The Applicant’s Confession

I can still remember typing out my college application essay on the Smith Corona typewriter I inherited from my older sister. When it was done, I asked my parents to read it. They demurred, telling me to ask my sister instead. After all, she went to college so she must know about such things. And that, pretty much, was that. If there was a cottage industry of college admissions counselors to get one into college, nobody told me about it.

By the time my kids went to college, everything had changed. There was a proliferation of courses and counselors to game the system. There were courses to teach students how to take the PSATs, SATs, ACTs, and any other T one could imagine. There were advisors who were experienced in college admissions and told students what to write about, what to write, how to write it and then tweaked the twenty drafts at an hourly rate.

It was expensive, but the idea of rejecting these services was unimaginable. How could you let all the other applicants have an admission advantage that you denied your child? So I hated it, but did it, because what else would a caring parent do?

I did it. I hated doing it, but I did it. As it turned out, I should have saved my money. My son went to a very expensive SAT course which he hated. He went, but didn’t care enough to pay attention. He never studied the material. He got nothing out of it. He just wasn’t interested. I hired an advisor to help with essays, and her ideas were generic and pedestrian, as were her writing skills. We ended up doing it ourselves, and he ended up getting early admission into college anyway. To be fair, he was recruited as a fencer to a few top colleges, so it wasn’t really much of a concern, but he was accepted at his first choice and that’s where he went.

Stanford has now decided that its students are too wealthy.

• More than half of Stanford undergraduates came from a family in the top 10 percent of wealth in the United States.
• Thirty-nine percent came from the top 5 percent.
• Seventeen percent came from the top 1 percent.
• And 3.5 percent came from the top 0.1 percent.

And how many are from the bottom 20 percent? Only 4 percent. (Stanford is quite diverse by looking at racial and ethnic groups, with white students making up 32 percent of the population, Asians 23 percent, Latinx [sic] 17 percent, Black 7 percent and Native Americans 1 percent.)

As the above numbers indicate, Stanford has a very wealthy student body. And so do most of the other hypercompetitive (in admissions) private colleges.

As one might expect, the syllogism is kicking in, and the faculty has come up with an idea to address their wealth problem.

The first proposal is designed to reduce the influence of wealth in undergraduate admission and to increase the socioeconomic diversity of the undergraduate class. It urges university leaders “to devote resources to improving data collection by modifying Stanford’s application to require applicants to list those who advised or read their application, and to describe their relationship with those people.”

This presumes, of course, that applicants will comply with the requirement to name and shame, and out themselves, on their application. But what insight would this provide?

“Nearly 70 percent of students use some form of college admissions counseling, and while private college admissions counseling has become a booming and greatly controversial business, this percentage offers no clear correlation to wealth. The 2019 college admissions bribery scandal that led to Operation Varsity Blues provided only a partial glimpse into the bad behavior of the ultra-wealthy and their unqualified children. Clearly, not everyone is a monied abuser. Just as not every private college counselor is a high-end corporation that engages in dodgy tactics to boost the uncompetitive elite. In fact, many private counselors are small-business women,” she wrote.

Is it wrong to use whatever resources are available to provide a competitive edge? Or perhaps to be more precise, to not be left behind in the nuclear proliferation of college admissions gaming? What of the poor families who so deeply value education that they are willing to skip dinner so they can afford these classes and counselors? Are they now pigeonholed as the “ultra wealthy” for doing everything in their power to improve their children’s expectations?

“Why make students confess? The process will be messy and could undermine the very community of low-income students admissions hopes to identify. Under such a rule, the 130+ pro bono low-income students I helped from California would have to report they had a ‘private college counselor,’ or they simply wouldn’t mention it. Such a policy may change nothing except the willingness of applicants to tell the truth.”

But there’s a missing connection here that the Stanford faculty, geniuses as they no doubt believe themselves to be, ignores. So what? What do they plan to do with students who fess up to having used an admissions counselor? Do they get ten points off their SAT? Do they get a Scarlet Letter on their app? Or maybe the kid whose app bears no advisor’s name gets a +1, even though no one in admissions will ever know if they told the truth or what this contributes to their ability to perform college-level work.

So their essay kinda sucks but they didn’t try to game the system? Maybe that means they aren’t really up to the task, and maybe that means they didn’t value education enough to do everything possible to enhance their chances to get into college. Or, as the brilliant faculty at Stanford assumes, maybe that means they’re poor. And while class diversity might be the sort of thing that warms their woke hearts, being poor does not necessarily make them qualified to go to Stanford.

It’s really a shame that this is an issue at all. Had no cottage industry arisen to get our little darlings into college, we would likely be far better off and certainly saved some squandered money. But there’s no putting the genie back in that bottle. Is the solution to discount the efforts of students and parents who do everything they can to enhance their chance of admission in the quest for that poor but brilliant student who just needs a chance? Perhaps, but if that’s the goal, is requiring students to confess hardly seems like the way to find her, and a good way to create another game that will do more harm than good.