--Jacques Steinberg
William R. Fitzsimmons, the longtime dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard College, has been soliciting — andanswering — select reader questions. In today’s installment, he discusses how the admissions committee weighs the essay portion of the application, and tracks admissions decisions long after the applicant in question has graduated Harvard.
Q.
I’m a senior applying to college this year, and I would never let my parents do anything like fill out my apps or write my essays for me. Yes, they’re paying for college, but it’s my transition into independence. I would be ashamed if my parents wrote an essay or did my work for me. It’s irresponsible, and probably fraudulent.
—PS
Q.
The sad fact is that students whose parents don’t help them with their applications are greatly handicapping themselves in the college admissions sweepstakes, at least at places like Harvard. They’ll be competing against other students whose applications, including the essays, have been exquisitely polished by parents, college guidance counselors at school, private college guidance counselors, and even essay editing services.
—ALB
Q.
I appreciate that parents want to help their children get into school. When I applied to colleges, my mom proofread my essays and made suggestions, but left it up to me to make the changes I was comfortable with. (Everyone needs an outside proofreader - something my students seem to forget.) That said, she didn’t write my essays.
—KF
A.
Readers have inquired about application essays, and it is clear from ALB that many are well informed about the complexities surrounding authorship. Naturally we hope students (and their families) will approach the essays and all other aspects of the college admissions process with integrity.
We are aware that there are students working with adults as early as middle school strategizing about the topic for the essay, devising experiences they think might impress college admissions committees —and spending a year or more polishing their essays with inappropriate levels of help. There are those who plagiarize some of the more famous essays in the various “essay” publications or do so from the Internet—or buy essays or ghost writers on the Internet. And so on…
And yet there are those who do the right thing as KF did, PS will do — and as most of our applicants have done over the years.
We are part of the Common Application and Universal Application groups, which offer suggestions but allow free choice on essay topics. We read many wonderful essays each year, and we often project essays on our large screen so the entire Admissions Committee can read them. If the essay is truly unusual, we may ask a faculty committee member to evaluate it or other writing such as short stories or poetry.
We evaluate essays in the context of students’ transcripts, comments from teacher recommendations, any academic accomplishments that indicate unusual promise, or even by examining how the application essays compare to the essays on the SAT or ACT writing exam.
We look for, as Phil Smith (former dean of admissions at Williams) put it many years ago, internal consistency.
Writing a great essay cannot lead to admission if the rest of the application is not at the same level. What students achieve on a day-to-day basis during high school is far more compelling. But the essay provides an opportunity for students to tell colleges about something that is important to them, perhaps something that will not be found in other parts of the application.
One of the great clichés of college admissions is the exhortation that students find their own voices in the essay (and interviews)—and “be themselves.” It’s a cliché because it’s good advice.
Many publications and Internet sites display essays that purportedly led to admission. But cause and effect in college admissions is always difficult to ascertain, and often such sources tend to encourage students to write something that will be noticed — to get the proverbial 15 minutes of fame — rather than focusing on substance and on what is important to them. Occasionally students end up displaying bad judgment by reaching too far, or less harmfully, missing an opportunity to help admissions committees get to know them better.
So we hope students follow the instructions of KF and PS, knowing that there is no “right answer” on an essay and that it is only one piece of the application. Then they can get on with the rest of the senior year, making the most of the opportunities it provides for personal and academic growth — and let the college admissions process take care of itself.
Q.
I’ve read that nursery school admissions directors become very skilled at their jobs because they follow the students they’ve selected throughout their career at the school. How do college admission directors manage to follow the careers of the selected students other than in a statistical way (which may be a good way to measure academic success but may not take into account the other factors that went into the decision)?
—Marian
A.
Marian may be surprised to learn that we follow our students’ progress much longer than nursery school admissions directors. Having kept in touch with a Harvard friend from the Class of 1923 who just passed away at age 107, I can report that we are always interested to learn about what happens to our students after we admit them.
Our researchers are helpful in enabling us to follow our graduates over time. We have in the past studied the effect of high school admissions data and subsequent experiences at Harvard on alumni/ae who were 10, 20, and 30 years out of Harvard. “Success” is a difficult concept to measure, especially with self-reported data, but the results have been reassuring. Our studies showed that alumni/ae were generally happy and were prospering in all the conventional ways.
The positive results are not surprising given how outstanding the students were even before coming to Harvard. However, it was clear that many alumni/ae believed Harvard had a significant “value-added” effect, and we trust the synergy of bringing such undergraduates together with eminent faculty in state-of-the-art academic facilities works in many salutary ways, some of which are hard to measure.
We in the admissions office are also in constant contact with the 10,000 alumni/ae volunteers who assist us in the admissions process by recruiting and interviewing candidates each year. In addition, we see alumni/ae reports each year from the class reunion office.
We have many ways of assessing our work while students are here in Cambridge:
1. There are wonderful researchers in our office and in other parts of Harvard who provide studies of students’ experiences during their undergraduate years. While academic success is of obvious interest, as Marian notes, we are concerned about students’ experiences in every facet of their lives. While our graduation rates are not a concern, given the fact that our 96 to 98 percent rate is always at or near the top of the nation’s colleges, we always want to know how we can make Harvard better for our undergraduates.
Recent studies have led to major changes in financial aid (as I wrote previously, we no longer require students to take out loans; parents with incomes less than $60,000 pay nothing, and those under $180,000 can normally expect to pay only 10 percent or less of family income); a greatly enhanced and expanded advising program; an expansion of our freshman seminar program (classes of 12 or fewer students) from 30 to 130 seminars to provide immediate contact with professors; improved study abroad opportunities, and a newly initiated program of greatly enhanced offerings in the arts.
2. Our office administers financial aid as well as admissions, so we have constant contact with many undergraduates about their aid. About 60 percent of students receive grant aid and 70 percent receive some form of aid. We also run the student employment office and interact with additional students who are not on financial aid but seek one of our many paid research positions, mentorships, and other opportunities that provide work experiences of various kinds.
3. Many of our staff are also advisers, and some live in the freshman dorms as resident advisers.
The feedback we receive about our admissions and financial aid decisions is thus multifaceted and constant. And as the results from our professors’ work in the life sciences reach the public through new treatments and preventive medical advances, there will be even more centenarians for us to track in the future.
