Affirmative action ruling changes role of college essays
trauma or hardship. It left her with the impression she had to write about her life's hardest moments to show how far she'd come. But she and some of her classmates wondered if their lives had been hard enough to catch the attention of admissions offices.
“For a lot of students, there's a feeling of, like, having to go through something so horrible to feel worthy of going to school, which is kind of sad,” said Amofa, the daughter of a hospital technician and an Uber driver.
This year's senior class is the first in decades to navigate college admissions without affirmative action. The Supreme Court upheld the practice in decisions going to the 1970s, but this court's conservative supermajority for an essay that would stand out for its positivity.
Merritt wrote about a summer camp where he started to feel more comfortable in his own skin. He described embracing his personality and defying his tendency to please others. The essay had humor — it centered on a water gun fight where he had victory in sight but, in a comedic twist, slipped and fell. But the essay also reflects on his feelings of not being “Black enough” and getting made fun of for listening to “white people music."
“I was like, ‘OK, I'm going to write this for me, and we're just going to see how it goes,'” he said. “It just felt real, and it felt like an honest story.”
The essay describes a breakthrough as he learned "to take ownership of myself and my future by sharing my true personality with the people I encounter . ... I realized that the first chapter of my own story had just been written.”
I necessarily wanted to share,” said Decker, whose top college choice is Tulane, in New Orleans, because of the region's diversity. “It felt like I just had to limit the truth I was sharing to what I feel like the world is expecting of me.”
Before the Supreme Court ruling, it seemed a given to Imani Laird that colleges would consider the ways that race had touched her life. But now, she felt like she had to spell it out.
As she started her essay, she reflected on how she had faced bias or felt overlooked as a Black student in predominantly white spaces.
There was the year in math class when the teacher kept calling her by the name of another Black student. There were the comments that she'd have an easier time getting into college because she was Black.
“I didn't have it easier because of my race,” said Laird, a senior at Newton South High School in the Boston suburbs who was accepted at Wellesley and Howard University, and is waiting to hear from several Ivy League colleges. “I had stuff I had to overcome.”
In her final essays, she wrote about her grandfather, who served in the military but was denied access to GI Bill benefits because of his race.
She described how discrimination fueled her ambition to excel and pursue a career in public policy.
“So, I never settled for mediocrity,” she wrote. “Regardless of the subject, my goal in class was not just to participate but to excel. Beyond academics, I wanted to excel while remembering what started this motivation in the first place.”