It’s a frantic week around these parts. The deadline for applications to all University of California campuses is November 30, and I have a great many students who are desperately finishing up their personal essays. UC doesn’t ask for letters of recommendation or examples of scholarly papers; the only thing they want — besides grades and test scores — are a series of personal essays.
It’s been a decade since California did away with affirmative action by passing Proposition 209. Race can no longer be considered as a factor in admissions to public universities, a change that seems to have led to declining black and Latino enrollment at the most prestigious schools (Berkeley and UCLA). What the end of affirmative action has meant, of course, is a huge rise in the significance of the personal essay. While a student’s ethnicity is no longer automatically factored into an admissions decision, a student is free to mention their racial background in their essay. And judging from the large number of essays I see (I am often asked to help craft admissions essays), an exceptional number of my students do just that. The hope, apparently, is to make a legal, oblique appeal to “diversity.”
This is not a post about the wisdom or merits of affirmative action. But count me among those who has always considered class to be as important as race; I’m a fourth-generation Cal grad from an educated, prosperous family. I’m also white. Obviously, I didn’t need or deserve any affirmative action from the state; my culture and my class had already bequeathed to me more than I deserved. But I went to school with a kid whose parents were Spanish — pure Castillian — and wealthy as could be. He shamelessly (and accurately) checked the “Hispanic” box back in the affirmative action days; I also went to school with poor whites from the Central Valley. Descendants of “Okies” and “Arkies”, they shared my skin color but not much else. Race is often linked to class, but not inextricably.
In any event, I digress. My point is that far too many of my students insist on writing essays that I can only describe as “narratives of suffering.” About half of all the essays I see are blatant appeals for sympathy, usually based on a constellation of socio-economic, racial, and historical factors. Some of these essays are poorly written, but many are actually quite good. They all follow the same game plan: tell the reader about all the obstacles you’ve overcome. If your parents are immigrants, mention it. If one of your parents drinks, or is in prison, don’t hide it — wallow in it! If you moved around a lot, if you grew up surrounded by drugs or violence –share, share, share! It’s the modern version of the apocryphal story about “walking fourteen miles every day to school, in the snow, uphill both ways.” It’s shameless, it’s vulgar, it’s repetitive, it’s tiresome,and it seems to work.
I’ve been in the teaching game long enough to notice that these “narratives of suffering endured and transcended” have gotten much more common in recent years. I did notice a sharp uptick after the end of affirmative action in 1996, but it would be wrong to suggest that only ethnic minority students employ this technique today. Even the relatively small number of my students who come from what might be thought of as “privileged” backgrounds (white, middle-class families where college education is a multi-generational norm) have fallen prey to the seductions of competing in the “suffering Olympics.” If one’s family wasn’t disadvantaged economically, perhaps an inspiring tale of battling anorexia will suffice. (Indeed, the “let me tell you all about how I overcame my eating disorder strategy” is one I’ve now seen three times in the last few years. It suggests a trend.)
I can’t remember much about what I wrote in my college essays when I was a high school senior twenty-two years ago. (I applied to just two schools: Cal and Vassar.) I think I wrote mostly about my love of history. They weren’t very interesting essays, but I remember being told that the point was to convince an admissions committee that I could write well and that I had a certain amount of intellectual ambition. And though I was hardly underprivileged, I was a chubby, clumsy, unpopular teen who grew up as a child of divorce. By the time I was a senior in high school, my problems with alcohol and depression were already emerging. I am sure that had I wanted to, I could have crafted a serviceable sob story, demonstrating both my facility with the English language and my capacity to transcend my own special and important misfortunes.
So, my beloved students, I’ll be happy to read your essays before you pop them in the mail this Thursday. I want you to do well, and I hope you get in to the school of your choice. Write whatever you (and your counselor, who probably knows the admissions committees better than I) think best. But if you want my two cents, talk about your accomplishments, your goals, and your dreams outside of the context of your own narrative of disadvantage and oppression. I’m all for sharing stories, mind you! But when appealing for admission to a selective university, consider that constructing a narrative that is obviously designed to elicit sympathy is, well, pretty poor show.
