The college admissions essay is absurd, unfair and cringe
- Joanne Jacobs
- Apr 6
- 2 min read
The college admissions "essay is a deeply unfair way to select students for top colleges, one that is much more biased against the poor than standardized tests," writes Yashcha Mounk. It encourages applicants "to cast themselves as victims, to exaggerate the adversity they’ve faced, and to turn genuinely upsetting experiences into the focal point of their self-understanding."
There is a huge class bias in college admissions, he writes. "If you come from a background in which your parents and grandparents went to college and many family friends have recently gone through the Kafkaesque process of gaining admission to an elite institution," then you have the "cultural knowledge" to know how to market yourself, even if your parents can't afford to hire a "coach" to write the essay for you.
Mounk was inspired by the saga of 18-year-old Zach Yadegari, who posted that his very high grades and test scores -- and his success as a high-tech entrepreneur -- were not enough to get into 15 selective colleges. He was accepted by Georgia Tech, University of Texas and University of Miami.
When he posted his admissions essay on X, dozens of tweeters told him that he was arrogant, writes Mounk. “For every student with perfect scores like Zach, there’s a student with near perfect scores and more humility who’s overcome terrible circumstances and does not seem entitled,” a condescending professor tweeted. A former admissions director implied that the essay was "garbage."
Yadegari -- the name is Iranian -- apparently didn't have a family member to tell him to fake a little uncertainty or apologize for his privilege.
He is very confident, but he has good reason to feel that way. You'd think a non-victim would add diversity to most college campuses.
Mounk recalls a college acquaintance "who won a prestigious fellowship to study in America based on a sob story about having his house bombed during the 'troubles' in Northern Ireland." He didn't mention he'd been at Eton at the time, and that the "house was one of the family’s many estates."
For ambitious families, the teen years have become a branding exercise. "Many teenagers no doubt genuinely enjoy sports or playing the violin or participating in the math Olympiad or helping little old ladies cross the street," he writes. "But the admissions system makes it impossible for them not to pursue those activities with one eye to their future advancement."
The fundamental problem with the system "isn’t that it arbitrarily excludes some highly talented individuals like Zach from positions of power and privilege," he concludes. "It’s that it drains the souls of teenagers and encourages a deeply pernicious brand of fakery and breeds widespread mistrust in social elites." It's time to dump the essay.
When I was in high school -- I'm about to attend my 55th high school reunion -- college admissions was less competitive. I assumed I'd get in somewhere, and spent almost no time worrying about it. I didn't have to start a nonprofit or a business, build a clinic in Mexico or overcome the heartbreak of psoriasis. Confidence was OK.
There is no such thing as an American comprehensive admission process. Every university has different ways of admitting students. From university such as Cal Poly-SLO that admits applicants to a single department to UT-Austin top ten percent rule but with firewalls to keep less qualified students out of hard majors to Harvard where 1/3 of the freshman class were legacies, children of faculty, or athletes to Georgia State that admits most applicants, allow students to major in what they want but gives them only a single change to make cut off grades in certain classes for each major.
The other issue is that the Ivy League and Ivy Like are a small percentage of students compared to all college university.…
I'm glad you overcame the heartbreak of psoriasis. That must have been quite the struggle.
I wouldn't have a shot today at the undergrad university I attended 35 years ago. I got in with a 26 ACT. Today, you don't even get on the "maybe" pile without a 30+. My then-3.8 GPA would be "meh" compared to the "minimum" 4.0 today. I don't even remember what I wrote on my essays--yes, more than one--but I'm sure if I saw it today, present-day me would laugh at 35-years-ago me.
The problem is that Zach Yadegari gave off a strong vibe as being a grifter. When schools like Georgia Tech picked up on it, then every selective school was avoiding him.
Best practice is to include admission essays as part of a single comprehensive admission process used to break ties among students of equal selection rank, with the latter to be determined by overall average grades as among European schools, with such a system prioritizing written exams at advanced level, a common university admission test, internal marks (commonly known as "grade point averages" in North America), and oral exams, in that order.