The College Essay Is Dead

[Jonathon Burnside]

Asa longtime admissions essay consultant and the founder of College Essay Advisors, anytime news is announced in the world of writing education or college admissions, I receive a flurry of text messages. So you can imagine the avalanche that crashed down when OpenAI announced the release of its most recent AI-powered text generator, ChatGPT.

To address the last and most frequently lobbed question first: No, I am not worried, not one bit. If there are any arenas that are safe from the circuit-driven claws of AI, they are the bastions of creativity, sincerity, and humanity, and these are essential ingredients in a successful college admissions essay.

While much of this is probably true, some of it may not be. Was your team truly tight-knit? Did you actually restock shelves or arrange displays? While these are easy details to swap in and out, the foundation of the story is built on a disconcertingly generic skeleton. Where are anecdotes about personal connections? How is this not the story of anyone who has ever worked in retail? By the time you adjust these details or feed the bot enough prompts to get the specifics right, you might as well have just written the essay from scratch, without crossing any ethical lines and with your own panache. Which brings us to my next point:

As I walked into my first job at a local clothing store, I had no idea how much it would shape my perspective on the world and ignite my passion for business. What began as a means to earn some extra cash during high school turned into an eye-opening experience that taught me invaluable skills and nurtured my aspirations for a future in entrepreneurship.

As I nervously stepped through the doors of a bustling local clothing store, little did I know that this seemingly mundane job would unlock a world of possibilities, sparking an insatiable curiosity for business within me.

I went to a training at the hospital in my first year of college. People swapped hospital stories while we waited to go inside. Broken wrists. Appendicitis. Kidney stones. I realized the last time I was inside a hospital was the day my mother died, nearly four years earlier.

My friend grabbed me, pulled me back into the elevator and took me outside, where I calmed down and cried. I spent the rest of the weekend in bed watching old romantic comedies my mom and I used to watch together: Maid in Manhattan, Father of the Bride: Part II.

Whether it was about an actual lack of resources or my own refusal to engage with them, that spring, I was finally ready to read stories about women like me. And then Cheryl Strayed came to speak at my school.

Autostraddle staff writer. Copy editor. Fledgling English muffin maker. Temporary turtle parent. Zine creator. Swings enthusiast. Political human who cares a lot about healthcare and queer anti-carceral feminisms. I asked my friend to help me write this bio and they said, "Good-natured. Friend. Earth tones." Another friend said, "Flannel babe. Vacuum lover. Kind." So. Find me on Twitter or my website.

Thank you for such a relatable story. I agree with the sentiment that have a parent that passed away at a young age (or two at 18 when it comes to my own personal story) is just a much part of ones identity as anything else is.

i was 8. 24 now. still not sure i understand it, but i do know it permeates every single part of my being and always will, just like you said. not sure what else to say besides this essay made me feel things. in the good/sad way, you know?

Thank you so much for writing this. My mother-in-law died after her second round with cancer five months ago. She was basically my mom after my parents rejected me after I came out as bi. Her doctors had told us the chemo had worked and she was fine; 24 hours later, she was gone. This personal essay makes so much sense to me and gives me a little bit of hope, too. Thank you for writing this, very much.

This hit me right in the gut and your writing brought me right there, crying with you. Thank you for sharing something so personal and so honest. So many people will feel less alone by reading this, more than will ever have the courage to comment, because you chose to write your truth. Thank you.

I really appreciate you writing this piece. My mom also died of cancer when I was sixteen, five years ago. I too have trouble finding other stories of women who lost their moms as teenagers. I hear about women whose moms died when they were adults and I mostly feel resentment and very little affinity. I hope that in time those feelings will subside.

One thing I have learned in my own experience with mother-loss is to let myself just be, whatever that means on a particular day, at a particular moment. Sometimes I need to let the permanent grief crack inside myself open up and release pent up feelings of loss and sadness. Sometimes I feel a need to do something fun that she and I would have done together and take the time to remember her. And sometimes I just need to be angry at the world for being so unfair.

The outpouring of love here means so much to me. Thank you everyone. I feel so humbled and grateful for those of you who have said I made you feel less alone, because your sharing your own stories makes me feel so much less alone, too.

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That just about everyone reading this is well-familiar with the 5-paragraph essay is a testament to why it needs to be retired, and by retired, I mean killed dead, double-tap zombie-style, lest it rise again.

