The U.S. Supreme Court has decreed that colleges must ignore race in their admissions decisions. However, the court did not say that students have to ignore race in their applications.
“Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion.
“He kind of gave it a green light,” said Aya Waller-Bey, a former college admissions officer and now a University of Michigan doctoral candidate, in a telephone interview. The risk now is that Black students will feel race is all they can write about, said Waller-Bey, who studies what she calls trauma narratives in college essays.
Her research found that Black students are often expected to write about their pain in essays. From her work in admissions and in admissions consulting, Waller-Bey has observed that white students often write about their passions. Black students disclose their trauma and hardships in their essays, while other students rhapsodize about mission trips to Mexico or fly-fishing with granddad.
Students have always sweated over their college essays, which are typically more consequential in applications to highly selective schools than to large public campuses or less selective schools. According to the National Association for College Admission Counseling, about 23% of colleges rate personal essays of “considerable importance” in their admissions decisions.
Counselors and parents extol teens to be their authentic selves, but not so authentic that they alienate admissions officers. As a result, affluent white kids often seek to play down historic advantages. Asian American teens strive to avoid the model minority stereotype of being hyperfocused on grades and achievement. And Black students delve into race and racism in their lives.
Credit: erin nae
Credit: erin nae
As a high-achieving Black student from Detroit, Waller-Bey said she was urged to detail her struggles rather than her successes. “I encourage those who work with students to understand that students may want to write about their joy because we are more than our pain. When we are told that our pain is the most salient part of our identity, that is incredibly harmful and reductive,” she said.
Black students are often burdened with representing more than themselves when they apply to college. Their story is not just their own, as it is typically with white applicants. “When Jane applies, the story of Jane is Jane,” said Waller-Bey. “Black students are not only representing themselves; they are representing the whole. So even students of color whose parents are physicians can feel they must conform or flatten their lived experiences to fulfill a racial stereotype.”
Atlanta college essay coach Patti Ghezzi said teens describe being advised to highlight their struggles as being asked to “sell their pain.” If that’s not what the teens want to write about, Ghezzi said, “My advice is then don’t do that. For this year, my plan is to give the same advice to students I’ve always given, write something that tells colleges who you are in this moment and tell them in your own voice and your own words.”
“We are doing a terrible thing to students of color making them write about that trauma in a personal essay, saying if you want access to a highly selective institution, you have to tell everyone how hard you’d had it in life, how hard you had to suffer,” said David Mickey-Pabello, postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA and Harvard at an online seminar last week sponsored by the left-leaning think tank New America on the impact of the Supreme Court decision.
An emphasis on personal essays that encourage applicants to compete for admissions based on the difficulties overcome as a measure of character can create what has been called an Oppression Olympics. Applicants have to beat out other underrepresented students in a who-suffered-more contest to earn the gold, a spot at an elite college.
This can be humiliating at a personal level, and it can encourage a forced negative stereotyping of minority families and communities, said Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
Carnevale said that belief was shaped by his own experience in honing a personal saga to get into college. “I can testify, with a very weak statistical sample of one case,” he said, “that being encouraged to develop such stories, however true, encourages diffidence, mistrust, profound cynicism, anger, and resentment of authority on the part of those who have to develop the performance.”
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