Reid Coddington graduated from Bowdoin College, where he studied history and European languages and graduated with a thesis on the political rhetoric of the French student movement of 1968. After Bowdoin he spent three years in Edinburgh on a Marshall Scholarship, completing an M.Sc. in the History of Political Thought at the University of Edinburgh, where he also taught undergraduate seminars and began to understand that what he wanted to do was help young people figure out how they think and argue.
He returned to the United States with a particular appreciation for European university culture — its longer degree programs, its expectation of intellectual independence from the first year, its indifference to the extracurricular profile-building that dominates American selective admissions — and a conviction that the right college environment for some students is not in New England at all. Before joining Clarebourne he spent four years as a college counselor at the Brooks School in North Andover, Massachusetts, where he developed the school’s UK and European university advising track from scratch.
At Clarebourne he works with Grade 11 and 12 students through the full application process, with particular depth in highly selective domestic admissions, UK UCAS applications, and Dutch university applications through Studielink. He is the team member most likely to place a student at St. Andrews or Utrecht or Sciences Po — and the one most likely to have read the institution’s founding documents before recommending it.
His advising style is direct, well-researched, and occasionally unsettling in the best sense. Students who come to him with a list assembled from US News rankings leave the first meeting with a different list and a better understanding of why.
“I spent two years in Edinburgh surrounded by students from twenty countries who had chosen their university because of its specific intellectual culture — not its ranking, not its name recognition, not what their parents thought of it. Most of them had never heard of a college counselor. They had just done the work of figuring out what they wanted to study and where they could study it best. That is still the clearest model I have for what this process should look like.”
Clarebourne since 2017