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It was one of those timely coincidences that lead to long rants. An old friend who's a college history professor came for coffee and dessert last night, and he started complaining about the way undergraduates write. "The admissions staff must all be incompetents!" he roared. His point was that the quality of applicants' essays bore no relationship to the competency of the writing once the kids arrived on campus. Clearly the vaunted ability of the screeners to sniff out efforts shaped by tutors and parents had failed. Then (in the conversation) came a detailed characterization of the incoherent eight-page research papers my colleague had been poring over on the train to Providence.
As it happened, I had just spent the day, and the weekend, and the last three months watching my youngest child, a high school senior, contend with these very admissions essays. As I say, the result (from me) was a modest harangue, not loud or long enough to induce deafness in the ears of a listener wearing noise-canceling headphones. If you wish you'd been there, read on.
Seen from a moderate distance, the college admissions process seems to have gotten simpler over the past decade, with the increased use of the Common Application, a single document now accepted by 347 colleges. (In 1996-7, the number was less than half that, at 164.) Write one essay, click the Web page "submit" button, and the process is largely done. You wish.
In practice, the Common App has slots for two smaller essays, about one about extracurricular activities and one for anything else you might want to discuss. And then there are the supplements, devised by individual colleges. Some are simple. Harvard asks what languages you speak and whether you have received academic honors. Some schools (Wesleyan) have no supplement at all. But the norm - so it seems from the places my son is considering - seem to be informed by that questionable virtue, admissions officers' own creativity.
Kenyon College, for instance, asks: "You're given a block of stone and a hammer and chisel. What would you carve and why?" Alternatively a student can choose: "Along the edge of ancient maps it used to say 'Here there be monsters.' What does it say at the edge of your map and why does it say that?" And so on. Fine topics, clever, why not? Except that if you want also to apply to The University of Virginia, you will need to explain "what work of art, music, science, mathematics, or literature has surprised, unsettled, or challenged you, and in what way." Then, in a second essay, you can choose to "discuss something you secretly like but pretend not to, or vice versa" or expatiate on a quotation from Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine: "We might say that we were looking for global schemas, symmetries, universal and unchanging laws - and what we have discovered is the mutable, the ephemeral, the complex."
Not bad, not bad, you might say (especially if you are a devotee or doubter of global schemas), and presumptive evidence that the admissions directors themselves attended college. But apply to ten schools - as now kids now seem to need to do, at the peak of the echo boom tsunami - and you're in the process of compiling a small book, a collection of essays bland enough to be inoffensive but stimulating enough to keep the readers' caffeine rations below the range that induces cardiac arrhythmia. Then, too, if your supplement essay touts your extracurricular prowess on, say, the math team, you have to reach back into the body of the Common App and create a new version in which your short tucked-in essay now ignores calculus and refers instead to time spent gaining discernment on the board of the literary magazine. For high school seniors, the composition and juxtaposition of application essays begins to resemble an additional academic course.
And why? If the Kenyon staff were forced to make due with the Virginia essays or vice-versa, would the makeup of the student body change in any way? For that matter, do we imagine that Wesleyan loses anything by foregoing a supplement? After all, the SAT now includes a writing sample, kids all come with grades from English and social science teachers, and the Common App core essay (one choice is: "Describe a character in fiction, a historical figure, or a creative work . . . that has had an influence on you, and explain that influence") goes some distance toward what the supplements demand.
Besides, the essay is one more area where privilege matters. Private schools have more guidance counselors per student and so can massage the submissions; wealthy parents bring tutors into the mix. It takes a (hired) village to raise a child from high school senior to college freshman. Lacking such advantages, kids spend precious weekend time selling themselves to strangers.
Oh, and then there is the inevitable additional box for saying why you want to attend school X in particular - in a note the student may have to sketch out before having visited. The optimal approach is to make a précis of the pitch the college has posted on line - this school is great because it sends kids abroad; that school, because it epitomizes the whole of human knowledge in one faculty, thus obviating the need to set foot outside the hallowed halls. That very benefit is the one the respondent must say he or she has long craved, preferably in cleverer terms than those the college has paid scriveners to indite on its own behalf. Must we turn every teenager into a Madison Avenue wit?
And then you, my dear history professor friend, tell me that undergrads can't write? Oh, you surprise me. Something's wrong, no? Wouldn't it make sense to rationalize the supplement process and leave our overprogrammed kids time to take long walks, read books, and, if it moves them, study English composition?
