The Old College Try

I originally wrote this essay for Ming Pao Weekly, where it appeared in November, 2014.

I am going to read some terrible essays this month. Of course, as a high school English teacher, that is my job. And, of course, I will also read a few brilliant ones. But what makes this month's terrible essays special is that they will all be written for one purpose: to get into an American university.

            While we hear a lot about the failings of America's schools, America remains home to most of the world's best universities, and this fall thousands of Hong Kong students will try to win a place in one of them. As the Wall Street Journal reported in September, their parents will do what they can to ensure their success; Hong Kong donates more money to American universities than any other foreign country.

            Applying to an American college can be a byzantine process. Of all its odd elements, the most opaque is the "college essay." In its most common form, this essay is a 650-word personal statement answering one of five very broad prompts. This year they include recounting an experience of failure and describing a place where you are "perfectly content." The goal of the essay is, as a guide from the College Board suggests, to provide "a clear sense of who the writer is and what he cares and thinks about."

            You do not have to be an analytical philosopher to see some troubling assumptions here, and this is the first reason students struggle with this task. Why does a university want to look into my soul? Don't you just need to know if I am a good student or not? If the university is judging me as a person, which aspect of my personality should I put forward? And, wait a second, how am I supposed to accomplish this act of soul bearing in 650 words? Virginia Woolf may have done that once or twice but this is hardly a reasonable goal for the average 17 year old.

            These difficulties are multiplied for Hong Kong applicants. How is someone raised here supposed to figure out which qualities an American college wants to see? That is a big cultural gap to navigate. For those without perfectly fluent English, the risks get even higher. Is one awkward adjective going to signal an English-as-a-Second-Language learner and doom the application to perdition? Given the tiny numbers of students admitted to top American schools, you can imagine the pressure created by these sorts of guessing games. You can almost hear Hong Kong students shouting, "Just look at my high school transcript! That will tell you what kind of student I am!"

            The second reason students struggle with the college essay has to do with the word "essay" itself. Hong Kong students are, in general, great at writing essays in the sense that we use that word today: using evidence and analysis to support a thesis. Unfortunately (and this is the part nobody tells you) that is not what "essay" means in this case. Here, essay is used in its much older, French form meaning "to attempt" or "to try." We still have a version of this word in English (to assay), though it is rarely used.

This version of the essay falls somewhere closer to what we today mean by "memoir": A writer takes some small observation or recollection from her own life and builds a philosophical idea upon it. It is not meant to be a closely reasoned argument, but rather an idea or theory the writer is trying out: hence "to assay." 

            These kinds of essays are still around. David Sedaris, who was in Hong Kong in September for Story Worthy Week, writes comic versions of them, and the best of stand up comedy gets close to them. Podcasts like This American Life and Radio Lab do audio versions of the essay. While the genre can still be found here and there, however, it is far from the poems, plays, and novels that form the vast majority of a high school student's literary education.

Thus the college essay asks students to write a thing they have probably never studied, like asking devoted classical violin students to write a country song on the final exam.  And, I think it is fair to say, the Hong Kong student is asked to write in a self-revelatory mode much closer to the American cultural mainstream than to our own.

This essay you are reading isn't the kind of essay that ends with a clear solution to that problem. But you have a better shot at success if you know what you are aiming for. So, America-bound students, download This American Life and double-check your adjectives. It won't get you into Harvard, but it might make for a better essay.