What to Write on Your College Essay
By David Dante Troutt
25 January 2024
Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last June in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the country’s 12th graders now applying to selective colleges face unprecedented angst—especially if they’re black.
You face an admissions process where your understanding of race and racism has been rejected, forbidden as a factor in considering you, on no less than constitutional grounds. Forget “affirmative action” that might deliberately correct for the persistent effects of longstanding racial exclusion from majority-white institutions. Forget societal discrimination—the Court already decided there is none that matters. Now, educational “diversity” is a barely lawful interest for schools to consider. Your race and all that comes with it is in unconstitutional territory.
Except on your personal essay.
At the end of a long decision remaking the anti-slavery roots of the 14th Amendment into what he believes is colorblind equality, Chief Justice Roberts added this aside: “[N]othing 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.”
So, whatever is to be made of your race is yours to make in your own words. But what would the Supreme Court find acceptable for you to say?
What an incredible question to have to consider. What you write is speech, and your speech is your own personhood.
Your generation speaks of personhood in identities more than ever. You bring a fluency for comprehensive yet elastic identity formation. Your identities are rich and sensitive, individualized and collective, socially constructed and not, yet often tied to immutable characteristics like biological race.
To will away diversity as if it were a disproven hypothesis, as the Court majority does, is to miss the fact that you’ve already embraced it with great pride. And so have universities, employers, the military and most kinds of institutions—because the affirmative inclusion of differences advances their missions. The differences matter.
The Court is simply not in harmony with the people of whom it speaks.
And who is the Court to regulate the expression of your personhood anyway?
The prohibition on race—purportedly based on equality—does not affect applicants equally. It is uniquely applicable to people who come from places/families/communities/races of more marginal resources. It picks sides. It does this in the name of merit.
Yet everyone knows that the whole idea of merit is inexorably tied up in access to unequal parental resources. If you don’t attend a segregated high school, then you’re familiar with the costly race to merit that your peers’ parents have been playing since birth. The best preschool or nannies, endless extracurriculars, homes in the best school districts or the price of the best private schools, $100 an hour tutors, $1500 a year sports league memberships, impressive trips abroad, $7000 summer college programs, test prep courses starting at $1000—a wealth of experiences to draw from in their essays.
This wealth of experiences is usually paid by wealthy parents, who also benefited from access to the best colleges.¹ The Court’s decision protects student applicants whom researchers show typically represent the 1 percent, at most the 10 percent, based on family wealth, parents’ education, alumni status, faculty and donors. In fact, Harvard researchers recently found that their university and nine other elite institutions offer multiple advantages to the richest applicants—even with the same SAT scores as others—based on non-academic factors, such as activities, being children of alumni or playing lacrosse.² Once enrolled, these students are three times as likely as others to get the best jobs at the highest incomes. And they will likely press to reproduce their advantage for their own children.
This cycling of privilege is the economic context for merit. It dramatically favors the very well off not just because they enjoy vastly superior resources. But also because they live in environments where resources, expectations and networks converge to give them the best scores—GPAs and standardized tests. Which most of them as well a majority of Supreme Court justices the regard as merit.
Yet this standard of merit comes from inequality and reproduces more inequality. Beyond wealth, it benefits mostly white (and Asian) applicants while harming significant numbers of black (and Latino) applicants.
The evidence stares back at us when we visit colleges or boardrooms or law firms. We know it by racially disparate debt burdens, lower homeownership rates and wealth gaps. Colorblindness cannot wish it away. College is the pipeline to more equal outcomes. College helps overcome discrimination. The better the college, the more pronounced the effect.
But these are not facts the Court will consider. “Diversity” as a justification for taking race into account did not include remedying racial inequality. Now, the only racial inequality this Supreme Court is concerned about is the possibility of denying opportunities to people who statistically already enjoy more of them. Racial inclusion somehow becomes racial exclusion. The idea of reverse racism really is racism in reverse: Inequality is equality and equality is inequality.
This comes from what legal scholar Jamal Greene refers to as America’s top-down, zero-sum form of constitutional decision making³ when unelected judges determine whose rights will win and whose will not.
Many of you already sensed this coming. Yours is a generation reacquainted with inequality. Born into the new world after 9/11, many of your families struggled with the financial instability of the Great Recession and the foreclosure crisis that followed. Someone you know has been evicted; someone you love may be homeless or severely rent burdened. Covid seemed to come especially for people like you in the beginning, and you lost the most schooling because of it. Like many videos you probably shouldn’t have to see, you counted the minutes until George Floyd died. You know what it’s like to have your accomplishments doubted simply because of your race.
Consider how many of these facts are in the background of your life stories. Your essay is a chance to talk about that life to people interested in how that life made you. And in the telling, you will revive the very truth the Court bent over backwards to deny.
So, what should you write on your college essay?
Whatever you want. If you wish to connect your own hardships to the struggles of family and ancestors, do it. If you decide to put your hobbies and accomplishments in the social context of a segregated life, do that. If you choose instead to thread your story with references to the distinctive culture that helped make you, go for it. Your race is not an excuse. It’s part of your story. Our classrooms need it. So does our country.
The question is, how will what you say be read? The choice lies with admissions officers and whether you can show them how your attributes contribute to their educational mission. Which begins with you being there, so please get back to writing.
2) https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/collegeadmissions/
3) https://www.amazon.com/How-Rights-Went-Wrong-Obsession/dp/1328518116