're students so you do you handle every sport that's in the ivy league i do we have as ivy league sports a five school sponsor sport it's an ivy league sport so we have thirty three ivy league sports where we are ward champions our schools sponsor an average of thirty five sports with the highest that forty to one and we get involved in all aspects so so the sponsorships and t v rights and so on and yet at the conference level and then we also help coordinate policies and rules we have our own ideally rules as well as n c a a rules championships in a number of our sports and then we have a website and the ivy league network where we broadcast the live events for over eleven hundred contests across all sports and when did that start so this is the fifth year of the ivy league network and it's been a huge success so that you have something to do with it i did it was our athletic directors came together and president supported the initiative where each school had been already streaming had seems like such an old school term now but each school had been streaming their own events and they each school had branded its own channel of events and we thought if we came together and pool resources we could have an ivy league digital network at the time where it would be a nine channel endeavor so we would all be under one umbrella and then each school would also have its channel for fans over time that's evolved where it's really the ivy league network and of course fans of an individual school can find the games for that school but they can also watch games from other schools and so we were involved in the process of putting out an r p g selecting the platform and figuring out all the details that go involved hiring staff and all of our schools have had to hire staff we hired someone to oversee the network and it's been a resound thing success  can figure out how to stream an event then home adventure on so we have squash we have fencing we have soccer field hockey you name it i'm almost every sport is on the network over eleven hundred events we have on demand content with special features and it's it's really been a lot of fun it is subscription it's a nominal subscription amount that people can buy day passes commitment to student athletes coming to the ivy league yeah i think it's a really important issue as i alluded to when i remember back in the dark ages when i was applying to college almost everyone was making decisions senior maybe some in the junior year but really senior year even for athletes and that has shifted earlier and earlier and earlier i think in large part because of the growth in new sports travel teams and  showcases and probably technology as well that it's easier for athletes to be recruited it's easier for coaches to find athletes and we are in a never ending spiral of earlier and earlier commitments and some sports are earlier than others of the cross tends to be the poster child but it's it's touching other sports like softball and soccer and so our schools actually took a stance because we don't adjust our admissions process so the earliest that any athlete or regular student can get a sign from the admissions office whether or not they're likely to be admissable is not until the senior year and at schools outside the ivy league that can occur much earlier and we really hold true to that timetable that we think you need to develop yourself as a person your academic credentials and you need to figure out what you as a person want in a college and conversely a college should have a strong record in palm which to evaluate so when we see commitments occurring in the freshman and sophomore year at other schools it just doesn't make sense you know if it's as verbal commitments those are just verbal because you're actually  can't sign a national letter of intent until the senior year now we in the ivy league don't subscribe to the national letter of intent because that is tied to an athletic scholarship which we don't offer but we do limit the  when the admissions office can review someone's credentials so we actually took a firm stance on appropriately so on holding to our admissions process and we consistently over the past several years have raised the issue at the n c a a level and finally we have some traction and i and then some respect because of high school students and their parents going to the media and expressing concerns about this early the pressure to commit early so one of the best articles was in the new york times involving soccer and the impact it has on sophomores in high school feeling like they have to commit to a college or they're not going to be in the spot for them so the n c a a is actually looking at this and i think we're going to bring the timetable back closer to what it should be where the citizens shouldn't be happening until at the earliest the junior year and ideally scholarship academics financial need things of that sort the really those things like that so the ivy league offers very generous need based financial aid packages we have among the most generous packages at all eight of our schools in the entire country all aid has to be need based in the ivy league there may be some limited special scholarships that are available at different schools but there really aren't academic scholarships like there are at other schools and there's definitely no athletic scholarships in the ivy league but unfortunately we have tremendously generous need based financial aid package is there any type of merits scholarships or anything now  that can so it's just financial need not other than in some limited special scholarships that are designated certain purposes but not a general like oh you're great in math and or physics and we're going to give you this package like other schools do you got yours so how does the i mean we didn't work with student athletes coming to into the different sports because a lot of these athletes  some are are well off in an affluent family so that they just come to them and say ok you pay the sticker price of the school so the way the process works is obviously coaches are recruiting and during the recruitment process the more the college selection process families are able to go on all of our web sites now and there's a calculator and they can input their information and get a general sense it's an estimate it's not precise it's not going to be the final award probably but they can get a general sense of what the need based financial aid package would look like and then there there's always the option of talking with someone in the financial aid office to get an early sense of hey if they supplied tax returns what what would the aid package look like and then after admissions they get the or with the admissions letter they would get you know over the over the years on the show i've had admissions people on it financially people on from from princeton university and all the schools and then they talk about in the interview process the is like an interview process to get into the school is there an interview process for the athletes as well as who they go through some type of interview process as well so that's up to each individual coach i would expect our