<p>In everyday interactions with members of society, a student will adjust behavior and speech according to perceived expectations. He won’t swear in the classroom, he may decide to use higher level vocabulary in English class than in phys ed, he’ll know not to tell the teacher the real reason he wants to go to the restroom is to make a cell phone call, and he’ll convince mom to let him go to a party by offering a reassurance he knows will relax her. All students have some access to various means to determine what has to be done in each class and for each individual teacher to succeed. Outside of school, they may have mom and dad or some other mentor who can clue them in that they shouldn’t mention such and such to Aunt Emma or that supervisor. </p>
<p>The problem is that for college apps., they’re writing for strangers whose expectations and opinions they have no clue about. Should they write about their part-time job if it’s research, but not if they’re a cashier at the supermarket? Some adults will tell them the supermarket job is unimpressive, while others will assert talking about it could indicate the Ivy-bound student isn’t too full of himself to work at a menial job and still learn something there. Remember the CC lifeguard discussion? Some adult posters thought it was a great job for a teen–certainly better than flipping burgers–which would reveal a high level of student responsibility. Others argued that this is not a job viewed positively by adcoms since it is seen as a lightweight job of privilege–I suppose along the lines of hanging out at the country club dad belongs to under the guise of working. Educated adults can’t agree on these things, so where to turn? </p>
<p>Students are told to make sure their own voice comes through, and to be careful not to over-edit their essays such that their own voice is lost. Yet they’re supposed to have an adult read it to make sure they haven’t, due to their inexperience, broken a cardinal rule of what not to say in an admissions essay and that they don’t sound too much like the young, immature and directionless kids they are. Also, they must ask the right teachers to write their recommendations letters–not Sister Mary who will likely comment on the fact that the applicant shows up with a neat and clean uniform every day. </p>
<p>This discussion should not be trivialized as stemming from sour grapes or entitled whining. Everyone whose own child was successful believes it was deserved, and although they won’t admit it, many tend to assume there had to have been a good reason that other student didn’t get in, ie. their essays were inferior. (Btw, for the newcomers to this thread, my own two kids did well in admissions and attended an Ivy and Stanford. So I suppose they did something right, if only by accident.) </p>
<p>Why is there so much reaction to this topic? Because a lot of people suspect that it isn’t always the content of their character that got them in the coveted school, but the “character of their content.” The concern is that the right “content” is unfairly easier for certain groups of people to achieve than others, such as the sort of kid who goes to a top school where there are no Sister Mary types of teachers to even worry about and where a xiggi is their GC or consultant. People understand there isn’t a set formula for elite admissions and can’t be, but they suspect there are some secret rules out there and desired “contents” that certain privileged groups have access to that they don’t. They also suspect that certain classes of applicants, like recruited athletes, could work as a lifeguard and write an essay about liking the college’s weather and architecture and it wouldn’t matter one whit, but it would be fatal for anyone else.</p>