Let's Ditch the Personal Essay:
How to Move Beyond the Non-Conversation About RACE in College Admissions
The personal essay could be a wonderful written testimony to one’s lived-experience, character, and service to others. Instead, it’s become the clearest evidence of the malaise in college admissions under the prohibition against discussing race openly.
The June 29, 2023, Supreme Court decision against affirmative action exacerbates an already troubled college admissions system, which is notoriously opaque and prone to gamification.
As a longtime reader of college admissions applications, I’d like to suggest some paths forward. First step: Let’s ditch the personal essay:
The personal essay could be a wonderful written testimony to one’s lived-experience, character, and service to others. Instead, it’s become the clearest evidence of the malaise in admissions under the prohibition against discussing race openly. I have an alternative that I discuss below, but first let’s consider how the Court’s majority opinion aggravates this problem.
While conceding that “exposure to different perspectives and thoughts can foster debate, sharpen young minds, and hone students’ reasoning skills,” Justice Thomas rejected that “diversity with respect to race, qua race, furthers this goal.” Instead, he asserted, affirmative action simply places some individuals “into more competitive institutions than they otherwise would have attended.”
Thomas’s characterization of affirmative action as a slippery slope to “a world in which everyone is defined by their skin color, demanding ever-increasing entitlements and preferences on that basis” stands at odds with the remediation goals of affirmative action to pursue justice for those who have been historically excluded in the admissions process. Thomas seems interested in making sure no one is admitted to a college or university to which they wouldn’t have gained entrance without extra attention in the selection process, especially if the conversation is about race.
Many people have asked me whether it is not ironic that the conservative court along with its many conservative supporters, who normally present themselves as advocates for free speech, have arrived at a decision that “muzzles” college admissions officers from discussing race. My response is both yes and no. Free speech remains somewhat undisturbed insofar as the Court made clear that applicants may discuss their own race and how their experience of race and racism may have influenced their achievements. Admissions officers may pay attention to such statements, but the admissions process may not privilege race as a deciding factor.
But while the decision does not explicitly silence conversations about race, it serves this end de facto. SCOTUS has simply delivered to the federal context the same prohibition against considering race as California implemented 1996 with Proposition 209. A hotly contested decision, Prop 209, is modeled on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and prohibits state governmental institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity, specifically in the areas of public employment, public contracting, and public education. To the extent that this new SCOTUS decision approximates the outcome of the California referendum, the role of race in decisions may end up confoundingly obscured but not eliminated.
Indeed, the California ban has led to an elaborate, convoluted non-conversation about race that nonetheless remains omnipresent. Since 1996, public California universities have engaged in extensive elliptical speech acts to discuss race without mentioning race per se. This engagement with race mainly involves the evaluation of the personal essay as the key to “holistic” admissions which endeavors to assess a candidate’s worthiness beyond their grades and test scores, especially with respect to diversity and “resilience.”
Ten years ago in 2013, I wrote this New York Times piece about the strange discussions Berkeley admissions readers engaged in to “build a diverse class” while not mentioning race. As we debated the merits of each student carefully without saying such things as “is the student Black or Latine or Indigenous?” our supervisor instructed us to follow the pattern of what they called “helpful” personal essays that directly referred to race. All of us expressed relief, whenever the student explicitly mentioned their race, so we wouldn’t have to try to surmise it. We were also taught to identify “stressors” that might indicate the person was from a marginalized group that could include race. Family names and socioeconomics have often been seen as a proxy for race. But, despite all our careful efforts to infer race or marginalization, subsequent decisions to accept or reject a student may have been neither accurate nor just.
The SCOTUS decision merely confirms the habits of our era of “helpful” personal essays where applicants understand they must most loudly and clearly declare their race as well as tales of stressors and disadvantages if they hope to gain entry to universities of their choice. Is this fair that marginalized students be forced to trade on their trauma? Sociology PhD student Aya M. Waller-Bey says no. Given this dysfunctional system, where Waller-Bey and many other former admissions readers believe the personal essay will become more important, what other options do applicants have? Justice Thomas’s strategy to avoid race thinking and its supposedly “entitled” attitudes, has in fact sanctioned an environment of competitive victimization where everyone needs to clearly state how they have survived a world of unjust harms that makes them more worthy of admission than their peers.
