I've been horrified when people tell me the kinds of questions they were asked on their college application essays. The charitable way of lookin at it is that they encourage students to bullshit. The less charitable way of looking at it is that they encourage students to lie. It's hypocritical for schools to complain that they have problems with cheating when their process for deciding who gets accepted into the school does not select for honesty.
i’ve always liked the supplemental essay questions from uchicago—they tend to be more whimsical and interesting, and the variety of prompts usually means a student can display their writing ability in whatever they’re most interested in rather than trying to hit a checklist. of course there is still the issue of outside help, but they feel more personal despite usually having nothing to do with your personal life & when writing it i felt it demonstrated my ability better.
It's a subtle distinction but an important one (check out Harry G. Frankfurt's "On Bullshit"). A lie is unequivocally intended to be believed. Bullshit is so idiotic and/or preposterous that it cannot be taken seriously as an attempt to deceive.
You're right, by golly! When a doubles tennis partner recently upbraided me for alleged errors of omission at the end of a set that we lost (which was a gross breach of etiquette on his part) I angrily replied that his criticisms were "bullshit." The criticism was largely false but I didn't accuse him of lying, being mindful of the semantic distinction to which you just reintroduced me. Alas, I seem to forget lots of things nowadays.
Yascha, you make a very compelling argument of how the looming college essay drains the souls of teenagers and all those involved directly and indirectly in the college process.
I taught high school English for 37 years. In working with my students who asked for help in their college essays over those years, I was complicit in helping them engage in this “deeply pernicious brand of fakery.” You are so right that this element of the college application process can prevent authentic engagement with the world.
Yup. I taught high school English at an elite DC private school, and we had a class called Writing Seminar, whose ostensible purpose was to teach effective writing, but whose actual purpose was to help students craft their college essays with the help of a teacher.
The more I see of ther academic systems, the more I appreciate the ETH system: Everyone with a Swiss highschool degree (~35% of the population) can sign up for the first year. After that there is a set of exams that you collectively pass of fail. Fail twice and you are out, pass and you are welcome to proceed with your studies at one of the top 10 universities in the world.
I live in Switzerland and have been so impressed by the educational system—and in particular all the apprenticeships and trainings that are available for kids who lack the interest and talent for an intense academic program. These non-university programs lead to good jobs and good lives for young people. I wish the US could be more like Switzerland.
About a year ago I was slogging my way through a particularly bad contemporary novel and it occurred to me that the college application essay has become the definitive literary form of our times. Many of the elements outlined here, seeing everything as trauma, the all-too pat and explicit lessons related directly to the circumstances, and the elite worldview being counted as the only path to enlightenment, have slipped from the application essay into a huge chunk of contemporary literary fiction and pretty much all YA fiction. We’ve been teaching children to read and write with this single work as it’s goal for the past generation, and we’ve inadvertently taught them that this is what writing is.
I really don’t get the motivation to read contemporary fiction. One will never exhaust older works. Why not focus on stuff that is at the very least 20 years old and proved to be of some substantial value ?
That's pretty narrow to limit oneself that way; if everyone followed this policy, there'd be no audience for new writing and hence less incentive to write - are we to only have works from pre-2005 to turn to for the rest of human existence? Or are authors supposed to be independently wealthy and able to wait 20+ years to potentially gain an audience and a living from their toil?
That's pretty narrow to limit oneself that way; if everyone followed this policy, there'd be no audience for new writing and hence less incentive to write - are we to only have works from pre-2005 to turn to for the rest of human existence? Or are authors supposed to be independently wealthy and able to wait 20+ years to potentially gain an audience and a living from their toil?
That's pretty narrow to limit oneself that way; if everyone followed this policy, there'd be no audience for new writing and hence less incentive to write - are we to only have works from pre-2005 to turn to for the rest of human existence? Or are authors supposed to be independently wealthy and able to wait 20+ years to potentially gain an audience and a living from their toil?
You’re right. Taking my advice to the extreme risks becoming a “freeloader” after a fashion. Those who take a chance on new works do society a service. However we are in an age where there is no foreseeable risk that my strategy will become common. On the contrary, not only is reading in decline but reading of classics much more so than reading of new titles. As such I truly believe that if more of us prioritize more older works (without *totally* abandoning recent publications) we will do everyone a service. Not just to ourselves by bettering ourselves with the best that’s been thought and written, but in as much as that by becoming a better read and therefore more discerning readership we will be able to incentivize current publishers and authors to do better.