I don’t think I’ve been as offended by any of your posts in the past as I have this one. Maybe it’s not obvious to you, but it’s dripping with class privilege. It’s ridiculous to tell disadvantaged students to omit facts of their disadvantage in their personal statement and tell them to focus on their accomplishments instead. Accomplishments must be contextualized by one’s upbringing. To omit disadvantage is to help support the lie that everyone, regardless of how they are situated class-wise, has had the same opportunities and privileges as other applicants.
Not only that, but many personal statement prompts encourage students to explore the potential disadvantage they have experienced. The students are thus following directions, not “wallowing” in their own disgusting disadvantage…
To be able to omit one’s own experience with anorexia or alcoholism or drug addiction is a slightly different story. These tales can be useful or they can be irrelevant. Additionally, they can also be a marker of class privilege. Financially privileged youth have the resources to more easily overcome these obstacles and move forward in their pursuit of education, while disadvantaged youth are often trapped in cycles of substance abuse without the privilege of an extensive support group and financially secure adults to rely on.
If your parents are immigrants and escaped their country amidst political turmoil, risking their lives to provide better opportunities for their children, how is this not relevant to that applicant’s life? How is this not relevant to their educational goals and dreams? If you avoided a drug or violence-rich environment and persevered to even be given the opportunity to write a personal statement essay for college (and then have the very real facts included in that personal statement essay ridiculed by professors on the internet) this is most certainly relevant.
How are the facts of someone’s life–the tales of their educational progress and inspiration–irrelevant? How are they “tireless and shameless”? Exactly how are they “vulgar”?
The problem with the college admissions essay is that it’s not sure what it’s supposed to be. Is it (a) supposed to evidence the applicant’s writing ability; (b) explain away other “problems” with the application (poor grades, disciplinary record, etc.); or (c) give the admissions committee a glimpse of the applicant’s personality?
Writing ability is mostly orthogonal to the other two purposes. Those purposes, however, are at odds with each other.
Part of the problem is that (at least on the applications I filled out in the 1990s) often the essay is the *only* place that an applicant can introduce information that is relevant to the application, or the only way to contextualize some piece of information that would otherwise jeopardize the student’s admission.
The other part of the problem is that often teenagers don’t have much else to write about. Accomplishments, goals and dreams? These are 17 and 18-year-olds. While some may know what they want out of life already, many don’t. While some of them may be calculating and gaming the system, a lot of these “sob story” essays, while not the most original, are about issues that are very much front and center in the students’ lives.
Let me point out that some schools seem to pretty much demand a “sob story” essay, whether the applicant can reasonably produce one or not. For example, the application to the PhD program at UC Berkeley (in any department) includes the question
“[D]iscuss how your personal background informs your decision to pursue a graduate degree. Please include any education, familial, cultural, economic or social experiences, challenges or opportunities relevant to your academic journey; how you might contribute to social or cultural diversity within your chosen field; and/or how you might serve educationally underrepresented segments of society with your degree.”
http://www.grad.berkeley.edu/grad/admissions/pdf/form_F.pdf
I suppose one could logically answer this with an essay that begins “My parents and grandparents were all mathematicians and physicists, and I feel inspired and humbled by their work as I hope to join your department …” but I think that it is clear that the commitee is looking to hear about some major difficulty based on the applicant’s background. There is nothing wrong with applicants who have overcome unusual difficulties writing about them; the problem is other students feeling that they need to inflate their own challenges in order to compete. I think that most students who come from “white, middle-class families where college education is a multi-generational norm” should simply realize that they are priveleged and try to sell themselves based on their abilities and achievements. If we encourage them to invent ways to see themselves as unusually challenged, we hide their privilege from them.
By the way, when I had to deal with the question above, I adressed solely the last part by talking about some of the strategies I use when trying to teach a student who has a major gap in his or her preparation. I’m sure that this wasn’t as helpful to my chances as if I had exagerated some difficulty in my past, but my past history, being quite priveleged, didn’t merit me any special consideration. What, if anything, did, was the ways in which I had developed better analysis and teaching skills than someone else of similar privilege.
