Let Me In!

As summer’s waning days have tightened around the academic year, another cohort of high school seniors begins their anxious and time consuming college application process. Dreams of big envelopes and early emails call from beyond the horizon, while piles of mail and blank forms prove an unyielding weight upon a season of otherwise easygoing fun. The privileged few will receive endless advice and all sorts of competitive pressures from parents, teachers and their peers. The rest will proceed with far less stress—an ease that can help as it also risks competitive disadvantage in rejection pools that outnumber acceptances five, ten or more to one. Still, above all, one single item will plague students more thoroughly than any other: the college essay.

More than a matter of eighteen-year-old-angst, this centerpiece in the ceremony-strewn path to adulthood reflects a deep uncertainty in our current notions of self, success, and social progress. Beyond bumper stickers and guidebooks, the college essay—the questions it poses, the answers given, and the college’s scrutiny—reflects more about American values than any individual instance of yearning teenage prose. From affirmative action to the code words of elitism like “leadership” and “character,” the request for an applicant’s unhindered thoughts provides cover for higher education's greatest endeavor: social reproduction with just enough leeway for a comforting sense of merit-based opportunity.

However much everything else can be spun—résumés padded, recommendations carefully chosen, senior schedules packed with tough courses—nothing stares out as blankly as the request for a personal statement. From two years of work in college admissions, and now four summers spent advising students—thousands of essays later—I’m convinced that this eminently awkward genre reveals as much about the inner lives of teenagers as it does about our society’s odd understanding of everything from education to happiness.

Even with tutors, parental review and high-priced consultants, the existential dilemma remains as real as it does for that majority of normal kids who simply sit bleary-eyed in front of their computers wondering what they ought to say. Topic? Tone? Style?: Who am I—my most formative experience—am I even supposed to be formed yet?

Students’ fear of the unknown mirrors an equally ponderous question: why do colleges ask for an essay in the first place? Millions of students in other countries make their way to a university education with no pause for tortured, adolescent reflection on life’s challenges or their mothers’ heroic strength. Of an extremely odd process that manufactures absurd competition and stratification, it’s the single weirdest aspect of the college application. And over the last thirty-three years, the Common Application, with its normative role as the essay-asking admission hurdle, has gone from 15 to just under 350 subscriber institutions. Holistic review, with student self-description as key, is now the defining keyword of competitive admission.

Ask any college admission officer why they require an essay if you want to hear an example of that sort of doublespeak so often used to provide a non-answer to a difficult question. Spun in one direction the essay stands at the heart of this murky holistic reading, the desire to get to know a student beyond the nastiness of arbitrary numbers like SAT scores and GPA: tell us who you are; we want to know you as a person; let us hear your own voice.

Spun the opposite way, the essay gets talked down as being just one factor among many—not something that will make or break a student’s chances, just a small factor in an evaluation that will focus on academic accomplishment, intellectual ability and the potential for collegiate success. “Be yourself” becomes a bit of a token afterthought—we’ve already got you figured out, we’re just curious to see if you do, too.

But this odd dissonance should be familiar to students and parents alike. It’s the same tension that exists between the status driven desire for highly ranked, well regarded brand name schools and the belief that trappings don’t matter; that “fit” means more than anything; that happiness trumps holiday conversation about who got in where.

The college essay dances the lead in a tango across this otherwise unfathomable chasm between a notion of true-to-self individuality and the American desire to emerge victorious from hard-fought victory in an honest competition. In the first instance we don’t need Harvard to be happy—the goal is a sort of inner peace and personal contentment. In the second Yale delivers well-deserved lux et veritas for the chosen few—potential and prowess reap the rewards of the world’s most privileged institutions in order to become leaders for a better future. Even as the college essay straddles between the humble and ambitious, the reality remains: the only reason anyone writes one is to get admitted.

