The Common Application essay is the official essay used in the evaluation process. TCNJ also requires a secondary writing prompt designed to explore your interest in The College in more detail
This is on the admissions page under essays. Sorry, the link returns the whole shooting match!
I take it back - you are correct! I could have sworn this wasn’t there, but it obviously is.
Edited to add, wait this is referring to the Why TCNJ essay. Not the optional 4 essays after applying. That’s what I’m referring to. The Why TCNJ essay was expected.
I didn’t define it and I didn’t say elite, either.
@31fan I’ve read the whole thread and I am also addressing other observations that have come up in the thread. I don’t see a distinction between the essay suddenly appearing in the Contacts section of the Common App, or an essay request after submission, or an email asking for another essay.
If someone isn’t interested in doing optional essays, they don’t need to. I think people are not considering how critically important yield protection is. As you yourself said, “may have applied to 12 or 15 schools…” Not many kids MUST do that.
If the student really wants to get in, they can jump through more hoops. Is it annoying? Yes. Is it unethical? I don’t think so. No one made a student apply to a bunch of schools with optional essays. Again, I don’t think this is a big issue.
I am truly astonished that there is debate about whether or not it is preferable for colleges to disclose application requirements before a student decides to apply. Feels like the twilight zone.
Yes, those are the ones that scuttlebutt says are major-dependent. Iow, not every applicant gets a request. But I don’t know if that’s so.
Updated to show that this was under “pharmacy” major:
Students will have a supplemental application placed on their application portal.
It looks like other majors (and situations) have something similar. Not sure if you’re in that boat or not.
The bottom line: Colleges are looking out for their best interest, not yours.
Colleges know that there are 20 spots on the common app and that kids are applying to more and more schools. As already noted, the universities care greatly about accurately predicting their yield numbers. Kids who engage more with them are more likely to enroll.
And very little about the college admission process is “fair.”
For others reading this that have younger children, lots of free sites post the supplemental prompts for the most popular colleges. (I like the college essay guys). You can also post here on CC and ask the question.
We are all of course entitled to our opinions. Mine is that it is more than annoying, it is disrespectful of the students time. I still don’t understand why the secrecy is required to yield protect. I will say in my case, if any of D26’s schools ask for one of these after the fact supplementals, she will do it. But, it will have the opposite of the intended effect. If she gets in, and has other good options, the school that played yield games with her time will be less likely to get her than they would have otherwise. She is not applying anywhere she doesn’t want to go. She has three top choices and a top 5. One of those three top choices is a very likely admit, and one is a match. A school that is disrespectful of her time will not be looked upon favorably even if it is one of those top five now. So, if they want to play stupid games they can. But they may win stupid prizes with my family if they chose to.
Yes! And that’s where you have the power!
FWIW, my D was very irritated with one of her schools that delayed their EA decision date, and when finally released, did a huge wave of deferrals. And then requested a letter of continued interest, something else from the guidance counselor, in addition to midterm grades, etc…. The communication from the school was horrible and she wasn’t feeling the love. She opted to ignore all the extras because it wasn’t her first choice school and she was not going to go even if accepted.
Yep. Good for your kid!
This is a life lesson we teach D26, know your worth! You don’t need any one school if you create your list right. I treat job search process the same way. I am respectful of them and their time, if they are not respectful of me in the process, I do not need them. No reason to believe they are going to be more respectful when I am working for them when they are not respectful when they are courting me.
Of course, sometimes you need to suck it up and pair up with the disrespectful in some moments in life. But in those situations, I am always looking to move on to a place that respects me as soon as I can. Respect gets respect. Disrespect tells me who you are and I act appropriately.
I’m curious what the turn around expectation is for these surprise additions. My big issue is if they’re expected to turn these in before the application deadlines and/or have an extremely short deadline. As I stated earlier, December is a particularly busy time for my daughter and a surprise in December would have been extremely unwelcome for a student that had diligently prepared all of their materials and was just waiting until after ED decisions came out. I’m sure students have other reasons to apply near the application deadlines.
To be contrary, I’m going to flip that around and argue that it is disrespectful of a college’s time when kids apply to schools they have no desire to attend.
Colleges have to survive in whatever way they can. That means finding ways to admit students they feel are more likely to enroll.
I guess we are now at a chicken v.s. egg impasse. Right now, it seems the pendulum is swinging back towards additional essays. In another couple of years, who knows what will happen?
I’m pretty sure that’s what I intended this thread to be …
In so many ways, this is the crux of the issue. The whole college admissions process in the U.S. is stressful. In places where it’s transparent, that generally means reliance on high-stakes exams which are very stressful. You wanted to study nuclear engineering but your score wasn’t high enough? Pick again!
So we’re faced with an environment with TONS of options for students with wildly different attributes - from location, size, cost, courses of study, etc --who need to fill their classes every year. And students have the ability to apply to TONS of schools, recognizing that they can attend only one. It’s really a messy situation – an online version of that childhood game, Pit!
I personally don’t feel that I am in a position to change the system, but I do feel that by understanding it, we can navigate it in as positive and productive mindset as possible. A school that comes back with additional essays is saying (if they are optional) that they care about yield and that you have additional real estate to convey why you are a good fit. If the additional essays are NOT optional, you may be applying to a program that is hard/expensive to reverse out of (i.e., pharmacy) and they may be checking your understanding of what you’re getting into. (I say this after seeing what TCNJ says will require additionalessays.) Or you may be getting considered for a scholarship or honors college that required a pre-screen.