I would like to respond to JAS:
I think you have misread the post. Hugo is not putting people of other socio-economic classes down. He is deploring the rise of manipulative, self-pitying essays. The essays are showing this trend REGARDLESS of socio-economic class. Rich and poor alike are using this strategy.
I agree with him that it is deplorable. No one, not even college administrators, like feeling manipulated.
How are the facts of someone’s life–the tales of their educational progress and inspiration–irrelevant? How are they “tireless and shameless”? Exactly how are they “vulgar”?
Jas, to answer your questions in a way that is consistent with Hugo’s blog entry, you must adopt a certain bourgeois, let-them-eat-cake attitude. You must place yourself in the shoes of someone who has a superiority complex with respect to his students, of someone who must condescend to volunteer some time with and toss a few crumbs to those community college urchins whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents did not sit in the lap of privilege and attend “Cal” and all that. Noblesse oblige, you know!
I didn’t misread the post. What are most certainly “self-pitying essays” when written by middle to upper class privileged whites who seek out and play up the few unfortunate events in their life are not “self-pitying” “shameless” and “vulgar” essays when they happen to be the life stories of those who are actually disadvantaged. As far as I could tell, there was no differentiation between these two groups in Hugo’s post; both were simply encouraged to shut up.
This one is a home run, Hugo. The continuing quest for who can be the biggest victim is a cancer on the national character.
Oh, and I like the new blog.
KMTBerry: these are essays written for the sole purpose of influencing admissions officers. How are essays about disadvantage any more manipulative than essays on any other topic?
Well, at least we aren’t expected to write sob stories as cover letters for our resumes… yet.
I worked at a writing center at a university for a couple of years, and saw really similar trends in grad/professional school essays. Like DavidS pointed out, some of the applications don’t give students a lot of choice, with questions like “Describe an obstacle you’ve overcome in your life.” This one I got a lot, with some really hilarious answers, like “how I overcame spraining my ankle and missing out on the high school volleyball tournament.”
I agree with you that these questions are a kind of “affirmative action,” in that if you have a better obstacle, you’ll have a better essay, so it lets the admissions committee take a broader view of applicants’ lives and histories. I tutored one student who wanted to be a dentist because she grew up in Vietnam w/o dental care and was so happy to finally go and get her teeth fixed when she immigrated to the U.S., and I hope her passion helped the committee see her transcripts in a better light. In that sense, I’m ok with these essays, although I agree that they are usually incredibly tedious to read through. But then, so are the bunches of essays all stating students’ goals to “help others, make a difference in the world, and succeed to the best of my potential.”
Thanks Hugo. As an African American female who has suffered many misfortunes, I am grateful for the advice. I am preparing for 2008 entrance and the essays have been a major concern for me. Focusing on my hardships sounds redundant and unappealing.
My goals, dreams and accomplishments are just as important as my hardships and they can influence (or manipulate) the admissions commitee just as easily. I am now ready and excited about writting my essays. Again, Thank you!
I’d guess this is prominent because it works. THe whole concept of tens of thousands of students writing these essays to better determine fair admissions is a fundamentally silly bureaucratic requirement. For successful formulas to emerge and become ubiquitous seems perfectly logical and predictable. Why you would council students to take unnesessary risks when they’ve got what appears to be a winning formula to a silly obstacle is hard for me to phathom. I sympathize with having to read a bunch of them, but I sympathize more with having to write one.
Isn’t at least part of the problem that the Admissions Offices of many of these schools are trying to get around the demise of AA by asking for essays about overcoming adversity? The counselors, coaches, and others are telling the students to play that card to give them an edge, too. I guess I would be more worried if the students seemed to enjoy the mandatory wallowing in trials and tribulations.
And (cynical me) I’d almost be willing to bet that at least some admissions officers sort the applications by type and severity of adversities overcome, ranking within each category: OK, we have 3 orphans raised in foster care, and 5 ex-anorexics, and 15 ADHDs, but I really like this one, Mike, he’s a multiracial refugee in a wheelchair!
