Real Value of Essays

College Essays
61

I’m always reminded of those studies which have found that the number of books in your house growing up correlates with future standardized reading scores, even controlling for other factors.

So without any ACT tutor or such, S24 did great on the reading sections. As he explains it, he knows there are kids who are studying and consciously applying all sorts of rules and strategies when taking these tests, but he can just look and know which answers are right or wrong, he doesn’t have to think about it.

There is a lot to that, but I am quite aware our house is full of books, including all the ones we bought specifically for him when he went through a huge reading phase and could not get enough. And that doesn’t even account for all the library books, the Kindle books . . . .

So, uh, yeah.

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62

My kids do that. They don’t know why it’s right but can generally pick out the correct answer because “it sounds right.”

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63

S24 is like that with math. Also, with the reading comprehension. He did have to prep the SAT grammar, though. For some reason that wasn’t as intuitive.

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64

This feels like a common story to me. The kids from these families (including ours) come “pre-prepped” but may have one or more types of questions or sections where some focused prep helps.

To circle back to essays, I know my kid was also pretty “pre-prepped” to write essays, but of course he has gotten some help from us and even more so the college counseling staff. But none of that is starting from ground zero, in fact all the good stuff is coming from him. Our role can be limited to just suggesting where maybe he could do more, suggesting other things he can maybe consider doing without, and such. Because again really he has been preparing for this all along.

And while I have no similar standardized evidence that his essays have gone well, college counseling seems satisfied with the results. And to me this all feels broadly the same, across all the different parts of his application–the foundation was laid long ago, this part is really just tweaking the final presentation.

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65

As others have responded, why stop there? Other pieces of the application can be at least as "biased,” if not more so. Paying for private school tuition, paying for SAT tutors, paying for academic competitions to win awards in, pay-to-pay sport clubs, overseas trips for athletic events or other extracurriculars, etc. Can these “substantially increase the probability of admission?” Absolutely.

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66

S24 is a solid writer, but as a STEM oriented kid essays have been more of a challenge. He has had some input from me and his excellent GC but all the ideas and writing have been his. I never considered hiring professional help.

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67

Some now argue that admissions advantages offered to people with wealth have been nullified because expectations for those students have become far greater.

Right zips, Test prep tutors, and College Coaches can’t change that. Maybe the disadvantaged these days are the rich kid who do their own work.

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68

We relate. Mine can write an excellent analytical paper, if a bit dry. College essay writing is a whole different game. I actually feel is a bit unfair that my writer D may get a little bit of a pass for not being A+++ in Math/Sci on her apps while STEM kid still has to produce an excellent essay to pass muster.

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69

Many years ago, it was still possible for international students to get accepted to a very good school with a low verbal SAT score and a good TOEFL score, which would be impossible today. My grad school roommate and I got lucky, our rough attempts at writing essays after 3 years of high school English made it through. He got into MIT with the lowest verbal SAT in his class, but still managed to graduate top of his class.

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@TonyGrace

This right here is my daughter. Excellent technical writing skills. My wife had to tell her to use contractions and it nearly threw off her equilibrium.

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71

:joy: you have no idea how much I relate to this. Zero contractions happening over here. He’s an athlete and his emailing with coaches is soooooo formal! I’m like, you are having a conversation, you don’t need to sign with your full name every time!

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@TonyGrace

Literally just laughed out loud. I am assuming his sport isn’t football, not too much formality on the gridiron. Make sure your son cherishes the opportunity to play in college. I walked on D1 football and quit, biggest mistake of my life.

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My D is a walk on D1 athlete, which was a VERY unexpected turn of events. It’s been the best experience and has made her already great college experience so much richer.

74

I know it’s become a controversial thing to say in this country, but smart parents are going to have smart kids.

What’s to be done about it? Handicaps, Harrison Bergeron-style?

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75

If so, so it goes.

B. Pilgrim

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76

Sometimes, and in such cases typically a component of that was the parents got favorable “nurture” and then they also give favorable “nurture” to their kids.

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77

As the saying goes, nature or nurture, either way it’s your parents’ fault.

And the nature part is 80% hereditary.

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78

The essay is another arrow in the “holistic” admissions quiver, that allows ad comms to “shape” the class the way they want to, to build the class that they want.

I’ll never forget seeing a tippy-top application with a video supplement essay showing the daily life of a rural applicant. The ad comm loved it. I thought that it was a great boost, not for the applicant but for the pro videographer older brother, except that he was too old for college. But the ad comm loved it.

So no, I don’t believe that ad comms can reliably distinguish between good essays that are the result of pro help and good essays that are the student’s own work. Pity the applicant whose self-produced essay is considered too good to have been done without pro help.

79

I would suggest people consider the “caveats” section of that article when thinking about these issues.

I would also suggest that to the extent there is a substantial percentage of any admissions factor that is controllable by parents with a lot of savvy and economic resources, including but not limited to essays, then the marginal effect of such resources can be very large. And when looking at the most selective private colleges, it is of course the marginal effects which make all the difference.

On the plus side, in states with good, affordable public universities, this provides an alternative for kids on the wrong side of those marginal effects. Which to me is the real issue–not that some such kids don’t get into fancy private colleges, which in my view is more or less inevitable in a capitalist system with private colleges, but that not all states are doing a great job providing affordable public universities.

In any event, to once again circle back to contributing to the OP’s understanding of this issue, highly-selective private colleges are not likely to be turning away from the marginal value of essays, not least because they really need all these different margins in order to be so selective.

Like, loosely speaking, Harvard in the litigation period got down to such a low admittance rate by only deeming around 20% of applicants to have the very strong personal rating they needed to be admitted unhooked. Maybe more like 25% among those with sufficiently strong academic and activities ratings too, but still they had something like four times as many potential admits as they could possibly grant before implementation of this personal factor.

Essays were a major component in that personal rating, and so were very important to determining which one of four such applicants actually got admitted to Harvard. And although it was pointed out in the litigation this personal factor was not free from bias, it turned out pretty much nothing was.

And Harvard won the part of the trial where they argued that they had legitimate reasons for valuing their personal ratings and that any observed biases were not intentional.

So, the marginal value of essays at these colleges is not likely to go away. Indeed, if anything given the parts of the litigation that Harvard lost, the marginal value of essays/personal ratings is likely to go up, not down, including in some relatively specific ways based on what the Supreme Court, and subsequent DOJ/ED guidance, said were allowed.

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80

Thanks for all the discussion and I have learned a lot in this thread. It’s not straightforward.
My point was also about honesty - people can paint a totally different picture than what they truly are or have done in these personal essays and tailor it to fit the particular institutions profile.
But then again, that happens in every day life - from resumes, to job interviews to dating and relationships. Much broader and deeper issue than what I initially thought to be and I assume just like a seasoned interviewer, Universities have the know how to separate the wheat from the chaff.

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