The 5-paragraph essay is indeed a genre, but one that is entirely uncoupled from anything resembling meaningful work when it comes to developing a fully mature writing process. If writing is like exercise, the 5-paragraph essay is more Ab Belt than sit-up.

Mrs. Goldman was teaching us a number of different things, genre awareness, audience, structure and sequencing. None of it had anything to do with a standardized assessment. We were solving a writing-related problem. Most of all, we were absorbing the lesson that above all, writing is done for audiences.

The steady encroachment of standardized assessment on education and learning has only exacerbated the damage of the 5-paragraph essay. If the 5-paragraph essay was only one genre among many, we could safely contain the contagion, but as it is the easiest form to assess, it is now the monolith at the center of the English classroom.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that medical professionals shouldn\u2019t watch Grey\u2019s Anatomy and lawyers shouldn\u2019t watch Suits and therapists shouldn\u2019t watch Shrinking because no one wants to be in a room with a person screaming THAT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN at the screen. Which is why I, a college admissions counselor, should probably not have gotten as invested as I did in Never Have I Ever, a Netflix series about Devi Vishwakumar, a high school student who wants more than anything to get into Princeton.

Of course, the show is about more than that. It\u2019s about grief and rage and yearning and the weirdness of being a teenager. Devi\u2019s father collapses and dies at her ninth-grade orchestra concert in the opening episode, and for the next four seasons, Devi struggles with the aftermath, tries to lose her virginity, feuds with arch-rival Ben Gross, and butts heads with her mother. (Let\u2019s pause here briefly to gush over admire her mother, the iconic Dr. Nalini Vishwakumar. Nalini is a widow who, after the sudden loss of her husband, is tasked with raising an angry, grieving teen, keeping an eye on her drop-dead gorgeous niece Kamala, who is getting a PhD at Caltech and the attention of every red-blooded male in greater Southern California, and caring for her (also) widowed mother-in-law, all while running a busy dermatology practice. The woman is legend. Did I mention she is always impeccably turned out? Did I mention that I covet, desperately, her ability to combine murder eyes with withering politeness?

In an early episode called \u201C(Never Have I Ever) \u2026felt Super Indian,\u201D Devi meets with Ron Hansen-Battarchaya, a sought-after college counselor famous for the fact that 90 percent of his students get into Ivies. Ron tells Devi dismissively that she\u2019s just another hardworking Indian kid with good grades and high scores (which is mean but true\u2014ask any admissions officer wading through a sea of applicants the vast majority of whom have good grades and high scores). But then he remembers: she\u2019s the hardworking Indian kid with a tragically dead dad, and he\u2019s like, \u201CAha! Write about losing your dad and you\u2019re golden,\u201D and Devi, who hasn\u2019t even come close to making sense of the magnitude of her loss, fires back, \u201CI don\u2019t need some washed-up white dude who leases a Tesla telling me what makes me special.\u201D Snap!

So Devi submits an essay to Princeton that, as Admissions Officer Akshara tells her in a phone call (WOW, SERIOUSLY? NEVER HAVE I EVER HEARD OF SUCH A THING, BUT FINE, WHATEVER), is very well-written. Very academic. Remarkable for its frequent use of the word \u201Cdichotomy.\u201D In other words, it\u2019s an unremarkable, try-hard essay in which Devi fails to show who she really is (Akshara\u2019s words).

I\u2019ve worked as a college counselor for 18 years, and I\u2019m here to tell you that nothing strikes more terror in the heart of a young person than being asked to show who they really are, especially with so much at stake. I mean, who wants to be vulnerable and exposed? In a college essay, of all places? Like, is Devi supposed to share that she misses her dad and envies/loves her drop-dead gorgeous cousin and spent the first half of high school lusting after Paxton Hall-Yoshida (whose collegiate swim career she derailed, btw) and recently had a cringe-fest of a hook-up with her arch-rival, and doesn\u2019t know whether she\u2019s Indian or American or what, and has only recently begun to understand how hard and lonely it\u2019s been not just for her, but also for her mom? Of course we know all that because we\u2019ve been watching the show. But how is Devi supposed to tell that story and convince Akshara (who, it would appear, single-handedly runs Princeton\u2019s admission office) to let her in?

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