That is the question.
COVID impacted (and continues to impact) everyone on the planet to some extent. We have one hard and fast rule in the essay writing for application process: if anyone can say it, it isn't the right thing to say. So for the vast majority of us, we should NOT write about COVID in our applications (and no one should write about it in the essay itself). The Common App and Coalition App both have places dedicated for students to write about this topic if they need to. The question is, do they need to? To answer that question I have found several resources. Tulane University's blog always has amazing topics and this is no exception. Funny, but straight to the point, they give good examples of when and when not to write about this pandemic. But more importantly, they talk about how to write about it. The College Essay Guy also has a tremendous resource for exploring this. It is what he does, teaches you how to write. However, as much as I like Ethan's work, I am leaning toward being more conservative, and will be advising more along the lines of Tulane's advice for students.
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Despite the constant and public push for diversity, it remains blatantly clear that if you want to attend some of the most highly selective schools in the nation, you better be born under a sign, specifically, you better be born to a parent who went for undergraduate to the same institution. Legacies have an advantage, plain and simple. Perhaps a bit hypocritical, these advantages have grown proportionally with the increased “commitment” to diversity. For the Class of 2000, admit rates of legacies and athletes were four times higher than their peers. For the Class of 2017, the advantage was nine times.
Schools provide an advantage to athletes, and the sports in which elite colleges and universities excel are Varsity Blues “rich sports” i.e., water polo, rowing, sailing, squash and other sundry country club pursuits. As The Harvard Crimson reported recently, 43 percent of white admits to Harvard are legacies, athletes or children of faculty and donors; in the Class of 2022 alone, 36 percent are legacies. Additionally, money talks. Many private schools rely heavily on donors and/or alumni to fund their operations. It is no surprise that some school may give significant consideration to applicants of significant donors. The Varsity Blues scandal should be clear indication of the length people will go to buy their way in. And that is not to say that all financial gifts are illegal or shady - they aren't. However, how many of us can be 10 million dollar donors? But they are out there and they get seats. This is not the place to discuss the other factors that weigh into admissions decisions, namely underrepresented populations (ex., countries and states with few current students or applicants, race, gender, and sexual orientation diversity), choice of major, rewarding local applicants, etc. This post was originally started to make the point that students who have good grades, good test scores, and good extracurricular experiences - once the golden ticket to admission - are now struggling to be competitive at highly selective schools. However, things changed in the Spring of 2020, and now we are probably further away from understanding how decisions will be made than we have been in the last decade. With the addition of COVID-19 wrecking havoc on universities around the world, we expect to see more changes. With literally hundreds of schools in the US announcing that they would employ test optional polices (to some degree) for at least a year to come, it raises the question of how admissions will be considered. Will schools revolutionize their use of holistic admissions or will special categories like those above dominate admissions for years to come? |
AuthorOlder blog posts were for the UCLA Ext course "Using the Internet for College Counseling" Archives
February 2023
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