Some people see this as disrespectful, and as noted, we all have the ability to vote with our feet. Others may not resent this extra “check” on fit by the school (even if they resent the time.) But no matter, the system is imperfect and both sides are trying to optimize it for their own goals.
How is this “contrary” to my post or the point of this thread? We are not arguing against as many supplemental essays as the college wants to gauge interest (as I said earlier, one of D26s had 6, no issues with that). We are arguing against secret essays that are only demanded after a student has already applied.
I don’t disagree that students should not apply to schools they do not want to attend. Why can’t the colleges ask them for things that show their interest as part of the application as opposed to waiting until afterward if that is what they care about? Is your argument that the only way to stop the “disrespectful” kids who don’t want to go there from fooling the college is to trick them by asking for supplementals after they apply? No way to get them to reveal a lack of interest beforehand?
Maybe it is a way for colleges to collect additional application fees and then auto-rejecting those who do not send in the “optional” surprise extra essay, so no admission reading needs to be done for those applications (but the application fee is collected already, so free money to the college).
Not to belabor the point, so I’ll stop after this. I don’t see this type of essay listed at all on TCNJ’s website. It’s not the “Why TCNJ” essay which IS listed on the website and is required. The optional essays are called “Quest to know you better” and as far as I can tell, they are for all applicants. They’re not about a specific major, and in fact the questions are more like interview type questions. One is something like, “If you could have any band or speaker come to campus, who would it be and why?”
To me, this is a typical “hidden” supplemental that only demonstrates interest in the sense that you didn’t know you had to do it (it’s not on the website), and you have limited time to do it so it demonstrates interest in your willingness to drop other things that you might have been working on and submit it in a timely manner for it to be considered. This is fundamentally why I’m against this type of essay.
But I note that others disagree and are comfortable with this approach. I only note that this is an approach that I personally detest. Will it preclude D26 from attending the school? Probably not. But I’d like this specific type of demonstrated interest to not exist. That’s all I’m trying to say. This issue for TCNJ and other colleges that do the optional essays after applying could be very easily solved by them just saying that there are extra essays after applying. It doesn’t seem to be something that’s materially difficult for them to do. It’s a choice by the college - nothing more.
Yield prediction (estimating yield accurately) is important to all colleges, not all of which consider yield protection (getting yield to be as high as possible) important.
Yes, and there have been complaints about the increasing number of rounds of interviews needed possibly to get a job (or until the employer ghosts the applicant). But since applicants are not in the power position here, there is nothing they can do about it. The surprise essays after application suggest that the college sees itself in a position of power over applicants and can afford to screen out a significant portion of them this way without loss of quantity or quality of admits.
@beefeater – This wasn’t directed at you. I can’t comment on what your student is applying for and whether the essays are optional or required, fully recognizing that optional isn’t always truly so, nor on how much time they have to complete them.
My point was that if you look on the TCNJ website, there are a bunch of programs that say there will be additional essays after the application is submitted. (I put one of those “notices”, for pharmacy majors, above.) Most of those look like majors that are hard to pivot from without spending additional time and money, so my point is not about you, but that in some of these situations, the extra due diligence may be protecting both the student and the school. It serves neither well to enroll students in a highly specialized program if that fit isn’t right. And, fwiw, it was under the major/program and not under the general application tab, so it seems possible that a student applying to a lot of schools and doing that through the Common App could quite easily miss this. Again, not saying this is your situation, but a plausible one.
You’ve asked questions, so I will respond with one.
What is the goal of the colleges perceived of as being sneaky, in adding a surprise essay?
Is it to anger people by “tricking” them? Unlikely. People who are angered might be people who don’t really care about the school anyway and who won’t do the additional work. So it’s a win-win for the school in that they will have a pool of interested applicants about whom they have more information.
Is it to get more applications? Unlikely. Many colleges ditched supplements to increase application numbers.
Is it to gauge interest and get more information about a student? Likely.
People seem disgruntled at what they believe are “secret essays”, whether that be additional essays asked for on Common App but not explicitly stated on the website, essay requests via email, or essays requests generated after submission.
So why the sneaky essays? It’s possible that in the last situation, colleges decided after their college-specific Common App was generated that they wanted to have this additional information, and the maybe it was too late for Common App to include that in their template. So colleges found other ways to ask students for more essays. Or maybe after initial reviews, they choose who receives an email asking for another essay because they want more context for a student for whatever reason.
I just don’t feel anything here is villainous. I don’t work for any college but I bet if any college mentioned here responded, they would say “it’s yield protection.”
It is clear we are unlikely to ever agree on this topic, so I won’t continue to belabor the conversation generally. However, I do feel the need to point out that this portion of your response to me is completely inconsistent with everything I have said to you on this point. Sure, some “might be” people who do not care about the school. But some will be people who do care about the school. My D26 very much cares about each of her top 5 schools she has applied to. I have said that if one of these schools asks for a surprise essay after the fact, she will do the work. But, it will lower her (and my) opinion of that school such that if she has the privilege of choosing between that school and one which did not play disrespectful games with her time, she will choose the other one. That is not a win-win in my book. But I suppose either you did not take in what I wrote before, or you do not believe me. Maybe you think it is worth it to turn off quality interested students to yield protect against those who are not. That’s fine. I disagree and think there are better ways to yield predict without sacrificing some of the kids they actually might want.