The College Application Essay - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Sarah Myers McGinty has nearly 20 years' experience in admissions, college counseling, and the teaching of writing. She has taught at Harvard since 1993.

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THE COLLEGE APPLICATION ESSAY (chapter 1)

How Colleges Read Applications

"The essay is the first thing I read. I really slow down over that," says Thyra Briggs, vice president and dean of admission at Harvey Mudd College. Briggs is acknowledging the importance of the essay in differentiating applicants. "A picture of the student begins there," she adds. Of course, as in all admission offices, the transcript is the primary source of information about an applicant. But after that, when admission counselors want a sense of the person behind the paper, when they are looking for the match between institution and applicant, essays can make the case. "A great essay can close the deal," says Briggs. "It's the one place to clearly hear the student's voice."

Harvey Mudd's process is its own, but it is not entirely different from that of other colleges. In most admission offices, grades and courses--the transcript--are where evaluation begins. Then other factors are taken into account: talents, recommendations, activities, testing, special circumstances, a portfolio or supplemental materials, an audition, an interview. Woven into all this is an interest in the applicant's personality and writing ability. The application essay gives colleges useful information about both of these features.

Where It All Began

The application essay or personal statement has been a part of college admission since the explosion of college enrollment after World War II, evolving from direct queries like "Why in particular do you wish to attend Bates?" to more eccentric requests like "Your favorite word" (Princeton University) or "What activities make you lose track of time?" (Mount Holyoke College). The Reverend Robert Kinnally, former dean of admission at Stanford University, believes the essay helps admission counselors "judge the depth of the [applicant's] understanding of intellectual or social issues...it also shows the quality and freshness of the applicant's mind." Although not every college requires an application essay, narrative prose figures into the admission process at a wide variety of institutions--for the 38,000 applicants to the University of Michigan, for the 35,000 applicants to Harvard University, for the 12,000 applicants to the United States Military Academy at West Point, and for the 1,600 applicants to Carroll College in Helena, Montana. The evaluation of the essay may contribute to how a college differentiates among its top applicants. Or it may determine whether a borderline candidate has the necessary basic skills. Colleges use essays for different purposes, but essays matter--at large, small, public, private, selective and nonselective schools.

How Colleges Read Essays

Colleges are looking to build scholarly communities, hoping to collect a population of people who like to read and think, reflect and talk, wonder, and argue. This is the mission of admission. But as William C. Hiss, former dean of admission and now a gifts officer and lecturer at Bates College, says, "We are often seen, wrongly, I think, as a set of intellectual gatekeepers who, like Dante's Divine Comedy, offer three possibilities: paradise, purgatory or hell--that is, admit, wait-list, deny." In contrast, the colleges themselves see a methodical and quantifiable process of selection. Marlyn E. McGrath, director of admissions at Harvard University, describes the admission staff as a group of hard-working people "determined to bring to Harvard, students who are diverse in talents and interests." In choosing a class of first-year students, admission counselors make judgments that involve objective information (comparing two students' course loads, for example) and subjective information (a coach's opinion about how far a specific player might develop within the college's tennis program). It's what Fred Hargadon, former dean of admission at Princeton, liked to call "precision guesswork."

Making Choices

The anxiety about all this, for high school students and their families, is very real. And it's easy to start believing that the college admission process is going to be the most significant and determining feature in a young person's life. (Actually, what you do in college is more important than where you go to college.) But the "big picture" isn't a pattern of injustice and irrationality. Both colleges and applicants are looking and choosing. Both admission counselors and high school seniors are busy gathering information and making judgments based on facts and predictions. In pursuit of a common goal--the best education of the next generation of leaders and thinkers--colleges and universities, like you, will look at many options.

Your research probably started first and you have many resources to draw upon:

Guidance personnel and the counseling and career staff at your high school and at your local library

Websites, social media, mailings, videos, blogs and viewbooks from the colleges

Admission counselors--at the colleges, visiting at your high school, or at local-area information fairs

Teachers, coaches, educational consultants, friends, parents, alumni (preferably recent alumni)

Guidebooks and data handbooks

Campus visits and interviews

Prior applicants from your own high school or community

Word of mouth, general reputation, and media coverage (not the most reliable information)

You aren't doing this alone. All these resources will help you with your half of the choosing--deciding where to apply to college. Colleges rely on a more focused set of resources:

Course of study

Grades, class rank and grade point average

Test scores

Biographical data (summer activities, jobs, special talents and interests)

One or more essays, writing samples or paragraph responses

Support materials where appropriate (audition, tapes, portfolio)

Recommendations

An interview when available

Inside the Admission Office

Let's look at how colleges make their decisions, in order to understand where the application essay fits into the picture.

The evaluation process differs at every school. Some colleges see numerical data as the most reliable predictor of success: They look first at an applicant's grades, class rank and test scores. The state of California, for example, publishes eligibility minimums and uses a variety of criteria for each of its different UC campuses. Other schools try to tease from the file a richer sense of the applicant. Vince Cuseo, vice president and dean for admission at Occidental College, says, "We read to uncover character, values and something of the life experience." And where a school offers a distinctive program--the K plan at Kalamazoo College, the internship options at Northeastern, the hands-on education of Deep Springs--application evaluation stresses the "fit" of applicant and education. All schools, even the large state universities, have a special process for the question marks--the "gray zone" applications that may require additional readers or consideration by a committee. Colleges and universities continually modify the way they evaluate applications, looking for the most reliable and the fairest way to put together a class from the limited information provided.

The people who make these decisions also vary. The readers of applications are usually a combination of experienced senior admission personnel and younger staffers, often themselves recent graduates of the school. A dean of admission or an enrollment manager oversees everything. But faculty members may be part of the process. At Cal Tech, all admission decisions involve faculty. Reed College includes student readers on admission committees. Applicants may also be looked at by specialists: music faculty hear auditions, art staff view portfolios. Claudia Harrison, a geography teacher and applications advisor at James Allen's Girls'...