“Why you would council students to take unnesessary risks when they’ve got what appears to be a winning formula to a silly obstacle is hard for me to fathom.”
Perhaps, David, because Hugo feels that learning to express one’s life story primarily in such terms for purposes of gaining admission to a university can inculcate into the applicant the idea that their disadvantages and experiences are a tool, a part of a strategy, rather than an element of who they are?
I guess I don’t see this is a problem. We all know that our educational system is profoundly unequal and that it is a vastly more impressive accomplishment for a working-class kid to achieve the same results that a coddled upper-class kid like Hugo achieved. The critique of AA was that it was a blunt instrument and couldn’t account for the real inequalities that students actually faced, especially because it didn’t account for class. These questions are not blunt instruments: students can articulate their personal challenges, rather than telling the admissions committee what box they fit into and then letting the admissions committee draw their own conclusions. As long as our educational system remains profoundly unequal, this seems like the minimum thing we can do to ensure some semblance of fairness in the admissions process, as well as to ensure that admissions committees can accurately gauge students’ achievements. (All other things being equal, who do you think is going to do better in college: a student who got a 3.7 GPA while working 40 hours a week to support herself or one who got a 3.8 because she didn’t have other demands on her time and her parents hovered over her every night, making sure her homework was done?) It’s true that such questions disadvantage students who have not faced significant challenges in their lives, but since every other aspect of society disadvantages students who do face challenges, I guess I just can’t get too offended by that.
I don’t know anything about admissions at Cal, but I have a couple of friends who read applications at a very Vassar-like college, and I can tell you that, however things worked 20-odd years ago, this would be terrible advice these days. Application essays are extremely important, and writing a boring one is an absolute kiss of death. If you’re applying to a liberal arts college like Vassar, you need to use your essay to make it clear to admissions people that you’re the kind of person who would thrive at their school. They’re choosing between a lot of people who are capable of doing the work, and what they want is people who would benefit and benefit from the campus environment. And incidentally, I don’t hear a lot of complaints about “adversity overcome” essays. I hear a lot of complaints about “I learned to appreciate how lucky I was when I went on a summer ‘volunteer’ trip and met poor people” essays. FWIW.
You know, I know that the tone of this blog is supposed to be all nice and everything, but as someone who knows how little consideration your average university gives to physically disabled people, this pisses me right off. There are few things as galling as privileged people whining about the imaginary benefits supposedly enjoyed by people who have less privilege than them. I have no idea how my university’s admissions committee would look at someone who used a wheelchair, but not a lot of people in wheelchairs bother applying here, because the campus is an inaccessible mess. And that’s a problem that’s a whole lot less likely to be discussed on this blog than the serious, serious issue of imaginary disabled people getting imaginary preference in imaginary admissions discussions.
Thank you Hugo.
Here would be my criteria for “when it is reasonable for admissions committees to prefer an essay about disadvantages.”
I think it is reasonable for an admissions committee to care about disadvantages when the record doesn’t make sense without it, or when it is a core part of the student’s background. For example, if an applicant quit school after 8th grade, knowing that he grew up in a religious community where everyone did so would be fairly important to evaluting his record. Similarly, if someone had one wildly uncharacteristic bad year in high school, knowing that they were hospitalized for depression would be a fairly critical piece of info.
But what I object to–and I think you are agreeing with me–is that students shouldn’t be encouraged to whine about and magnify disadvantages that were, basically, petty bumps in a generally good road. For example, one of my classmates, who always whined about how she was “disadvantaged” as a black female. Her father was a US diplomat, she’d gone to a good private school–her disadvantage was pretty much all in her head. (Certainly, I–the first-referenced student above–felt like her advantages over me were fairly substantial.)
I agree that admissions committees are partially to blame for encouraging this trend. For those who defend it, however, what possible safeguard is there against dishonesty? Why can’t a student invent a narrative of oppression that is impossible to validate?
My father was a war refugee; I could have surely cooked up something about being the son of a Holocaust survivor who struggled with all the usual consequences of that condition. It would never have occurred to me to do so. Of course, if I were writing such an essay today…
Russell, yes, I see that, but admission to a large public college seems about as clear-cut a case of the appropriateness of strategic self-presentation as I can think of.
