Over at the New York Times, Ron Lieber’s “Your Money” column apparently does an annual thing where they collect college admissions essays touching on money, and publish a selection of them. I say “apparently” because I was not previously aware of this, and in fact didn’t see this year’s edition when it originally ran a couple of months ago (to be fair, that was a really busy weekend for me…). I’m not quite sure how that happened, or why it landed in my Twitter feed this week, but I saw it for the first time yesterday. Anyway, I read through the selected essays this year, and it mostly reaffirmed my conviction that I never want to work in Admissions.
This is not because they were badly written or anything like that— quite the contrary. As you would hope for essays published as exemplars in the Paper of Record, they’re very polished and technically proficient. They’ve each selected an anecdote about their lives, and they each spin a well-constructed essay off of that. They’re excellent examples of the form.
And that’s actually the problem for me— they’re excellent examples of a very particular form. If you asked people in the business “What does an elite college admissions essay look like?” these are what they would fumblingly describe to you. They’re polished and proficient to the point of feeling almost focus-grouped: they move smoothly from the punchy introduction to the tidy conclusion (which of course calls back to the intro), checking all the boxes you might be looking for along the way.
In the end, though, I’m not sure what any of this accomplishes. On a certain level, the polish works against them— these are so well-crafted that they while the subject matter is personal and specific, they don’t feel revelatory. I end up feeling keenly aware of the artifice involved, and being more interesting in wondering what’s behind that than taking the on-the-face-of-it point of the essay seriously.
I am frequently guilty of this myself, for the record. At one point, I needed to write a personal story for something, and asked Kate to read it over. One of her comments that really stuck with me was “I can feel you struggling with sincerity,” which was absolutely dead-on, maybe the second-most-accurate assessment someone has ever said to me. I’m good at maintaining a certain level of often-ironic distance between what I write and what I really think and feel. Which may make me unduly suspicious of other people’s writing, like these essays, but, you know, that’s where I am.
In the actual context of college admissions, I can’t imagine how I would choose between these people were I the person who had to read these. Well, OK, I almost certainly wouldn’t be choosing between these five, which I’m fairly certain are at a level well above the median admissions essay even for a highly regarded private college or university. These are all clear admits, and the arguments would be between the larger number of students who turned in less polished work than these. It’s more that the general form is so obvious that I’m not sure what you’re really getting out of these.
And, of course, this quickly veers off into politically charged territory. Another tab I’ve had open— also from the NYT as it happens— is an opinion piece from a few weeks back in favor of standardized testing. (Which, incidentally, is less well-crafted than the admissions essays that started this off…) The enormous disparities between test scores for different groups by race and class make such tests a hot-button issue, with lots of people calling for them to be abolished entirely in the interests of increasing diversity and equity in higher education. Others claim that these tests are in fact a boon to some highly talented kids from underprivileged backgrounds, who can use high scores on the SAT/ACT to attract attention. It all gets very messy very quickly.
There are bits I agree with in the pro-testing arguments— on a personal level, I suspect that my high SAT scores got me attention from elite schools that being the valedictorian of a not particularly distinguished public high school in a rural area would not have. On balance, though, I tend to find the race and class disparities in scores more troubling than the smallish risk of losing out on talented kids in bad schools who nevertheless score well on national tests. I’m good with, at the very least, de-emphasizing standardized test scores— a kid in an off-the-radar school who scored really well should be able to wave that number around to get attention (perhaps writing an essay about it), but bad scores shouldn’t be an automatic disqualification.
But of course, then you come back around to the question of admissions essays, and the obviousness and artificiality of the form. De-emphasizing test scores and grades necessarily means giving more weight to the essays, and looking at these with their focus-grouped feel, I wonder again how much you’re genuinely learning from these.
I almost wonder if you wouldn’t be better served by asking for the first draft of an admissions essay, rather than the final product. Or, perhaps more practically, asking for something written within a short time limit, so there wouldn’t be time to run it through the rock tumbler of parents and teachers and professional admissions consultants to get something shiny with no rough edges. That would tell you who has a good grasp of how to organize their thoughts and arguments from the start, not just who knows people who can coach them in the standard forms. In some ways, that’s probably a more realistic assessment of what you might get out of students under actual college conditions— what the faculty will mostly be grading isn’t going to be a carefully crafted product of weeks of focused effort, but something slapped together in the 48 hours before the due date while short on sleep.
The logistical problem of getting students scattered all around the world to write to a tight time limit without being able to pay some high achiever with low income to Cyrano it for them is probably intractable, though. A marginally more realistic approach might be more of a thresholded lottery—every applicant whose portfolio is “good enough” goes in a pool, and you select the admitted cohort at random from those. That has the risk of some well qualified but unlucky students being shut out of every school they apply to though, which brings us around to my real crazy idea: admissions collusion. Rather than each school considering applications in isolation, have students apply to groups of similar colleges or universities— the Big Ten, say, or NESCAC— and then the schools discuss among themselves which students get into which schools, capping the number of admissions offers to any single student. That way, you avoid the thing where two students of comparable ability end up with drastically different outcomes, one just squeaking into a bunch of places, the other coming just short at all of them. I suspect that split is a disproportionate driver of admissions angst.
Or, you know, I could just shut up and leave this to the professionals who do college admissions already. And be quietly grateful that I don’t have to read hundreds of these essays and try to choose between them.
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If you’d like to critique the artificiality and insincerity of my writing, well, the comments are open.
As someone who worked for a little while in admissions as a highly-selective school, I can tell you that the vast majority of those essays get little more than a brief once-over. There are just too many of them. And for god's sake, don't write about how your missions trip to an impoverished country made you realize how lucky you are and how you're inspired to make the world a better place. So did 75% of your fellow applicants.