Since the GI-bill boom in higher education, the steps in this personality-splitting performance have become all the more frantic. A college degree is a required ticket for entry into any kind of upward mobility, or less optimistically, one of the few insurance policies against a downward sloping income curve. The erosion of manufacturing jobs means the sort of work that develops from skills learned in vocational and technical high school courses elicits nostalgia more than opportunity—and even when found, comes with much less security. Beyond the lowest level service jobs, some sort of post-secondary education has become a workforce requirement. Here another kind of stratification emerges—between learning for unapologetically utilitarian goals (no qualms that a bigger pay check means more security and with it greater happiness) and the enlightenment notion of valueless—and thus infinitely valuable—learning for learning’s sake.

As evidence of how far this chasm has grown over the past few decades, the formula for prompting a student’s personal reflections has itself become an expanse of oddly uncertain prose. The Common Application, used by the vast majority of students applying to nationally-known, selective schools, now takes 235 words to elicit a student’s response—just 15 words shy of the minimum requirement for the essay itself.

Applicants choose from six different essay prompts. They range from the particular to the unfathomably broad—from personal experience to world-shaping events. A great deal can be said about the cultural assumptions and expectations built into each of these questions, but arguably the one most loaded with significance appears as number five:

“A range of academic interests, personal perspectives, and life experiences adds much to the educational mix. Given your personal background, describe an experience that illustrates what you would bring to the diversity in a college community, or an encounter that demonstrated the importance of diversity to you.”

The cut-to-the-chase purpose of this option is to circumvent the legal morass that informs how race can be considered in admitting an applicant. Since the increasingly conservative US Supreme Court has nearly eliminated any possibility for affirmative action based upon skin color or class, these and other marks of (dis)advantage have been transformed into “diversity,” the orgasmic utopia of the contemporary liberal imagination. Here the contradiction of self-satisfaction and social expectation appears in the rather curious first sentence—what seems to be the answer put before the question, a rather directive statement ironically coming before the solicitation of a uniquely personal past experience. And for those who might be left out of hardship, fear not: they can turn to an “encounter.” How did you feel when you saw those poor people? Mustn’t they be helped? The fantasy of colonialism dies hard with such a cringing word. (For instance, this summer I had a fascinating conversation with a group of well-meaning students as to whether or not all homeless people were by their nature without happiness.)

Yet the elevation of individually-constructed diversity has a disabling effect on many of the original goals of social equity brought forward by category based, race-defined considerations. Difference becomes an odd yoke upon identity in a way that proscribes experience. In a broader, structural approach to evaluating an applicants’ background and life experience a student can be left to explain themselves in whatever terms they find most appropriate. Certainly a student of color who doesn’t write about their life as a case study of diversity doesn’t mean they somehow escape the reality of race in America. At the same time, the value placed on traits and activities such as leadership, participation in sports and activities, and a charitable disposition—all of them luxurious values marked by opportunity well beyond the reaches of America’s median family income—is laden with cultural assumptions.

Difference becomes a double burden. Beyond whatever lived experience it might involve, colleges’ expectations present a narrow and subtly voyeuristic desire for a very specific kind of suffering. Once a proxy for disadvantage, difference now costs a great deal more than a genuine urge to learn—having overcome the odds of poor schools, discrimination and structural racism doesn’t mean that you’ve met the expectation of that luxury good cum diversity. (What AP classes? Sports teams? Arts! Who are you kidding.) This has become increasingly true as colleges try to justify exceptions made for students from challenging backgrounds while evading accusations that it’s merely a cover for race. And there’s also an uncertainty about what sort of leg-up they’re offering: a number of admission professionals wonder what if any further advantages should accrue to the children of the first-generation of affirmative action beneficiaries. I’ve heard it phrased as the “Colin Powell’s kids” question—should the children of CEOs, professionals, and politicians be seen as any different than their privileged white friends?

So the essay has become a demanding stage for a specific kind of performance. If you’re black, better to write about getting pulled over in the Benz rather than celebrating the accomplishments of Barack Obama. But if you’re white—and here’s the recreation of the double standard which undercuts claims of equity—feel free to describe how much you enjoy Latino culture and using your Spanish to help build latrines in Guatemala. Now skewered back within the realm of privilege, suffering actually ought to be minimal and ideally episodic—a study in contrasts. The true test comes not with a hard life but rather the talent for inflating very little into a matter of epic proportions.

