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Most college application essays are not very good.
Even top students write poor essays. I know because friends have asked me to read their kids’ attempts at writing one. Before reading, I had a straightforward criterion – they had to do it themselves. Not with the assistance of parents, essay coaches, consultants, writing mentors, editors, proofers, or other titles that are in the “student did not do it” category.
(A few of these parents have also asked me to recommend types of community service that would look good on a college app, so go figure)
Admitted students love to self-report their essays as 8 or 9/10, but these assessments are prone to the better-than-average fallacy. They have no standards for comparison except a few classmates or samples they read online.
SIMPLY THE BEST
You only see the best samples in college guides because nobody would read “50 good enough but not amazing essays for Harvard.”
In a study of Michigan’s early 2000s essay topic on diversity, the researchers went out of their way to stress how bad the essays were. Many essays did not read as though anyone had even helped the applicants hone what they were trying to say, let alone reveal evidence of assistance. Pitfalls like vagueness, cliches, recaps of the resume, claims of ‘passion,’ and lack of a clear point were prevalent.
As “shotgunning” becomes more popular with more and more applicants applying to ten or twenty or more universities, there is an even steeper trade-off between essay quality and application quantity.
Why do most essays play a prominent role if they are not so good?
UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL
Admissions gatekeepers mislead their applicants when they say essays are essential. They claim to want to “get to know” their applicants, ignoring that essays are almost always skimmed.
Entire applications are usually read in less than ten minutes. Skimming applications is one reason the holistic review process needs to be fixed.
College essays could be a better use of time and human resources. It’s not unheard of for some applicants to submit upwards of fifty essays for their varied admissions, honors, and scholarship applications.
Students who apply nationwide likely work anywhere from 100 to 200 hours, if not more, on their applications, not accounting for distractions. And the phenomenon of so many essays isn’t recent.
In a 1965 journal article, the education critic Fred Crosland makes an observation that could apply today. “Millions of dollars are wasted on application fees…. millions of man-hours are wasted on recruitment…. millions of anxious student-hours are wasted on unnecessary and redundant testing and filling out of forms; that precious time should be spent in learning and experiencing the joys of intellectual growth.”
Most students don’t know how to write. And most of this is not the students’ fault. The education system doesn’t teach real-world writing. Students aren’t very good storytellers.
THE ULTIMATE ARGUMENT
They can’t express their ambitions and dreams regarding their lived experiences. They don’t know how to construct arguments; college essays are arguments about why you deserve an admissions space.
It’s easy to blame students for their unoriginal and boring essays or others who wrote the essays for them. High school doesn’t teach you to write concisely and in the first person. Instead, writing training is mixed with literary analysis in English literature and language classes.
THE MYSTERY OF THE LOST VOICE
My least favorite piece of college essay advice is for students to find their voice. Students mistake “their voice” for glaring errors and bad habits. Their “voice” reads like daydreams that make little sense to anonymous readers. They have no idea how to recognize “voice” because they’re trained to write in the third person and the passive voice.
This is no fad. Many people involved in the admissions enterprise believe — or want to believe — that personal essays are essential. As long as students can write autobiographical vignettes and creative riffs on quirky topics, nobody can say the process is just about numbers, which it often is.
Students who can’t write a succinct, five-paragraph essay won’t succeed in college. The navel-gazing essays require only telling a story, a “narrative” about you, as college administrators have it.
But it doesn’t reveal much about how students think – but increasingly shows how chatbots do.
This column is by Ritchie Lucas, Founder of The Student Success Project and Think Factory Consulting. He can be reached by email at ritchie@thinkfactory.com and on Facebook and You Tube as The Student Success Project.
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