Here is a “helpful” example. In a recent admissions cycle, we encountered a student from the Midwest who described her Indigenous heritage (the exact details here have been altered not to reveal the student’s identity). As an applicant, she was attractive on two demographic grounds: First, she qualified as an underrepresented minority, and second, she would “help build the class” to include less represented states in the country. This student with an Anglo-sounding family name, wisely understood she need not elaborate what might have been a highly mixed, privileged identity. Instead, she focused on her service to the Indigenous community and others. From her home address, we could tell she attended a well-funded public school and was probably not poor. It also helped that she had survived several health scares, which showed “resilience” and “growth mindset.” Her essays sounded mature, but spunky and young in a style that may have been ventriloquized by a college writing consultant. With these essays alongside a great alumna interview, good grades, this student gained admission to an elite university. In the end, we took her based on the merits of the rest of her application and a conversation we had about how “likely she was to succeed” and “serve the university mission.”
If you’re queasy after hearing about the process, you should be. So much of the college essay depends on how it persuades readers, the process has become confusing and impressionistic. Here are some ideas for a more principled, sustainable, and equitable admissions solution, one that SCOTUS might also disdain, but not assail:
Consider a program where low-income high school students can start working on their college-style research papers early with college writing instructors as their teachers.
Instead of asking students to write a personal essay in its now routinized style of what Waller-Bey calls “trauma-porn” and competitive marginalization, students should work with high school teachers to prepare a college-level research paper with an accompanying reflection about how the project challenged them personally and intellectually. Many high school teachers already teach a similar assignment as a final or capstone paper. The research paper and reflection can become the focus of teacher college preparation pedagogy rather than the genre of the college essay.
When students research a topic of great personal importance to themselves, they avoid trading on trauma, and instead engage ideas. Likewise, rather than writing silly supplemental essays where they are required to show “intellectual vitality” (Stanford finally renamed this vapid category) or “leadership” or “passion,” a student research essay and reflection will demonstrate both deep interest and lived-experience. In this new approach, the student’s teacher will have seen this essay develop over various iterations, be able to testify to its authenticity as well as the quality of the student’s work and character in their recommendations. Switching genres is not more work for high school teachers. It’s better, more appropriate college preparation. Imagine one 1800-2500 word research essay, a 800 word reflection, and maybe 100 word supplement. Not 650 words of trauma plus 4 x 250 +50 characters x 10 of banality and keywords written by college writing counselors or ChatGPT.
To help marginalized students write a research essay and personal reflection that are equally excellent as their privileged peers in well-funded high schools, why not have university writing programs expand on already excellent programs like National Equity Lab which also partners with Stanford Digital Education to fund outreach to marginalized communities? Consider a program where low-income high school students can start working on their college-style research papers early with college writing instructors as their teachers. University writing instructors are great teachers. They care about students, are usually grossly underpaid, and would be keen to participate in an extracurricular or summer college-prep program. At Stanford and elsewhere we already teach both these genres of writing in research and reflection, so the genres transfer to other kinds of learning experiences, especially through revision. College writing teachers, like the high school teachers, will have witnessed the research paper and reflection evolve over several drafts. The outcome would be more honest, accurate measure of who can succeed in college.
Are there enough college writing programs out there and staff to meet the demand? There are. At Stanford we have at least 52 writing instructors who can serve local populations. More rural populations can also gain access to local universities, which all have writing instructors, course materials online from elite programs, and local interns who are recent graduates.
No student will have to write about misery unless they want to, because there will be less guessing about who is a marginalized student. Wealthy students can stop pretending and understand that higher education institutions need their full-tuition dollars, especially as these institutions confront the ethics of legacies and other privileged categories.
Proactive involvement of high school teachers, switching genres, practicing actual college writing, and expanding outreach programs will help admissions readers identify highly qualified applicants. Once students from all backgrounds arrive on campus with firmer preparation, they are more likely to succeed and understand how they contribute to the excellence of their university cohort.
Will students still talk about their race and identity? Of course. Not merely, out of what the court derides as “entitlement” nor to broadcast misery, but because their identities and lived experiences better represent the American public, uniquely equip them to help future generations attain their dreams, and gain claim to what the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. calls “the promissory note” of American founding ideals.