Students’ despair can hardly be faulted when they make their way through the five directed opportunities for sharing their personal insights and arrive at the final option: “Topic of your choice.” Young adults, socialized by countless multiple choice exams, are rightfully suspicious of anything that follows from a “none of the above” option. Especially if, after so much loquaciousness, the Common Application can’t even spare a verb.

Still, textual analysis of a form’s tedious prose hardly plumbs the truth depth of the unique cultural quandaries confronting our aspiring high school seniors. Students lack the luxury of deconstruction if they want to build their chances for competitive admission—they’re stuck with the task of figuring out what, exactly, constitutes a personal essay amidst this pain-is-plenty definition of experience. For the savvy few, irony or well-honed, genuine creativity offers an antidote to the suffering masses. Transcendence is key—the humility to acknowledge life amongst the tremulous hoi polloi while speaking from a point above, demonstrating the elevation needed to characterize synoptically those who remain below.

Students immediately fixate on topic: if applications are perceived to ask questions, then there must be answers. After years of testing, endless bubbles falling beneath phalanxes of No. 2 pencils, very little else makes sense. Everyone must have a five-paragraph essay within them—a real, emotive and powerful story that will tell a college what they want to hear. In many ways, they’re responding to the analytic tone oddly juxtaposed to the desire for soul-bearing truth. The Application puts forth a rather impersonal set of directives: “evaluate,” “discuss,” “indicate,” and “describe.” No wonder the rote skills of high school writing emerge instantaneously—now stretched between self-reflection and the nature of the universe, only cookie-cutter prose exists for meeting this challenge. It’s hard to fault students when they’re just doing the one thing we’ve taught them to do.

Certainly a self-describing essay might be better elicited with a request to reflect, explain, elucidate or the like—any way to avoid the idea that a response requires a thesis, evidence, and argument. How useful would it be to provide a vocabulary sensitive to the fact that emotion, understanding and empathy might require a different kind of writing—involve a different sort of experience than day-to-day schoolwork.

Seeking the clear-cut, students often select a topic to which they can harness a moral—whatever they say, it needs to have a point, and one that sounds exactly like what adults have been instructing since their earliest days.

One of two themes usually wins out in one form or another—the realization that raw-makes-real: (1) I have experienced some kind of hardship, adversity or struggle and it has made be a better person; or (2) I have done something to help a person or people less fortunate that I am, which has made me grateful.

Superficially, there’s nothing wrong with these themes and indeed they may well serve as the basis for a genuine or thoughtful essay. But the greater trap is students’ sense that they must manufacture some episode into outsized proportions that can declare truth as powerfully as a Biblical proverb. And even when they’re instructed to be nuanced or allow for ambivalence, students sense better than we’re willing to admit to ourselves that, indeed, we do want to hear something that validates a secure and trust-worthy view of the world.

This past summer, working with a number of groups of college bound students, I brought conversation about the college essay to a head by pressing them with a series of questions: What was their most intensely personal experience, I asked. What had changed them more than anything? What remained front-in-center in their minds as they reflected upon their life?

After a few moments for contemplation, I requested that they offer up their stories. Not surprisingly, the students remained extremely reluctant—comfortable in their environment, but not so comfortable as to let down their guard. I then inquired: how many of you are thinking about something sad or depressing? Without failure, in every group, the vast majority—usually all except for one or two—raised a hand.

Why, I asked, do we so readily equate suffering with seriousness? Must depression always correlate with depth? To preemptively unsettle the do-gooders I continued by wondering aloud how many of them liked asking for help.

Did they look forward to admitting their limitations? Eager to expose their weakness? Why then, I pushed, why did they feel so comfortable writing essays about the greatness of helping others?