Hugo, of course there is no meaningful check on dishonesty in college admissions applications. That’s one of the reasons they are a silly requirement at best, and a pernicious one at worst. I don’t advocate such commodification of one’s life story out happily. Imagine the job candidate who was completely honest about their weaknesses when that boilerplate interview question is asked. A handful of interviewers might be so impressed with the honesty that it would help, but that would be a bad bet.
(FWIW, I think straight-up affirmative action is far more respectful than this admissions essay-as-backdoor-affirmative-action approach. It says, we judge groups X/Y/Z to be historically and currently disadvantaged as well as underrepresented, and we’re adjusting our admissions formula accordingly. This is honest and straightforward. The admissions essay is essentially the very same large, impersonal bureaucratic organization pretending to be something it manifestly isn’t. In a competitive environment, this interpellates applicants into a potentially unsavory form of strategic actor. As I understand it, Sally is correct that admissions at Vassaresque type colleges are an entirely different kettle of fish, about which I have little to say.)
I don’t advocate such commodification of one’s life story out happily.
strike the “out,” not sure where that came from.
There’s no safeguard against parents hiring $100-an-hour admissions coaches to help (or “help”) their kids craft perfect essays. There’s no safeguard against kids using family connections to get impressive-sounding internships. There’s no safeguard against kids who can’t afford SAT prep courses (never mind individualized SAT tutoring) being compared on an equal footing to students who can. There’s no safeguard against a lot of unfair and bad things in college admissions, and there are all sorts of opportunities to lie to one’s advantage in life. I’m not sure why one would focus on this particular one.
Actually, I wrote my college application essay about how my family’s refugee experience informed my political commitments. I think it was a perfectly fine essay: it was sincere, it was true, and it helped the reader understand the person behind the resume. I don’t think it was a narrative of suffering overcome, and I certainly don’t think I claimed any sort of suffering for myself, but you might disagree.
You’re probably right. But as California voters have seen fit to outlaw straight-up affirmative action, it’s the back door approach or the pretend-everyone-is-equal-even-though-they’re-not approach. If California voters insist on judging everyone on their merits, then you have to have some way to take into account people’s differing situations, unless you’re willing to do the difficult and unpopular things that would be necessary to get rid of the pervasive and systematic inequality.
Sally, no dissagreement here. My contempt for these essays is matched only be my contempt for the abandonment of affirmative action at state Universities without an adequate replacement mechanism in place to combat structural racial injustice.
“Russell, yes, I see that, but admission to a large public college seems about as clear-cut a case of the appropriateness of strategic self-presentation as I can think of.”
I suppose. I can see you don’t like these essays or the rhetorical positions they oblige people to take any more than Hugo does; I just see him as making an ethical point: as successful as they may be, they’re still a bad idea, because they get students thinking about their lives in a vulgar and cheap way.
“My contempt for these essays is matched only be my contempt for the abandonment of affirmative action at state Universities without an adequate replacement mechanism in place to combat structural racial injustice.”
I’ve never been one to complain about affirmative action–I have reason to believe that I’ve lost out in various “suffering sweepstakes” at different times in my life, but I’m sure that hardly offsets the much larger advantages I’ve also enjoyed–but I confess that I doubt it’s really does much to address “structural racial injustice” for a very long time. At best, it has become a tool for increasing (some kinds of) diversity in institutions of higher education and the workplace; while I suppose there is some evidence that such diversity has created conditions that make it easier for poor minorities to get their foot in the door of success, whi I’ve read suggests such evidence iis pretty indirect. Actually addressing inequality will require different tools.
Bingo. There’s a whole set of essay cliches out there (for example, “Athletics made me a better person on and off the field,” which is usually code for “Pass this application on to the coach”), and I think it’s kind of telling how it’s the one in which the traditionally privileged don’t have the advantage that gets all the criticism.
Not to mention how the privileged tell the less privileged not to raise the issue lest they be “vulgar” or a “victim.”
