The conventions of college admission essays demand tales of unparalleled grit and overcoming adversity. Yet for many seventeen-year-olds, their time on Earth has been marked by only by an unbroken series of mundane and typical experiences. What to do?
“August is a perfect time to collect your notes, mine for memories, and pull together a draft of your Common App essay” —advice on the College Essay Advisors website.
“Start by identifying a quirky or challenging experience that reflects a key insight into your experience. Think about how this experience has shaped your perspective and character. Use humor and honesty to bring your story to life, and focus on how you have embraced your differences to become stronger and more resilient.” —“College Essays That Worked And How Yours Can, Too,” Forbes, June 26, 2024.
Dear Admissions Committee,
I write to you today with a sense of purpose, not in the hope that my application will be accepted, but with the sincere request that it be rejected. Yes, you read that correctly. I acknowledge that the conventions of college admissions essays demand tales of unparalleled grit and overcoming adversity. Regrettably, my seventeen years on Earth have been marked by an unbroken series of mundane and typical experiences. Accordingly, I seek your rejection as an opportunity to finally craft the transformative story I so desperately lack.
Let me begin with the Great C Catastrophe of my sophomore year. Unlike the tales of those who heroically conquer academic challenges, my encounter with a poor grade on a chemistry test was merely a brush with mediocrity. I discovered no hidden learning disability and overcame no personal hardship to improve my performance. I simply studied a bit harder, made an effort to understand stoichiometry a little better, and my grades improved. Hardly the stuff of legend.
Then there was the time I was cut from the soccer team. It wasn’t because of a debilitating injury or systemic bias. I’m simply not varsity material. My response wasn’t a Herculean effort in the gym or rising before dawn to put in miles of roadwork, determined to earn a roster spot the following year. I pivoted to the debate team, where I found modest success. Again, it’s a story that lacks the dramatic arc of overcoming insurmountable odds. Just a kid trying something new when one path didn’t pan out.
Finally, there was the high school musical debacle. I auditioned and didn’t get the lead, or any part at all. Accepting the judgment of the director, I joined the stage crew. It wasn’t a life-altering setback but rather a simple redirection of my interests. My role behind the scenes was fulfilling, yet it didn’t transform me into a beacon of resilience. It just made me realize I enjoyed the technical side of theater more than being in the spotlight.
These experiences, while formative in their own ways, fail to meet the epic standards set by modern college essays. They lack the punch, the narrative twist that makes readers’ jaws drop in awe. I am—it pains me to confess it—the product of a happy, stable home where my challenges were ordinary and my responses to them equally so.
Therefore, I implore you to reject my application. Let your rejection be the crucible through which I forge my story of overcoming adversity! Permit me the gut-wrenching experience of receiving that thin envelope or terse email! Grant me the sting of failure so that I might finally have something worth writing about!
Imagine, if you will, my future essay: “Rejected from my top choice, I faced a crossroads. With grit and determination, I transformed this rejection into a launching pad for my personal growth.” It would be a tale of resilience, of turning defeat into triumph—exactly the kind of narrative that captures the hearts and minds of admissions officers everywhere.
So, in closing, I request—nay, I demand—that you reject my application. Help me help myself by giving me the adversity I so sorely lack. Allow me the privilege of being turned down so that I can rise up, story-worthy and ready, for the next application cycle.
Thank you for considering my request. I eagerly await your rejection.
Sincerely,
[Your Name]
Just when I thought that book ban debates were so last year—gone the way of critical race theory or the Common Core, subsumed by the latest controversy over Title IX or Project 2025—it seems those grouchy conservatives are at it again. Kamala Harris condemned efforts to ban books in her speech to the American Federation of Teachers in July. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports on a slew of new legislation aimed at, you guessed it, banning books.
Except no one is trying to ban books. What the latest so-called “book banning” laws actually do is establish procedures so that schools can effectively handle complaints from parents and adjudicate competing claims as to the appropriateness of this or that book, hopefully resulting in more productive debates, not just partisan stalemates.
Per the Times, the law in South Carolina, for example, replaces the former “patchwork approach to challenging books and deciding whether they are appropriate” and instead establishes a formal portal through which parents and other community members can lodge complaints, as well as setting forth a system for review of those complaints and the books being challenged. In Idaho, the law delineates clear content such as “masturbation” or “sadomasochistic abuse” which would trigger a book’s removal.
These new laws are no more “bans” than a bonfire in my backyard is arson—only alike superficially. As Mark Twain famously observed, “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter.” There’s quite a difference between a federal government black-bagging dissidents for sharing censored content, a major seller such as Barnes and Noble refusing to carry a book, a public or school library choosing not to shelve a book, and a teacher replacing one with another on a curriculum. To call routine library and curricular curation a “ban” is really a rather large categorical error.
Only a few thousand books can fit into a school library, and a handful onto school curriculum. It is the duty of school personnel to select the best books with the most educative potential to include in those small selections and the duty of our lawmakers to establish clear expectations for the personnel in and policies guiding our public institutions. Thankfully, just the other week, I strolled past a “banned books” display at my local bookstore where I could bravely buy many of these supposedly censored titles for $29.95 each. It may be false advertising, but it sure is effective.
Were we to indeed call this standard act of curation a “ban,” then by definition almost every single book in existence is banned from school libraries and reading lists. Following this logic, if anything, American schools have long been busy “banning” conservative ideas. In an amusing little study, researchers at the Cato Institute scoured the library catalogs of 200 randomly selected public schools and found a preponderance of progressive books. For example, while 39 percent of public school libraries carried Stamped: Racism, Anti-Racism, and You, only one school carried its centrist/conservative counterpart, Woke Racism.