Amidst the potential joy and excitement—even the important unsettling introspection that can accompany the college admission process—an uncanny emotional calculus shapes students' expectations for how they can explain their own past lives, present views and future ambitions. To be personal means doing exactly what they had anticipated: equate suffering with seriousness, depth with depression—but all the while radically juxtapose this with every other element of the application that demands a cheery, success-driven example of satisfied leadership.

You might well have known rivers but what hasn’t killed you better have made you stronger—you shall have overcome, the past closed off and now fashioned into a personality that’s well-adjusted, if not ideally optimistic. Admission committees rejecting eight or nine out of every ten applicants can’t risk anyone unsettled or unresolved in their disadvantage or—diversity forbid it—angry and uncertain. Indeed, if nothing else, diversity comes to mean quiescence or even better, a gentile disposition for protesting within the white walls of academe.

Of course there are many powerful exceptions to this rather cynical sense of what elite institutions expect from students’ self-description. Still I can’t help but reflect on how defining this sort of double consciousness has come to instruct the way students understand the personal essay.

In my survey of what might be topic-worthy, the saddest—though perhaps most honest—answer was: I’ve not had anything really formative happen to me. The honesty comes from a recognition that truth be told, most students haven’t been burdened with the sort of awesome experience that’s seemingly imagined in the diversity of a college community. My sadness stems from the fact that on the flip side, students lack the emotional vocabulary to explain their real lives. Undoubtedly, they have the kind of depth and emotional resonance that make all of us human in even the most mundane of circumstances.

Can the college essay be rescued in such a way that it truly elicits the personal from the greatest number of applicants?

The possibility lies in asking real questions—offering the sort of provocation that will get students to do some thinking. Inspiration could well come from those sort of essay-competition topics of yesteryear—if we’re hoping to further an enlightenment-inspired culture of liberal education, let’s be as direct about it as possible. Is democracy the best form of government? What ought education provide? Should free speech be an absolute right?

We’ll never get good answers to such questions by putting students in front of a computer, layering their desks with guide books and how-to manuals, and then dictating what they ought to say about their lives regardless of lived experience and personal reflection.

Let students respond in a way that exposes an aspect of how their mind works, how they draw on their own experience and describe the world around them with a variety of empathy, skepticism, uncertainty, and even—or ideally—a sense of what brings them joy, how they express their passion and creativity.

These sorts of questions and answers will only be possible with a far-reaching rehabilitation of America’s schools and the desire to truly democratize society through the power of education. The most talented and ambitious students can rightly gain advanced opportunities—while all receive an equally suited, high quality and self-fulfilling experience.

Still we must scrutinize what role an essay plays in the admission process, the values it valorizes, and the layered and contradictory expectations for success and happiness it promotes. More than a fanciful query of students’ interests, the essay plays a primary role in structuring the often homogenized, consumption-driven, and politically complacent, if not amnesiac views of what college ought to provide. The exercise creates real hurdles—cleared only with the strides of upper middle class culture. For education to lead to any possibility of economic independence and creative, personal freedom, the essay must be accepted as an honest mirror of students’ circumstances. Then they can be read for social and structural goals of equity rather than as lenses into the suburban soul of suffering as self-satisfaction. The competition is real, the pressures of oppression fierce—but the choice of what’s rewarded remains the privilege of college admission offices.

If we admit the essay carries so much, then we’ll really be in a position to ask with a straight face that students write about themselves and the world that lies ahead.

For the past four summers, Christopher Moses has been a college adviser to New Hampshire public high school students in the Advanced Studies Program at the St. Paul's School, Concord. A graduate and former Student Body President of Reed College, he later worked as an Assistant Dean and Coordinator of International Admission for the College. Chris has recently published "'Tis of Thee," a meditation of the Fourth of July and love of country in a country that's often hard to love—it appears in a hand-produced limited edition by The Crumpled Press, New York. He is also a regular contributor to the web journal EqualWrites. An avid bicycle commuter, Chris' interests include education, economics, gender and the history of the early Americas. He is currently pursuing a PhD at Princeton University.