I agree with most of this, but also think writing ability is an important aspect of intelligence and preparedness for college that the rest of the application process misses. If you can't write clearly, you probably can't think clearly.
So maybe instead of untimed, gameable personal statements that admissions officers scour for unwritten cues of alignment with elite liberal values (like overcoming adversity), the application portal should have a timed written work test on a random topic, or a topic in the student's preferred major, etc.)
One of my favorite college application prompts was something like "Do you think the ends justify the means?", which allowed me to showcase a stronger writing and reasoning ability about moral philosophy than most of my peers without having to convey personality or exaggerate childhood stories. If writing is an important component of what you'll be expected to do in college, it's fair for colleges to use some form of writing as one of the criteria.
I think the essay may have originally been conceived as a way for the admissions committee to get a better idea of who the candidate was, whether he or she could write, their personality, the kinds of things they liked to read. There were (and maybe still are) questions like “what is a book that affected you and why?” or “If you could have dinner with anyone living at any time, who would it be,” and similar exercises in creativity and imagination. Admittedly, these could also be gamed, and they may have advantaged the cultural elite for the reasons you suggest. But at some point, as new theories of social justice and oppressor/oppressed dynamics took over the academy and “diversity” became important, there began to appear more pernicious questions such as “describe a hardship you have overcome,” and “tell us something about your unique circumstances which you believe would make you a good addition to our community.” All of them were phrased with some language like “is there anything else you believe we should know,” which made them seem optional, and yet made it clear that those who answered them and did have “something else” would receive an advantage. I remember this from when I was applying and I, a white student from an ordinary family who had the misfortune of growing up in a typical suburban household, had no idea how to answer these questions. I am sure I wrote something insipid that tried to bend my life into something approximating what I knew they wanted to hear, and I know it must have sounded every bit the contrivance it was. I do remember feeling that this was terribly unfair, that my accomplishments shouldn’t be regarded as less significant because my life had not been difficult, and that I deserved to be considered for admission based on my grades and scores rather than what kind of cultural experience I could provide the other students. (I understand from this article that these questions can advantage privileged students as does the whole process. But it’s also possible that when these questions first appeared, wealthy students hadn’t figured out how to “game” them, I know I hadn’t, and nobody helped me.) What is the purpose and goal of an elite institution- to educate its students or to provide them with people of different backgrounds to learn about? And what is the function of any individual student - to learn or to serve as a cultural exhibit for the other students? It seems to me colleges increasingly believe that the latter functions are most important. This is unfair, and it is not resulting in schools which are dedicated to producing a group of the best and the brightest. Ironically, it is students chosen for their academic skill and merit, and not their mere demographic characteristics, who would be best equipped to make actual changes to improve the lives of the underprivileged and marginalized after they graduate.
I assume you were applying to elite schools—ivies and the like. Did any of them accept you? Where did you end up going to school? Was it a good experience?
Yes, one of them accepted me, I loved it. I don’t know that I’d recognize my own institution if I went back, and I’m certain I’d object to much of what I heard and saw there.
Brilliant insight. Privileged people identifying as victims is a repulsive sight. I'd never thought before how soon this fashion takes hold--ninth grade!
Terrific rant and well received! Totally agree. And thanks for helping me to spend five minutes thinking about something other than tariffs! (Hm…I just noticed that “terrific” sounds like tariff with an “ic”. Damn, these elite bastards finally made a post- modern deconstructionist outa me!)
My son is a lot like Zach. 35 on the ACT. Over 97% cumulative GPA (unweighted), including a perfect score on AP BC Calculus. He wanted to study engineering and business so he could develop technical innovations to tackle climate change. He also clocked up hundreds of hours as a volunteer Ski Patroller from 730 in the morning to 530 at night every weekend. Our friends told us that would look great on his college admissions essay.
And we said, what's a college admissions essay?
