Last spring, I interviewed for a job providing essay support with a company that works with high schoolers on their college applications. Services like this are expensive: According to a 2019 article in US News, comprehensive college consulting packages can range from $850 to $10,000. Because of the price point, these services are often reserved for students from economically privileged backgrounds. “These students are really at a disadvantage these days,” my interviewer confided. “What would you tell students who haven’t experienced trauma when working on their essays?”
I was immediately struck by the linking of privilege with disadvantage. I was uncomfortable with the one-for-one association of income bracket and adversity as if having money protected high schoolers from anything bad ever happening to them and that coming from a lower-income family automatically meant students were traumatized. Most of all, I was shocked by the emphasis being placed on trauma in college application counseling.
Trauma should not be a deciding factor in college admissions. Students should not need traumatic experiences in their past in order to be competitive applicants, nor should they feel forced to disclose anything that they may have gone through. Pain should not be the avenue through which students must represent themselves. And students who do not feel they have experienced much adversity or hardship should be grateful, not bitter, and write about any of the other things that make them who they are. But as the volume of applications that students send out continues to rise, applicants are desperate to stand out.
What do colleges actually hope to learn about a student through their essay? According to the CollegeBoard, they want “a unique perspective, strong writing, and an authentic voice.” Harvard Business Review says the Common App essay is “your chance to show schools who you are, what makes you tick, and why you stand out from the crowd.”
At its best, the college application is an opportunity for a student to go from being a set of data points to a human being. The essay can demonstrate a student’s writing ability, style, and flair. It can prompt a teenager to reflect on their values, on the moments and experiences in their lives that have shaped them, and on their understanding of their own selves. I am, primarily, a personal essayist. I believe deeply in the power of an essay to function as art and to reflect something much bigger than ourselves. I could even be convinced that a 650-word limit might be a productive constraint in essay writing. The personal essay could be good for students if students actually felt any topic was available to them, if they felt they really could write about their passion for pickleball or fan fiction instead of thinking that milking adversity could equal bonus points in their application file.
At its worst, college essays force high school students to search through their personal experiences for a trauma they think they can sell. Meanwhile, as former foster youth Emi Nietfeld wrote in Teen Vogue, young people who have faced immense adversity struggle to capture their experiences neatly in a few hundred words. When students compare themselves to their classmates, especially when applying for the kinds of colleges and universities that take a limited number of students from a specific high school, they are practicing ranking themselves against their peers in a form of trauma Olympics. They are not learning to be empathetic to the people around them or to recognize that they can never know the entirety of what people are carrying with them.
The Supreme Court's decision to overturn race-based affirmative action puts an even harsher burden on applicants' essays. Colleges can’t consider the systems of inequity that may affect students of color, but individual students can include their experience as a marginalized person in the essay. Many college admissions boards are still mostly white, and students of color may have to find ways to communicate their identity while also answering the essay prompts. This narrows what applicants think is worth writing about or what makes them worth receiving the education they dream of.
This summer I worked with a group of 16- to 18-year-olds in a creative writing class. For many of them, it was their first experience in a class like this. One afternoon, a student started writing about something they hadn’t thought about in years and ended up in tears over their laptop. We built a space where these students felt safe and supported to explore their trauma in writing and it often came out in incredibly moving 10- or 15-page essays. The projects were open-ended, so the story they needed to tell dictated how long the piece would be. Our students didn’t need to pretend their experiences had a neat conclusion. They could be honest. They could reflect and process, and then they could share a piece of writing with a community that cared about them.
The college essay allows for none of this when students feel required to write about adversity. Some students have already asked for a kinder application process, citing the damage the process as a whole does to their mental health. If students have trauma they need to work through, and if writing can help them do so, they should have space to safely, deeply, and thoroughly write about what they need to say without turning it into a self-sales pitch. The college essay should be a space for exploration and reflection where students can present what they care about and what makes them who they are.
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