Storytelling, Essays, and the 2 Admissions Playing Fields

Last year, Paul Tough wrote a COVID-inflected afterword to The Inequality Machine: How College Divides Us, his thorough critique of higher education in the U.S. Tough concludes:

The crisis year of 2020...may have opened our eyes at last to how unusual our current system of higher education has become, and how destructive. It is a system constructed to keep society's winners on top and hold back everyone else. Change can't come soon enough.

In the world of college access, we used to talk about "leveling the playing field," but quite clearly there have long been two playing fields--one for the advantaged and one for everyone else. Each year, more and more students are forced into the field of the many, with fewer and fewer resources to go around.?

COVID opened my eyes to the role that admissions essays play in the larger inequalities built throughout the U.S. college system. As a recent Stanford study shows, even the topics students choose for their essays are often tied to their socioeconomic background.?

I published Write Out Loud in 2013 and launched Story2 in 2014 to demystify college admissions essays and make low cost essay services broadly available to public school students like myself. When I applied to college, I did everything myself--test prep, picking colleges, essays--from the end of our kitchen table, late into the night.?

Last year, test-optional admissions made the essays even more important and the Story2 team chose to support more students by making our online services free.

This year, with more time and advice from our colleagues at KIPP, the Student Leadership Network, and New Visions Public Schools, we revised our essay rubric and classroom curriculum, making them both trauma-informed and equity-based. And led by an extraordinary intern, Mimi Wilmerding, who had just been through the admissions process herself, we edited over 200 pages of content from our website, everything a student needs to understand how the essays work and how to use their own experiences to connect with colleges without revealing things that they really are not ready to reveal.?

We are seeking schools and community-based organizations to share our services with more students. Towards this end, we have forged partnerships with College Greenlight (part of EAB), California Colleges Guidance Initiative, Student Leadership Network, and College Possible.??

If you work for a school, school district, or college access organization and would like to share our StoryBuilder writing platform and College EssayBuilder? courses with your students for free, please sign up here.??

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When I worked at Rutgers, I spent two seasons as a faculty advisor to the Douglass College Admissions Committee, and I saw how essays worked in the actual admissions process. At a big state university, we only read a student's essay if there was something unusual in the rest of their folder, and we needed to make a decision whether or not to admit them. It was only the edge cases we even looked at; the easy decisions were made by others (often by an algorithm), and we approved them.?

According to a recent Inside Higher Education article, in the world of test optional admissions, students' essays still play this type of decisive role, helping admissions readers make sense of other parts of the student's record. What was most surprising to me about that article was that public universities increased their reliance on students' essays more than private ones during the first year of pervasive test-optional admissions. Why might that be?

I can imagine three reasons:?

• Public universities, in normal times, rely quite heavily on standardized tests to make the first cut not only for admissions, but also for merit-based scholarships. In the absence of that yardstick, essays took on more importance.
• Public universities may be less worried that the essays they are reading were written by someone other than the student because so many of the students who apply there are from families that cannot afford independent education consultants (IECs) to help students complete essays.
• It's also possible, reaching deeper into their well of candidates than usual last year due to more applicants without standardized test scores, admissions readers at public universities turned to essays more often to see how well students wrote.??

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I can no longer ignore the fact that nearly every aspect of college admissions, including personal essays, will be tilted in favor of those who are able to tilt it.?

And yet there is magic in storytelling, community building, and healing.?

One of the first students to use our free software and online courses back in 2015 is an amazing refugee from Iraq, Abdallah al-Obaidi, who attended Emory University and is about to begin Tufts University Medical School. He recently told his story at the UN for International Refugee Day.?

Every single one of us has a story only we can tell and a way only we can tell it. Here's a story I did not tell when I was applying to college, and just told in public last week. It's our choice what we want to reveal when and how. Most of our big life choices are imperfect, and also whole and complete.?

If you are a student figuring out which stories you want to tell in college admissions, you may access our free services here. If you are an educator and want to sign up all your students, your link is here. And, if you have other questions, or you see any other aspect of admission essays, or our approach to the essays, that we can improve, please let us know at [email protected].?

Carol Barash, PhD, is founder + CEO of Story2, a community of over a quarter million storytellers across 4 continents. A graduate of Yale, UVA, Princeton, Goldman Sachs 10KSB and Techstars, Carol created the Moments Method? and built Story2 to empower people to share bold, authentic stories in safe, intersectional communities. #AMA @carolbarash