A changed college admissions process
After armative action ban, more emphasis is placed on college essay
As coaches from the Crossroads Foundation sat down with Pittsburgh area college-bound seniors this fall, they knew the sessions would look slightly different from past years.
This time around, more stress was placed on the college essay as a way for students to show their true selves to admissions officers, a key factor for many applicants after the U.S. Supreme Court over-ruled racebased admissions last year.
“We had put a lot more emphasis on the essay itself in light of the changes and had coached the scholars in responding to the essay as it being a way to introduce who they are, personally,” Esther Mellinger Stief, executive director of Crossroads, a Point Breeze-based college preparation program, said. “Which isn’t different than before the ruling, except that we know that the people on the other end are reading it differently because of the ruling.”
Thousands of Pittsburgh-area high school seniors this year were among the first group of college applicants to traverse a changed admissions process, with colleges and universities across the country placing a bigger emphasis on the personal essay as they responded to the Supreme Court decision and the focus on SAT scores continued to dwindle.
“Admissions offices are having to gather enough information about the applicant to try to discern the most competitive apps for an institution, for example, that has a high selection like you take a Berkeley or University of Michigan or UCLA,” said Jill Orcutt, global lead at the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. “Those institutions are having to determine ways to identify and select applicants that may have similar academic records. And so the essay is going to help differentiate those applicants.”
She offered several tips to high schoolers facing the changed admissions landscape including identifying their true selves in college essays and taking the time to explain how their experiences impacted their school careers. Ms. Orcutt also noted that students should not copy others when writing essays because colleges and universities look for plagiarism.
Changes to the application process come as several schools have altered requirements around SAT or ACT scores for admissions, with many shifting to test-optional or test-blind policies. There are currently 2,000 colleges and universities with those policies, according to FairTest, including many in the Pittsburgh region such as Carlow, Chatham and the University of Pittsburgh.
The Supreme Court in June barred colleges and universities from considering prospective students’ race in admissions.
The ruling does permit schools to still consider how race has impacted an applicant’s life, but all students “must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote at the time. That means that students can choose to write about “how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise,” Justice Roberts wrote.
But the ruling quickly garnered pushback, with many suggesting that the number of Black and Latino students at elite colleges could decline if race is not considered in admissions.
Now, students are rethinking their college applications as they adjust to the new requirements.
Marcus Hart, a 17-year-old senior at Seton LaSalle Catholic High School in Mt. Lebanon, said he mainly applied to historically Black universities and colleges. He said he considered applying to predominantly white institutions, but “I probably wouldn’t get into them especially if they have a low amount of minorities” following the ruling.
While he changed which colleges he applied to, Marcus, who is African American, said he kept with his original essay idea, which talks about his experiences with race and growing up queer.
But he called the experience of applying to colleges this year “disheartening.”
“Being a senior, it’s when you’re thinking about colleges and stuff and actually talking about it with your teachers and your friends,” Marcus said.
But, he said, those discussions took place with primarily white students who applied to colleges with few students of color.
“Not to say of course they’re going to get in, but of course they were going to get in,” Marcus said. “It was just a little bit, I want to say unfair, but at the same time there’s not much I can do about it.”
At Oakland Catholic High School, a Crossroads scholar said she changed her essay concept in response to the ruling. The senior, who declined to provide her name, originally planned to write about her relationship with her mother and her passion for traveling.
But the essay submitted to colleges and universities was drastically different. Rather than talking about her passions, she felt she had to discuss her experiences as a Black teenager because she couldn’t just click a button identifying her race.
“All I could focus on was how to explain that I was Black and I think that, you know, just being a Black woman in today’s society, you don’t want to explain that,” the senior said. “So it was just me pulling different things from my experience and incorporating them within my personal statement to try to get off to the point like yeah, I’m Black, I’m a minority, here are all my attributes, accept me. It was just an extra step.”
At Crossroads, students are now waiting to hear back from colleges and universities they applied to. Once those results are in, Ms. Stief said, Crossroads officials will be able to gauge how to best guide students going through the application process next year.
“That was kind of the response to the ruling that came down,” Ms. Stief said of steps taken by Crossroads this year. “This has been the first year, so we’ll see going into next year whether that in fact was the case, whether there are other things that we need to support scholars.”
Changes to the application process come as several schools have altered requirements around SAT or ACT scores for admissions, with many shifting to test-optional or test-blind policies. There are currently 2,000 colleges and universities with those policies, according to FairTest, including many in the Pittsburgh region such as Carlow, Chatham and the University of Pittsburgh.