Coming from Ireland, we had no clue about the American admissions system. As a First Generation History student at Oxford, I had had to submit an essay, but weirdly, it wasn't an essay about me. Rather, it was a history essay. Followed by an interview. To get into her course in Computer Science at University College Dublin, my wife just had to score enough points in her final High School exam, the Leaving Certificate. Our friends said that maybe our son could apply as a legacy student to those institutions.
And we said, what's a Legacy?
There are some wonderful features of the American education system. Our son, who was diagnosed with ADHD as a child, benefitted enormously from the federal IDEA Act, which mandates supports so that children with special needs can fulfill their potential. But we lost track of the number of counselors who told us he would have walked into an Ivy League school if he had been born twenty years earlier. In a laudable effort to rebalance the scales in favor of First Generation students, elite universities in the United States have created an admissions process that is deliberately opaque and profoundly unmeritocratic.
The upshot is that smarter kids are fanning out to Honors programs in Universities across the United States. For my son, who truly dreams of saving the planet through technological innovation, applying Early Decision to study Integrated Business Engineering at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was a no-brainer. Perhaps one day he'll help to revitalize a Rust Belt town that once produced enough steel to make a Battleship every day of the Second World War. He couldn't be happier. We couldn't be prouder of him.
We're also relieved that he won't have to torture himself by parsing every innocuous phrase in yet another college admissions essay. When he wrote "If you're thinking of studying in Ireland, you'd have to be crazy to not consider Trinity College in Dublin," he got a long screed from his counsellor suggesting that the word crazy might be deemed offensive to the neurodivergent community. As he has had to overcome very real prejudice as a special needs student, which he chose not to foreground in his college applications, we found that particularly ironic. I suggested that he rewrite the draft to say, "If you're thinking of studying in Ireland, you'd have to be completely retarded to not consider Trinity College in Dublin." Thankfully he hasn't inherited my curmudgeonly snark.
I have a high school senior who just went through this absurd process. The prompts transparently push kids to "exoticize" themselves or focus on overcoming some sort of identity-based adversity. Their grades, scores, and achievements are almost an after-thought in the application process.
For another rainy day: look at financial aid. Many schools, particularly at the elite level, have very little "merit" aid -- it's all based on family income. So kids learn that it doesn't really matter if you are the valedictorian or got a perfect SAT or won academic awards; all that matters is how much your parents earn. What you actually do in school is immaterial.
There’s a lot of truth in this piece, but also too many sweeping statements about the personal essay form in general and the value of learning how to examine your own personal biases. The trouble comes from a system that encourages faking it for transactional reasons. Figuring out who you are and why you believe what you do is an important life skill, one that is now, unfortunately, undercut by bad writing instruction for the past two decades. Anyway, I think being able to write a good, not “fake” essay matters more than ever in the age of AI.
I coached several clients on their college essays last year, so you could say that I have a horse in the race. However, the stories I helped those young people tell were not victim narratives or identity narratives; they were about creativity and intellectual hunger. One of them was accepted to USC, Duke, and NYU (all highly selective schools).
You nailed it. I had several classmates who aced the SATs but were denied admission to many schools because they and their working-class parents had no idea what the essay needed to sound like -- or how important it was.
Excellent article. One related suggestion. I understand that ambitious high school students are told that they need to do something “substantive” in their summers, and simply working at an ordinary old school summer job, e.g., waiting tables, fast food, retail, construction, etc. is disfavored. This strikes me as a terrible idea that further separates the would-be “elite” from ordinary people. It seems to me that our society would be a lot better off if our elite college graduates had worked a summer in a lousy customer service jobs with people who actually needed the job to feed their kids than shuffling papers at some non- profit.
Hard disagree. The college essay is the only vestige of the humanities left in the application process. Low income students who are highly prepared for college are well equipped to write compelling and authentic life stories. Their stories should matter. Storytelling itself should matter as part of the college selection process.
I've been horrified when people tell me the kinds of questions they were asked on their college application essays. The charitable way of lookin at it is that they encourage students to bullshit. The less charitable way of looking at it is that they encourage students to lie. It's hypocritical for schools to complain that they have problems with cheating when their process for deciding who gets accepted into the school does not select for honesty.
i’ve always liked the supplemental essay questions from uchicago—they tend to be more whimsical and interesting, and the variety of prompts usually means a student can display their writing ability in whatever they’re most interested in rather than trying to hit a checklist. of course there is still the issue of outside help, but they feel more personal despite usually having nothing to do with your personal life & when writing it i felt it demonstrated my ability better.