This is how I feel whenever I see womyn whining about how ‘oppressed’ they supposedly are. It’s really in the poorest of taste.
Hi there. I just have a few points to your essay that I would like to seek clarity on.
First, can you please explain your use of the work “shamelessly” in the context of your classmate who checked the “Hispanic” box? The idea that you chose the concept of “shame,” in pointing out the absence of it, indicates that you find it surprising/noteworthy that your classmate was not duly shamed by admitting his ancestry on a college application form. Do you feel that, given what you perceived as the presence of other factors of privilege, that he should have discounted his ethnicity and refused to answer, or should he have lied and checked some other box, “white,” perhaps? Does ‘adequate’ privilege in other areas divest one of the right to check a box that a percentage of people might perceive as being a marker of being inherently disadvantaged (regardless of the truth of that perception), in some cunning ploy to gain sympathy?
And what about a person of mixed ethnicity or socioeconomic status; what, in your opinion, would qualify someone to note multiple ethnicities? Blood quantitation, perhaps?
Another question I have is to the framework in which you present your concept of “trend.” Are you on the admissions panel for any college? Do you routinely see all the application essays for any incoming class? Given that you yourself note that “…[a] relatively small number of my students… come from what might be thought of as “privileged” backgrounds…” it is logical conclude that you see only a portion of essays, that are brought to you by individuals whom one would reasonably expect to have faced challenges. You appear to be attempting to generalize a “trend” based on a sample that is not representative nor generalizable.
Without question, your statement,
“If one’s family wasn’t disadvantaged economically, perhaps an inspiring tale of battling anorexia will suffice. (Indeed, the “let me tell you all about how I overcame my eating disorder strategy” is one I’ve now seen three times in the last few years. It suggests a trend.)” is offensive on so many levels. You present yourself as a feminist; and yet a powerful symbol of the profound internalization of patriarchal oppression is tossed off as an inconvenience to you. Anyone with half of a real interest in feminist/social justice issues would be far more concerned with the “trend” indicated by the injustices your students are experiencing in your community every day, than the fact that they are so ’shamelessly’ reported.
Hugo, your entry was very interesting. It was an entry that I do agree on (up until a point).
With AA, it can go both ways. A rich, spanish child from a wealthy home could label themselves as hispanic, while a poor white guy would often get nothing.
However, what I think Hugo is saying is that he is going beyond this and laying out the victimhood mentality that seems to be a trend. And I don’t believe it’s the students fault; it’s what society (or academia) wants out of them in their essays! I think a better alternative would be what your dreams are and how you are going to get there (a “look out world, here I come” theme), instead of saying ‘what obstacles have you overcome’. This often asked question on college essays seems to display an often victimized tone, or labeling the person a ’survivor’. I think we just need more uplifting themes to discuss.
Russell, I’m perhaps a bit more optimistic about the positive impact of affirmative action, but I certainly agree it doesn’t do much for those who find themselves at the losing end of both racial and class divides. It’s an imperfect, “clunky,” but real attempt to address and counteract racial inequality. So to reiterate, what I find contemptible and unforgivable isn’t the removal of affirmative action per se but it’s removal without a serious effort to replace it. Saying “we’re going to try a different approach,” done in good faith, is (dependent on specifics) fine with me. Saying “we’re not going to address this problem any more” or pretending it no longer exists is an appalling afront to justice. While I share Hugo’s (and your own, I presume) distaste for the admissions essays suffering sweepstakes, it’s much harder for me to criticize or condemn in the context of California’s abandonment of a systematic effort to confront racial injustice. An attempt to find a way to continue to pursue a crucial social justice goal, even when one’s masters have abandoned that commitment.
I’m curious what about structural racial injustice earns scare quotes
Sally:You know, I know that the tone of this blog is supposed to be all nice and everything, but as someone who knows how little consideration your average university gives to physically disabled people, this pisses me right off.
Sally, I’m sorry my example offended you. I was trying to give an exaggerated example of a “victimhood trifecta” that my theoretical admissions officer would love. I guess I didn’t articulate very well that I considered the whole attitude of sorting people by categories of disadvantages reprehensible. I agree that many campuses are not well-suited to people in wheelchairs, my alma mater among them.