coaches are getting to know the prospective student athletes as people as well as their performance on the field so whether you call it an interview or not they are allowed to have a certain number of meetings with each prospect in person whether it's on campus or off campus get to know the family get to know more about who the individual is as a person now another big thing that comes up to me a lot from parents is time factor the time factor at the universities when they go for a sport it's always about the sport not about academics at the ivy league from talking to all these people it's it's more about academics what's your take we are very protective of our student athletes experience we want them to not only have an amazing athletic experience but to have a fabulous academic experience and also have time to be a student as well because that's important to have some downtime and to just enjoy the social aspect as well as extracurricular aspects many of our student athletes are involved in another activity beyond their ath participation on an athletics team so in the ivy league we limit the number of hours that student athletes can be involved in their sport more so than what the n c a a allows in their varies by sport and the limits are particularly applicable when in what we call the off season where we limit the time that they can be involved in activities and some sports have shorter seasons or play fewer games because we want to make sure they have time to be students we also significantly limit what they can do in the summer athletically because that's a time for them to get jobs and internships and the trend nationally in division one has been for many many sports to spend the summer in campus working out and we want our student athletes that other experiences know from harvard so many people as well tony that once you graduate from an ivy league school they tend to come back in the the work at the school or something of that sort of do you see a lot of cases with all the ivy league schools there's a tremendous community with ivy league students generally and student athletes and it actually transcends our schools post graduation while there and there's still competitiveness on the field but there's something special about having gone to an ivy league school and also having been a student athlete and ivy league school and challenge yourself to exceed all expectations athletically academically and then in your career so when people meet each other there is a bond and yes a lot to come back but i also find there's a terrific community just out in the world of ivy league alumni you so another thing that tomes up is injuries at the college level  concussions is one of the biggest things that the topic is always out there what's what's your take on the confession issues that are out there with the n c a a the we have at the ivy league been involved in studying concussions for about seven years now and we have been continuously on the forefront nationally and how we've tackled no pun intended concussions both in terms of well in terms of the management the prevention and the treatment as well and we started studying with football because that's the one that gets all the press and the teams are large we've actually studied nine sports with soccer ice hockey men and women squash and lacrosse as well and we've implemented changes in all the sports in terms of practices how they're how we handle practices in the individual sports and in football we adopted an experimental playing role for kickoff which we've had in place for two seasons because we found as we've studied concussions that the number of concussions occurring in cast kickoffs were much greater than their percentage in the game so we had twenty five percent of all of our concussions in games were occurring in kickoffs and they're only six percent of plays so we moved our kickoff line to encourage more touchbacks and our concussions went way down for two years though it's been it and actually the n c a a last week announced that they were going to make some changes to the kickoff role and in large part that's because of the work we have done and the and the data that we have shared with the n c a a so we're thrilled to see that happening we've also limited in football the live tackling that occurs during the season as well as preseason because we want to protect the welfare of our student athletes and that's in all sports you know with the only conference collecting all concussion data for all school all all of our schools in all sports so you know a lot of people always talk about grades at the ivy leagues the old think you need a four point zero g p a they have to be number one in your class or else you can make it to an ivy league school which sports i'm assuming you can get every four point zero number one of their class to play every single sport in the ivy league our coaches are amazing at identifying really smart athletes who have been excellent students who have had a well rounded experience in high school with involvement in other activities leadership roles and who have challenge themselves academically by taking a rigorous course load because that matters as well to be a four zero zero and have taken basket weaving your whole high school career is not going to gain admission into an ivy league school  it's the idea that the students have challenge themselves with their course selection and then of course down well but perfection is not required and that c t s a c t same thing goes with out as well all factor in to the calculation but they're not determinative you know the numbers matter but at the end of the day the way our admissions offices evaluate kinnick candidates it's a whole person evaluation as you know because there are so many people who are qualified to attend an ivy league school and i think our admissions staff have the hardest jobs in our at our campuses i say that every year and how many how many students to play at the at the ivy league level don't know admissions wise how many students are at the school as well i don't get involved in admissions decisions just that and our schools vary in size if that's what you're asking so cornell is our largest school and then we have smaller schools like city so i usually ask my guess what advice do you want to give to the parents out there that their sons or daughters are interested in going to an ivy league school what advice you want to give them i think ensure that your son or daughter has the most well rounded experience possible and has an opportunity to challenge themselves in the classroom taking rigorous courses and assuming leadership roles outside the classroom as well i think is important and know that the ivy league is a great goal and terrific experience as someone that did not attend an ivy league school i've had a wonderful life and a terrific career and there's many many schools out there and every person will find the right school for them whether or not it's the first choice going into the process it all works out in the end very well thank you very much for coming on the show appreciate it thanks anthony thanks for having me so you'll be watching the secrets of college put