If "bullshit" and "lie" are commonly understood to mean different things nowadays it's news to me.
It's a subtle distinction but an important one (check out Harry G. Frankfurt's "On Bullshit"). A lie is unequivocally intended to be believed. Bullshit is so idiotic and/or preposterous that it cannot be taken seriously as an attempt to deceive.
You're right, by golly! When a doubles tennis partner recently upbraided me for alleged errors of omission at the end of a set that we lost (which was a gross breach of etiquette on his part) I angrily replied that his criticisms were "bullshit." The criticism was largely false but I didn't accuse him of lying, being mindful of the semantic distinction to which you just reintroduced me. Alas, I seem to forget lots of things nowadays.
More precisely, he defined lies as deliberate falsehood, and bullshit as indifference to the truth.
BS is more like marketing. Spin. A grain of truth.
Bullshitting is more creative I guess 😏
True; "bullshit" is the dysphemism. Should be the other way 'round, probably..
Yascha, you make a very compelling argument of how the looming college essay drains the souls of teenagers and all those involved directly and indirectly in the college process.
I taught high school English for 37 years. In working with my students who asked for help in their college essays over those years, I was complicit in helping them engage in this “deeply pernicious brand of fakery.” You are so right that this element of the college application process can prevent authentic engagement with the world.
Yup. I taught high school English at an elite DC private school, and we had a class called Writing Seminar, whose ostensible purpose was to teach effective writing, but whose actual purpose was to help students craft their college essays with the help of a teacher.
The more I see of ther academic systems, the more I appreciate the ETH system: Everyone with a Swiss highschool degree (~35% of the population) can sign up for the first year. After that there is a set of exams that you collectively pass of fail. Fail twice and you are out, pass and you are welcome to proceed with your studies at one of the top 10 universities in the world.
I live in Switzerland and have been so impressed by the educational system—and in particular all the apprenticeships and trainings that are available for kids who lack the interest and talent for an intense academic program. These non-university programs lead to good jobs and good lives for young people. I wish the US could be more like Switzerland.
https://www.vsg-sspes.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/verein/reglemente_studien/studien/2008_ETH.pdf figure 7 is particularly interesting as it shows a broad scatter between highschool grades and performance in studies. (The study is almost 20 years old, but I don't expect fundamental changes in the meantime)
Belgium is very similar I'm told! I think this system is the best.
About a year ago I was slogging my way through a particularly bad contemporary novel and it occurred to me that the college application essay has become the definitive literary form of our times. Many of the elements outlined here, seeing everything as trauma, the all-too pat and explicit lessons related directly to the circumstances, and the elite worldview being counted as the only path to enlightenment, have slipped from the application essay into a huge chunk of contemporary literary fiction and pretty much all YA fiction. We’ve been teaching children to read and write with this single work as it’s goal for the past generation, and we’ve inadvertently taught them that this is what writing is.
I really don’t get the motivation to read contemporary fiction. One will never exhaust older works. Why not focus on stuff that is at the very least 20 years old and proved to be of some substantial value ?
That's pretty narrow to limit oneself that way; if everyone followed this policy, there'd be no audience for new writing and hence less incentive to write - are we to only have works from pre-2005 to turn to for the rest of human existence? Or are authors supposed to be independently wealthy and able to wait 20+ years to potentially gain an audience and a living from their toil?
That's pretty narrow to limit oneself that way; if everyone followed this policy, there'd be no audience for new writing and hence less incentive to write - are we to only have works from pre-2005 to turn to for the rest of human existence? Or are authors supposed to be independently wealthy and able to wait 20+ years to potentially gain an audience and a living from their toil?
That's pretty narrow to limit oneself that way; if everyone followed this policy, there'd be no audience for new writing and hence less incentive to write - are we to only have works from pre-2005 to turn to for the rest of human existence? Or are authors supposed to be independently wealthy and able to wait 20+ years to potentially gain an audience and a living from their toil?