I also agree that the essay can be a tool to help explain adverse circumstances; similarly, some places do seem to use this type of essay as a way to fake that they care. In this age of educational branding, it’s tough for schools to sort among the applications for the students who will do them proud and will do well at the school. Anything that they come up with that could let them get a good feel for the applicants can be subverted by competitive parents with money. Maybe that’s why the “overcoming adversity” essay is such a popular requirement - it’s a quick and easy way to cover 3 bases in the process without having to think too hard about it.
In old fogey mode: Back in the day, while I sometimes complained about the advantages some of my peers had because their parents were very well-to-do*, I also never felt I HAD to go to any particular school to be successful in my career. (I think my essay was on the importance of the 3 Rs for a functioning society.) I realize that perception has changed substantially for young people nowadays and may even be true, to a certain extent. A relative who works for a Fortune 500 company told me that if he were applying to said company today as a freshly-minted graduate from his alma mater, he would not be hired, period. Because today his Fortune 500 company only hires people in his area of expertise who have graduated from one of about 10 schools, and his alma mater isn’t one of them.
*While we had a roof over our heads, food on the table, adequate medical care, and thrift store clothing that didn’t have too many holes, what cash flow we had was mostly negative, and I was the one putting food on the table as soon as I was old enough to land a cashier’s job at the local supermarket. The fact that both of my parents had graduated from college was a leg up that I didn’t fully appreciate until much later. Also my parents’ assumption that I would be getting post-secondary education was something I took for granted at the time.
“It’s an imperfect, ‘clunky,’ but real attempt to address and counteract racial inequality.”
I agree, David; affirmative action is a blunt but decent tool. My main complaint with it is that it is an easily co-opted tool, and I think the sort of essays this whole thread is about are symptomatic of such. The whole goal of affirmative action, as I understand it, is to change the structure of opportunities available to diverse peoples, thereby changing the racial, ethnic, and gender distribution of those who are capable of availing themselves of those opportunities, and thereby changing the sort of mentality which the resulting opportunity environments inculcate. I suspect that, except in a very indirect way, most affirmative action programs today get to the second step, at best, and then stop. When it becomes clear that people of different racial, ethnic, and gender categories can–with the help of money and good teachers and competent advisors–figure out ways to strategically pitch themselves (through admissions essays and otherwise) so as to dominate newly available opportunities as well as white men dominated previously available ones….well, that doesn’t mean the whole thing is pointless; you’re still increasing diversity. But as for actually changing minds, or challenging inequality, especially income and class inequality? Not so much. So yeah, I want to see affirmative action complemented with (and perhaps, in time, replaced by) something else. As it stands, I can’t help but agree with many attacks on affirmative action, but still think California’s cold turkey approach did much more harm than good.
Also, I don’t mean to say that I think the notion of structural racial injustice is hypothetical or deserves scare quotes, neither of which is true. I was just quoting you. Sorry for the confusion.
I think we’ve reached the point of near agreement.
UT Austin has an essay that asks students about significant setbacks or challenges they have faced. We thought it ridiculous. I advised my daughter to write about overcoming ALS and gaining the Lucasian professorship at Oxford (Stephen Hawking) and overcoming cancer to win the Tour de France (Lance Armstrong).
Truth is like many, if not most, young people her challenges and setbacks pale next to such as these.
This strikes me as a strange comment. First of all, while Hawking and Armstrong’s achievements are extraordinary, their challenges aren’t. I’m sure there are lots of college applicants who have had cancer. My childhood next-door neighbor, for instance, had survived cancer by the time he applied to college. (And actually, neither Hawking nor Armstrong became ill until they were in their 20s.) But I also guess I don’t understand why illness acts as some sort of trump card here. Illness is a challenge, but I don’t think it’s some sort of uniquely challenging challenge that blows anything else anyone has faced out of the water.
