Most College Essays Are Not Very Good

I want to share with you a secret: Most college applications are not very good.

Even top students write poor essays. I know because I read and reviewed thousands as a UT-Austin undergraduate admissions counselor.

Consider Amelia Tate's McSweeny's satire piece with the headline: “We Are Unable to Offer You a Place at Yale Because Your Essay Read Like the Closing Narration of a Teen Rom-Com.”

I recently reread my own college essays that “got me into UT Liberal Arts Honors.” They were terrible, last-minute, shoddy efforts that were still good enough to “get me into honors.” I got into honors, not due to my B-plus grades and mediocre ACT score, but because I happened to be born at a time when spaces in prestigious programs were challenging but not unattainable. Like most admissions reviewers reading your files who wouldn't have gained admission to their alma mater in today's competitive landscape, I would be an average applicant to UT-Austin today.

Admitted students love to self-report their essays online as 8 or 9/10 on r/collegeresults, but these assessments are prone to the better-than-average fallacy. They have no standards for comparison except a few classmates or samples they read online. I can't blame them though because there is no frame of reference for what average looks like.

You only see the best samples in college guides because nobody would read “50 Good Enough But Not Amazing Essays for Harvard.” Essay examples like JHU's distort what the median essay looks like by hand-selecting only the most incredible responses, many of which almost certainly received professional assistance. Even those that didn't at least spent substantial amounts of time rewriting and editing.

There is a sub-genre for beating the college essay that clocks in at over 4,000 books because doing even a little bit better than mediocre can give you an edge.

In a study of Michigan’s early 2000s essay topic on diversity, the researchers went out of their way to stress just how bad the essays were.

“Many essays did not read as though anyone had even helped the applicants hone what they were trying to say, let alone reveal evidence of coaching. Pitfalls like vagueness, cliches, recaps of the resume, claims of ‘passion’ and lack of a clear point were extremely common.”

As “shotgunning” becomes more popular with more and more applicants applying to ten or twenty or more universities, there is an even steeper trade-off between essay quality and application quantity.

If most essays aren’t very good, why do they play such a prominent role?

Admissions gatekeepers mislead their applicants when they say essays are essential. They claim to want to “get to know” their applicants, ignoring that essays are almost always skimmed. Entire applications are usually read in less than ten minutes. Skimming applications is one reason among many that the holistic review process is broken and flawed.

However, one reason they can skim applications is that the essays are often similar, what Jeffrey Selingo calls "the sea of sameness." It's relatively rare, perhaps one in a hundred, to read a file that is genuinely unique and produces a reason for pause.

College essays are a monumental waste of time and human resources. It’s not unheard of for some applicants to submit upwards of fifty essays for their varied admissions, honors, and scholarship applications. Many students applying to a nationwide college list likely work anywhere from 100 to 200 hours, if not more, on their applications, not accounting for distractions. Even if you worked every day over the summer, it's unlikely you will finish all of your essays and applications before school starts.

And the phenomenon of so many essays isn’t recent. In a 1965 journal article, the education critic Fred Crossland makes an observation that could apply today:

“Millions of dollars are wasted on application fees….millions of man-hours are wasted on recruitment….millions of anxious student-hours are wasted on unnecessary and redundant testing and filling out of forms; that precious time should be spent in learning and experiencing the joys of intellectual growth.”

This topic arises from time to time here, and each time students wonder what an average college essay looks like, former and current admissions counselors agree that most of you don't write very well.

And I’m here to tell you that it’s not your fault.

The education system hasn’t trained you to write in the real world. Students aren’t very good storytellers. They can’t express their ambitions and dreams with reference to their lived experiences. They don’t know how to construct arguments, and college essays at the end of the day are arguments about why you’re deserving an admissions space.

When I used to review applications, I was tempted to blame the students for their unoriginal and boring essays, or their parents who wrote the essays for them. High school doesn’t teach you to write clearly, concisely, and from the first person. Instead, writing training is mixed up with literary analysis in your English Literature and Language classes, see this insightful essay by Paul Graham.

The problem with “finding your voice”

My least favorite piece of college essay advice is for students to find their voice. Students mistake “their voice” for glaring errors and bad habits. Their “voice” literally reads like daydreams that make little sense to anonymous readers. They have no idea how to recognize “voice” because they’re trained to write in the third person and in the passive voice.

I’ve filled over twenty-five hand-written journals, published two books, and written many millions of words while receiving intensive feedback over the years. Here are some of my journals.

And I’m just now starting to “find my voice.” My style continues changing depending on what I’m reading or where I am in the world. Prolific bestseller Stephen King wrote the book On Writing. He shares over and over that his style and voice continue to evolve. If his early drafts require intensive editing, so, too, do you and I need feedback.

No amount of reading essay example blog posts is a substitute for receiving intensive feedback from a qualified source.

Persuasive college essays require clarity, precision, word economy, and honesty. Consequently, the average college essay is a vague, rambling mess indistinguishable from one another, even from the best applicants.

It’s as Amelia Tate suggests “like the closing narration of a teenage rom-com.”

This essay is a variation on one that I have published in the past under a different username and that has been shared here from time to time