You’re right. Taking my advice to the extreme risks becoming a “freeloader” after a fashion. Those who take a chance on new works do society a service. However we are in an age where there is no foreseeable risk that my strategy will become common. On the contrary, not only is reading in decline but reading of classics much more so than reading of new titles. As such I truly believe that if more of us prioritize more older works (without *totally* abandoning recent publications) we will do everyone a service. Not just to ourselves by bettering ourselves with the best that’s been thought and written, but in as much as that by becoming a better read and therefore more discerning readership we will be able to incentivize current publishers and authors to do better.
Excellent. And, btw, it is always a good time to point out what is fundamentally wrong with a country's intellectual elite.
I agree with most of this, but also think writing ability is an important aspect of intelligence and preparedness for college that the rest of the application process misses. If you can't write clearly, you probably can't think clearly.
So maybe instead of untimed, gameable personal statements that admissions officers scour for unwritten cues of alignment with elite liberal values (like overcoming adversity), the application portal should have a timed written work test on a random topic, or a topic in the student's preferred major, etc.)
One of my favorite college application prompts was something like "Do you think the ends justify the means?", which allowed me to showcase a stronger writing and reasoning ability about moral philosophy than most of my peers without having to convey personality or exaggerate childhood stories. If writing is an important component of what you'll be expected to do in college, it's fair for colleges to use some form of writing as one of the criteria.
I think the essay may have originally been conceived as a way for the admissions committee to get a better idea of who the candidate was, whether he or she could write, their personality, the kinds of things they liked to read. There were (and maybe still are) questions like “what is a book that affected you and why?” or “If you could have dinner with anyone living at any time, who would it be,” and similar exercises in creativity and imagination. Admittedly, these could also be gamed, and they may have advantaged the cultural elite for the reasons you suggest. But at some point, as new theories of social justice and oppressor/oppressed dynamics took over the academy and “diversity” became important, there began to appear more pernicious questions such as “describe a hardship you have overcome,” and “tell us something about your unique circumstances which you believe would make you a good addition to our community.” All of them were phrased with some language like “is there anything else you believe we should know,” which made them seem optional, and yet made it clear that those who answered them and did have “something else” would receive an advantage. I remember this from when I was applying and I, a white student from an ordinary family who had the misfortune of growing up in a typical suburban household, had no idea how to answer these questions. I am sure I wrote something insipid that tried to bend my life into something approximating what I knew they wanted to hear, and I know it must have sounded every bit the contrivance it was. I do remember feeling that this was terribly unfair, that my accomplishments shouldn’t be regarded as less significant because my life had not been difficult, and that I deserved to be considered for admission based on my grades and scores rather than what kind of cultural experience I could provide the other students. (I understand from this article that these questions can advantage privileged students as does the whole process. But it’s also possible that when these questions first appeared, wealthy students hadn’t figured out how to “game” them, I know I hadn’t, and nobody helped me.) What is the purpose and goal of an elite institution- to educate its students or to provide them with people of different backgrounds to learn about? And what is the function of any individual student - to learn or to serve as a cultural exhibit for the other students? It seems to me colleges increasingly believe that the latter functions are most important. This is unfair, and it is not resulting in schools which are dedicated to producing a group of the best and the brightest. Ironically, it is students chosen for their academic skill and merit, and not their mere demographic characteristics, who would be best equipped to make actual changes to improve the lives of the underprivileged and marginalized after they graduate.
I assume you were applying to elite schools—ivies and the like. Did any of them accept you? Where did you end up going to school? Was it a good experience?
Yes, one of them accepted me, I loved it. I don’t know that I’d recognize my own institution if I went back, and I’m certain I’d object to much of what I heard and saw there.
Brilliant insight. Privileged people identifying as victims is a repulsive sight. I'd never thought before how soon this fashion takes hold--ninth grade!
Terrific rant and well received! Totally agree. And thanks for helping me to spend five minutes thinking about something other than tariffs! (Hm…I just noticed that “terrific” sounds like tariff with an “ic”. Damn, these elite bastards finally made a post- modern deconstructionist outa me!)
Perfect
Good start! Only 749 words to go! 😀
🤣
This article resonates so much with me.