And finally, there’s not much about most college applicants that’s particularly extraordinary. We don’t expect students to shut up about being on the varsity football team, even if they’ll never be Peyton Manning. Kids send in slides of their artwork, even if it pales in comparison to Picasso. Pretty much every college application essay is going to seem awfully trite if you compare it to, say, Hegel. We accept that most 17-year-olds have failed to achieve greatness in any aspect of their lives, and yet we try to take them seriously for the purposes of judging them and determining their futures. So why treat their challenges differently than we treat their other experiences and ideas? Why hold their challenges to some standard of extraordinariness that we would never think to apply to any other aspect of their being?
I guess I’m just never going to understand why people get more worked up about “sorting people by categories of disadvantages” than by the persistence of inequality. I don’t understand why people find these tiny advantages meted out to less-privileged people worse than the huge, structural advantages given to more-privileged people. And I will never understand why Hugo would attempt to hurt his students’ prospects by shaming them out of using an admissions essay formula that appears to work. It’s not like Hugo earned his success through sheer merit. Everything he’s written about his adolescence makes it clear that Hugo was repeatedly rescued by a system that makes it damn near impossible for OKOP to fail in any lasting way. How on earth can he, who had the deck stacked so totally in his favor, begrudge students the tiny advantages that they can derive from not enjoying the much larger advantages that helped him? I’m not saying that it’s great to be pressured into fitting your life into this (or any other) narrative, but this post really rubbed me the wrong way.
I think that “vulgar,” with all its class implications, is especially telling here. Vulgar is what OKOP call NOKOP who don’t know their place, and it’s what they call each other to discipline those who violate the rules.
The main point of writing these essays is to get accepted into college. College essays are not exercises in self-expression; they exist to help people get noticed and accepted into school. If stories of adversity get people accepted, and if colleges openly ask for stories of adversity (and many do), why advise students to write otherwise? And who isn’t compelled by a well-written, riveting story of personal triumph against all odds?
Essays act very much like cover letters. They put a human face to an application. They tell a story that can’t be conveyed by grades and test scores. They also can provide a space where students can fill in gaps or explain anything unusual about their application.
Of course, I pity the person who has to read a stack of poorly written essays that come off as whining and insincere. What torture it must be! :( But that doesn’t discount the value of a *well-written* college application essay that explores personal triumph over adversity.
FWIW, my college essays were not about adversity. Personally, I don’t like to be hit over the head with stories of how a person overcame such-and-such. But that’s just me, not the admissions committee, and I can’t speak for them.
I should disclose that despite what I said about essays not being about self-expression, I basically took two short stories I’d written earlier and in one, inserted a paragraph to make it relevant to the essay question being asked. The short stories were not too shabby, and probably were much better writing samples than any “real” application essay I could have written on the fly, but basically, I was lazy and a pompous punk who thought her creative writing was all that and who wanted to thumb her nose at convention. (And no, this attitude is not reflective of my white middle/upper class privilege; my dual income, working class, take-no-vacations kind of family always hovered just above the poverty line.) Luckily, I was accepted by my schools. :) Please note, I don’t recommend my approach necessarily; it’s what worked for a punk like me, but applicants are far better off consulting their school counselors and admissions committee guidelines.
It would be interesting to hear about this topic from people who determine college admissions.
I ought not to have used the word “vulgar”. Sally’s write: it’s an “OKOP” word that is part of how we police each other and create separation between ourselves and NOKOP. Using it undermined the point I was trying to make, which was that in this post-affirmative action world, narratives of suffering overcome have become the dominant strategy for the underprivileged when applying to college — and that there is something disingenuous about doing away with AA on the state level and then openly inviting folks to insert race and class back into the discussion through their essays.
Then again, I only know the few dozen essays I see each fall; it would indeed be nice to hear from a UC admissions counselor.
Sally,
It’s not that illness is something special or a trump card. They were just the examples that came to mind. It is simply the topic of the required essay that bothers me.
You are probably right in that it is a cultural thing. It’s due in part to the influence of the “stiff upper lip” school and our (my daughter’s and my) discomfort with personal essays in general. One simply does not write about oneself.
I would be more comfortable with a prompt that asked a student to write about something that is important to them (which might include a personal setback or challenge overcome).