College Essays and Recommendations Matter, Write?

Chainsaw killer schools were what we used to call colleges that made admission decisions purely based on students’ grades and test scores. Without recommendations or essays, these colleges would admit kids even if they were chainsaw killers, as long as they had the right numbers. Essays and recommendations as ways to colleges could see students’ characters, and go beyond statistics.

Can colleges prevent chainsaw killers from getting in? Do they really want to? Are they seriously considering the qualitative information in addition to the quantitative statistics? Are essays and recommendations just grade point and test score window dressing?

Students, parents, teachers, and counselors spend hours and dollars making sure that college application essays portray students in a positive light. The Common Application, which is used by 548 schools, requires one or two faculty recommendations and a counselor recommendation for each applicant as well. An application package is now a dossier on a child and goes far beyond grades and an ACT or SAT composite.

However, an article in the New Republic by Stanford Associate Professor Mitchell Stevens is titled, “Stop Obsessing Over Your College Essay – Admissions Officers Don’t”. Professor Stevens asserts that “Remarkably, all this scribbling has almost nothing to do with whether the student gets in.”  He goes on to state that, “personal essays rarely got even cursory attention from admissions officers. There were simply too many files to consider in too small a time frame, and too many other evaluative factors that mattered much more.” Stevens cites his experience of a year and a half observing, “in the admissions office of a top-tier liberal arts college” as evidence that the essay, “can be great marketing.” Is the essay merely a mirror? Are we writing to the wind – or ourselves?

As a high school English teacher, I read hundreds of essays each month. It is a time consuming and grueling process, even when I am not actively grading the work. How many more essays and recommendations do admissions officers have to read?

According to the New York Times, the University of Chicago received 30,369 applications in 2013. As a Common Application school, that means that each of these applicants sends them three recommendations and one essay. In addition, there are two supplemental essays. Students pay $75 to apply.

According to their website, the University of Chicago has thirty-three admissions counselors. That means that, if each of them read the same number of applications, they each read about 920 applications. Each one, remember, has three essays and three recommendations. If each counselor spends only two minutes on each of these six elements, then we are talking about just over 184 hours without looking at the rest of the application. If each application gets a second reader, then each counselor is now spending his or her two minutes per item for over 350 hours. And the University is making over two million dollars in application fees.

Professor Stevens’ school, Stanford, had even more students apply and similar requirements. Perhaps he has a point. Perhaps all this writing is more for the writers than the readers. If this is the case, if the essays and recommendations are far less important than many of us in high schools have been telling students, what does this mean? Should we spend less time on them? Should we ask colleges to reconsider requiring them? Would any student (or parent) believe us if we told them not to worry so much about these elements of the all-important college application?

If colleges and universities justify the essays and recommendations as a way to prevent chainsaw killers from being admitted, the epidemic of sexual violence on campuses would be evidence enough that these vehicles (or the minutes of reading) are not effective. According to the Washington Post, “Overall, there were more than 3,900 reports of forcible sex offenses on college campuses nationwide in 2012, up 50 percent over three years.” Clearly, character is not being evaluated well enough.

Are they all chainsaw killer schools? Are our students, teachers, and counselors whistling in the wind? I hope not. I have spoken to countless college admission counselors who earnestly tell me that they read these essays and recommendations. Do they all? Do they spend enough time? Does it matter enough?

While students might learn about themselves through the process of writing college essays, staff is not benefiting from writing recommendations. Writing recommendations is time away from students. Come clean, colleges. Be more transparent. Tell us about your real process and the relative worth of all this writing. If recommendations and essays are not major players in the admission decision, is it time to let them go? Maybe it is: this year, the Common Application is allowing schools to make the essay and the counselor recommendation optional.

Midsummer Blues

We are only about a week from my mid-summer. It is not the real middle of the summer and not the summer solstice, but the time when I have been away from school for the same amount of time as I have until school starts: the middle of summer break.

The middle is when the bell goes off: summer is now “ending” and school is “around the corner.” The back to school sales started immediately after July 4^th, and I have learned to ignore them. But they are like that gnat buzzing around my ear.

I have two opposite responses to midsummer. I want to savor summer. I want to do all the things that I have not yet done. Yet, the urge to start to prepare for school grows more powerful the second half of the summer. I have done school planning throughout the summer, but at this time, I become more critical of myself and I start to feel as though I haven’t done enough. I look at my list of school tasks and beat myself up. I have been wasting my summer! What have I done with this time?

School is not the only clock ticking in my head. I am hyper aware that my family and I are experiencing a “last.” This is most likely the last summer that my entire family will be home together over the summer. My daughter just finished college and will be starting graduate school. My son will be a senior in high school. Next summer, one will be at grad school far away, and the other will be getting ready to leave for college. After that, our paths diverge.

This doesn’t mean that we won’t have vacations and holidays together. However, the odds of having anything close to a summer like this again are very slim. And it is almost over!

So I am trying to make this summer move in slow motion. I want to savor being together and not anticipate being apart. Even the negotiations about who gets a car to drive are making me melancholy. I don’t want to do school work, but I know if I don’t, I will pay for it later. Maybe that is a price worth paying.

The rest of my family seems keenly aware of this landmark as well. My daughter is spending tons of time with her grandparents. They aren’t in the same place with my son as they are with my daughter – and that is okay. He doesn’t feel slighted, but I wonder if he’ll get a similar opportunity.

We aren’t sitting around staring at each other. Both of my children have jobs. My wife and I are busy doing all those things that we cannot get to during the school year. I am busy, and fighting that busyness.

Summer is about to wane. My family’s life is at a turning point, too. It is going to take more than a few hundred words here or a few months of summer for me to adapt to our new world. It is not that I am not ready for it; it is that I am a little scared it isn’t going to be as nice as the brief interlude of this wonderful summer.

Next year and next summer will not be like this –and it is half over. Time to stop whining and savor this super summer while it is here.