An admissions case study from the WSJ, part 3
We’re examining a Wall Street Journal article about a young woman who applied to a lot of very selective colleges and didn’t get into most of them. You can read the previous parts here and here.
Let’s look at her application.
The article explains:
“During her sophomore year, joint pain and depression exacerbated her anxiety. She enrolled in a two-month, outpatient mental-health program that limited her academic work to two hours a day.”
And later:
“Ms. [redacted] wrote in the applications about her history of depression and anxiety to explain the two B’s she earned during her sophomore year.”
I think that essay choice was a mistake. Of course, I’m not criticizing her (or her parents) for her mental health struggles or efforts to address them. But she shouldn’t have talked about that in her essays, in my view.
Why? Colleges want to admit kids who will graduate. They don’t want to make a bet on a kid who could wash out. An essay about depression and anxiety prompts an admission officer to think, “this kid might not make it here.”
Here’s a snippet from MIT’s admirably candid admissions blog, with emphasis added:
“…our research shows students also need to do well in high school and have a strong match for MIT, including the resilience to rebound from its challenges, and the initiative to make use of its resources.”
Why do colleges care about graduation? Because the US News and World Report rankings reward graduation rates fairly heavily and because if a kid washes out, the tuition checks stop coming.
What could she have written about instead? It makes sense to explain the anomalous grades, but how to do it without raising a red flag? I would have suggested she focus on the joint pain and on her determination during physical therapy and emphasize that it was all healed.
What else?
She said she wanted to study business, which made me wince. There is not an undergraduate business major at the likes of Stanford or Harvard. Did she mention her plan to major in businesses in her “why us” essays? If so, she made it look like she had not researched the schools. Colleges want admitted students to enroll. The failure to mention a major actually offered by a college doesn’t indicate that the applicant is entranced by the place.
I consider making “the list” a crucial step in the application process, and she did not choose as I would have counseled her to.
She applied to ASU, Brown, Cornell, Harvard, Northwestern, Penn, Rice, Stanford, UC Berkeley, USC, UT Austin, and Yale.
Yikes! I would call all these schools, except for ASU and UT Austin, reach schools. The law of large numbers doesn’t help you here, because they’re largely looking for the same things.
UT Austin was probably a target school, and ASU a safety. Why so few in those categories?
What would I have encouraged this student to do? It depends on when she, hypothetically, became my client. If it was in eighth grade, we could have chosen extracurriculars that fulfilled her interests and appealed to admission officers’ preferences. There’s that one extracurricular area we certainly would not have neglected.
We could have weighed carefully the tradeoffs associated with working part-time jobs. We could have encouraged her to pursue more specific academic interests.
Even if she came to me later, we could have crafted compelling essays, particularly the “why us?” ones, that avoided those major gaffes and made her stand out in the minds of overworked admissions readers. We could have primed her teachers to write her glowing letters of recommendation that were gestalt-consistent with the theme of her whole application.
But most importantly, we could have chosen a better list for her. We could have pared down the list of reach schools and opened up a spacious plain of colleges that would be delighted to have her and her high SAT scores. There are plenty of colleges where she could have enjoyed merit aid, special attention from professors in honors colleges, and no small bit of prestige to show off on her sweatshirts and her parents’ rear bumpers.
How can you gain these benefits for your kids? How can your family avoid this young woman’s mistakes?
The path with the lowest barriers to entry, in terms of both commitment and cost, is to sign up for my online seminars. I recommend you start with the ones about academics and extracurriculars.
If your schedule and budget permit, you can get more tailored advice for your kid’s goals and talents with a one-on-one session. They’re easy to schedule here.
As for this student, I hope she is enjoying college, and I commend her bravery in discussing painful topics candidly. She’s clearly smart (did you see those SAT scores?) and I have no doubt that she’ll be successful.