My son is a lot like Zach. 35 on the ACT. Over 97% cumulative GPA (unweighted), including a perfect score on AP BC Calculus. He wanted to study engineering and business so he could develop technical innovations to tackle climate change. He also clocked up hundreds of hours as a volunteer Ski Patroller from 730 in the morning to 530 at night every weekend. Our friends told us that would look great on his college admissions essay.
And we said, what's a college admissions essay?
Coming from Ireland, we had no clue about the American admissions system. As a First Generation History student at Oxford, I had had to submit an essay, but weirdly, it wasn't an essay about me. Rather, it was a history essay. Followed by an interview. To get into her course in Computer Science at University College Dublin, my wife just had to score enough points in her final High School exam, the Leaving Certificate. Our friends said that maybe our son could apply as a legacy student to those institutions.
And we said, what's a Legacy?
There are some wonderful features of the American education system. Our son, who was diagnosed with ADHD as a child, benefitted enormously from the federal IDEA Act, which mandates supports so that children with special needs can fulfill their potential. But we lost track of the number of counselors who told us he would have walked into an Ivy League school if he had been born twenty years earlier. In a laudable effort to rebalance the scales in favor of First Generation students, elite universities in the United States have created an admissions process that is deliberately opaque and profoundly unmeritocratic.
The upshot is that smarter kids are fanning out to Honors programs in Universities across the United States. For my son, who truly dreams of saving the planet through technological innovation, applying Early Decision to study Integrated Business Engineering at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was a no-brainer. Perhaps one day he'll help to revitalize a Rust Belt town that once produced enough steel to make a Battleship every day of the Second World War. He couldn't be happier. We couldn't be prouder of him.
We're also relieved that he won't have to torture himself by parsing every innocuous phrase in yet another college admissions essay. When he wrote "If you're thinking of studying in Ireland, you'd have to be crazy to not consider Trinity College in Dublin," he got a long screed from his counsellor suggesting that the word crazy might be deemed offensive to the neurodivergent community. As he has had to overcome very real prejudice as a special needs student, which he chose not to foreground in his college applications, we found that particularly ironic. I suggested that he rewrite the draft to say, "If you're thinking of studying in Ireland, you'd have to be completely retarded to not consider Trinity College in Dublin." Thankfully he hasn't inherited my curmudgeonly snark.
I have a high school senior who just went through this absurd process. The prompts transparently push kids to "exoticize" themselves or focus on overcoming some sort of identity-based adversity. Their grades, scores, and achievements are almost an after-thought in the application process.
For another rainy day: look at financial aid. Many schools, particularly at the elite level, have very little "merit" aid -- it's all based on family income. So kids learn that it doesn't really matter if you are the valedictorian or got a perfect SAT or won academic awards; all that matters is how much your parents earn. What you actually do in school is immaterial.
There’s a lot of truth in this piece, but also too many sweeping statements about the personal essay form in general and the value of learning how to examine your own personal biases. The trouble comes from a system that encourages faking it for transactional reasons. Figuring out who you are and why you believe what you do is an important life skill, one that is now, unfortunately, undercut by bad writing instruction for the past two decades. Anyway, I think being able to write a good, not “fake” essay matters more than ever in the age of AI.
I coached several clients on their college essays last year, so you could say that I have a horse in the race. However, the stories I helped those young people tell were not victim narratives or identity narratives; they were about creativity and intellectual hunger. One of them was accepted to USC, Duke, and NYU (all highly selective schools).
You nailed it. I had several classmates who aced the SATs but were denied admission to many schools because they and their working-class parents had no idea what the essay needed to sound like -- or how important it was.
Excellent article. One related suggestion. I understand that ambitious high school students are told that they need to do something “substantive” in their summers, and simply working at an ordinary old school summer job, e.g., waiting tables, fast food, retail, construction, etc. is disfavored. This strikes me as a terrible idea that further separates the would-be “elite” from ordinary people. It seems to me that our society would be a lot better off if our elite college graduates had worked a summer in a lousy customer service jobs with people who actually needed the job to feed their kids than shuffling papers at some non- profit.
Hard disagree. The college essay is the only vestige of the humanities left in the application process. Low income students who are highly prepared for college are well equipped to write compelling and authentic life stories. Their stories should matter. Storytelling itself should matter as part of the college selection process.