A friend is relaxing now after writing more than 20 college admissions essays. “For rich families,” he explained. “It’s normally a competition among the professional essay writers who’ve been hired, but we decided to do it ourselves.” (“do it ourselves” means the parents, both Harvard graduates, did most of it)
The question for today is why elite kids are allowed to have this kind of advantage. If a college wants to see how a 17-year-old writes, wouldn’t it make sense to have the 17-year-old sit in a big room set up like the SAT or AP test environment? The prompts would be kept hidden until the morning of the exam so that applicants couldn’t show up with memorized professionally-written responses. This would also solve the ChatGPT problem.
If colleges are sincere about leveling out the disadvantages of coming from a poor family, why haven’t they adopted this obvious approach?
Separately, a report on the continuation of elite schools’ race-based admissions system… “After Affirmative Action Ban, They Rewrote College Essays With a Key Theme: Race” (New York Times):
Astrid Delgado first wrote her college application essay about a death in her family. Then she reshaped it around a Spanish book she read as a way to connect to her Dominican heritage.
The first draft of Jyel Hollingsworth’s essay explored her love for chess. The final focused on the prejudice between her Korean and Black American families and the financial hardships she overcame.
All three students said they decided to rethink their essays to emphasize one key element: their racial identities. And they did so after the Supreme Court last year struck down affirmative action in college admissions, leaving essays the only place for applicants to directly indicate their racial and ethnic backgrounds.
But the ruling also allowed admissions officers to consider race in personal essays, as long as decisions were not based on race, but on the personal qualities that grew out of an applicant’s experience with their race, like grit or courage.
This led many students of color to reframe their essays around their identities, under the advice of college counselors and parents. And several found that the experience of rewriting helped them explore who they are.
Sophie Desmoulins, who is Guatemalan and lives in Sedona, Ariz., wrote her college essay with the court’s ruling in mind. Her personal statement explored, among other things, how her Indigenous features affected her self-esteem and how her experience volunteering with the Kaqchikel Maya people helped her build confidence and embrace her heritage.
The Times features a future physician:
In her initial essay, Triniti Parker, a 16-year-old who aims to be the first doctor in her family, recalled her late grandmother, who was one of the first Black female bus drivers for the Chicago Transit Authority.
But after the Supreme Court’s decision, a college adviser told her to make clear references to her race, saying it should not “get lost in translation.” So Triniti adjusted a description of her and her grandmother’s physical features to allude to the color of their skin.
If this is her BMI at age 16, maybe she will ultimately specialize in prescribing Ozempic?
For lions & the rest of the mid pack, the essay didn’t matter. The Greenspun league these days now requires videos. Don’t know how today’s MIT applicants attained the amount of equipment & space they have by age 18. Don’t know the rationale behind giving up their shops & all their equipment to live in a dorm to one day be qualified to sit in a tiny bull pen.
College admissions essays should be written in a proctored environment? No!
If a college wants to see how a 17-year-old writes, wouldn’t it make sense to have the 17-year-old sit in a big room set up like the SAT or AP test environment? No!
If colleges are sincere about leveling out the disadvantages of coming from a poor family, why haven’t they adopted this obvious approach? Because they are not sincere.
If this is her BMI at age 16, maybe she will ultimately specialize in prescribing Ozempic? Yes!
The only reason there are essays is to enable the universities to circumvent quantitative factors in admissions so whether or not they are written in a proctored environment won’t make any difference. The standardized tests are the best predictor of college success and success afterwards (the Chinese figured this out about 3000 years ago) so why else would the universities bother with essays other than to circumvent the Constitution? The affluent who hire people to write their kids’ essays are probably just wasting their money.
Bingo.
For those interested in the college admissions process at Ivy League schools, the documentary called “Exclusion U” on Amazon Prime Video was interesting.
Why not just lie on the essay? If you were a rich white person why not write an essay about growing up as a ghetto N****?
“If colleges are sincere about leveling out the disadvantages of coming from a poor family, why haven’t they adopted this obvious approach?” Because the essay is an early test on whether applicants are coerce-able and are willing to play a ball and have politically correct answers.
Kids do not understand it. I have an example that states and US essay competition winner, willing to come up with right answers but not realizing what it was a test for, was not accepted, probably on essay and ethnic name, because SAT scores and all other extras were perfect.
Good points, but the goal is suspect, I think.
Parents and students need to spend a lot more time choosing a major than choosing a college, if they actually need to find a job which will support a reasonable lifestyle after they graduate.
Too many majors are quite useless, economically speaking. The time where a college degree was sufficient, no matter the major, has long passed.