Authors and advocates lamenting these “book ban” laws would likely take umbrage if I tried to get socially conservative books such as Ryan T. Anderson’s What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense or When Harry Became Sally into school libraries or (God forbid) excerpts onto health curricula. Many in the media did in fact clutch their pearls when Louisiana and Oklahoma mandated the instruction of biblical stories. And they have every right to express their disfavor about and seek to change the actions and decisions of these public institutions.
I’m inclined to joke that “We are all book banners when it’s books we don’t like” but that belittles what is really an important debate. What should we teach our children? What books should we have them read—and not read? Who from history shall we valorize and who shun? Plenty of considerations from literary quality to variety of genre can and should be in consideration when debating these questions. And appropriateness is absolutely one such criteria. Even authors at left-wing publications such as Salon have acknowledged, in a moment of hilarious understatement, that it might be inadvisable to distribute to children books that depict “adult bodies having sex” and “detailed drawings of genitals.”
Contrary to the Times’s framing, these recent pieces of legislation represent a productive and common sense step forward in a debate that’s been stuck in the muck and mire of partisan arguments for several years now. Creating a formal process with preset criteria will provide ideological opponents a productive means to hash out their disagreements and reach a compromise, even if perfect consensus or agreement is impossible.
To understand the benefits of these bureaucratic processes, consider another. Democracy is many things with many benefits, but it is fundamentally a process to foster political action and legitimacy. I may dislike politicians B and Q but I accept their authority, however grudgingly, because they won the formal voting process. It’s a process to manage even insurmountable disagreements.
So too, these processes lend credence to a school’s decisions about books in libraries and on curricula. No school will ever satisfy every parent, but more will accept the decisions if they’re made through formal procedures established through law. Moreover, the criteria themselves become the focus of a more productive debate. Utah, Idaho, South Carolina, and Tennessee have saved their schools from making arbitrary decisions in response to either the passions of the loudest parents or the convictions of activist teachers.
So long as we have public schools, what we teach our children and the books that we include in curricula and school libraries will and should be a matter of public debate. These states have passed laws that should create more light and less heat in these arguments, and so should be celebrated for doing so, not subjected to New York Times hit pieces.
A recent article in the Boston Globe dug into a controversy that is dogging Massachusetts’s highly-regarded system of regional career and technical education (CTE) high schools. What makes the schools so unique is that they are highly selective. Only applicants with relatively high test scores and clean discipline records are admitted, but as the article explains, that leaves out a lot of kids who might benefit from the kinds of programs that they offer.
As far back as he can remember, Aaron Perkins knew he wanted to work with his hands. Childhood photos foreshadowed his ambitions: A tow-headed toddler wielding a toy chainsaw in one shot, the same tyke wearing floppy workman’s gloves in another. By age four, he’s on his back under a jacked-up toy tractor, absorbed in imaginary play.
It seemed inevitable, then, that Perkins—the great-grandson, grandson, and son of tradespeople—would attend his local vocational school when he reached the ninth grade.
But that never happened. He couldn’t get in.
The article highlights a dilemma that might be unusual in the CTE world but is common in public education writ large: When is it appropriate to limit admission—into a school, program, class, or curricular strand—to students with high test scores or similar attributes? This question arises most often in the context of gifted and talented and advanced education, especially with respect to the country’s most famous and academically selective public schools, such as Stuyvesant and Bronx Science in New York and Thomas Jefferson in Northern Virginia.
Some people feel strongly that public schools should never practice selective enrollment. After all, one of the principles of public education is supposed to be that schools are open to everyone.
Of course, that’s never actually been the case, even for “regular,” open-enrollment, and “neighborhood” schools, which are typically reserved for families living within designated attendance boundaries. America’s leafy suburbs, in particular, contain many of what we at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute once called “America’s private public schools.”
And yet, an absolutist position against selective-enrollment public schools carries its own problems. Not only would it lead to the demise of many excellent institutions that have long served their communities—and the nation—well, it would also mean eliminating opportunities for kids with niche needs.
Take the example of CTE centers. While the high standards of the Massachusetts schools are unusual, it’s common for CTE programs to screen out kids with disciplinary problems. If schools are going to take teens and teach them how to weld or offer apprenticeships in which adolescents are sent into corporate offices, they want to make sure that those young people have the maturity to handle the level of responsibility and function satisfactorily in the new setting.
And there’s little doubt that some educational benefit follows from grouping students of similar high achievement together, so they can all be challenged in ways they couldn’t be if their teachers also had to instruct lower-achieving peers at the same time. We don’t bat an eye, for example, when states create selective enrollment public universities. Indeed, flagship state universities—think University of Virginia, Ohio State University, or University of California, Berkeley—are typically celebrated, and for good reason. But they don’t pretend to serve everyone, even though they are “public.”
Yet obvious problems arise when programs like the Massachusetts CTE schools exclude kids who would likely succeed and benefit from them, which undoubtedly means thousands who today don’t “qualify.” So here are a few rules we might apply to make sure that selectivity and accessibility are balanced to the greatest extent possible.
Back in Massachusetts, building more terrific CTE programs clearly must be part of the solution. Some could continue to serve the relatively-high-achieving students that they do now while others aim for students with more average academic abilities but a yearning to launch a career. After all, it’s possible to believe that not every school has to serve every type of student, while also making sure that selectivity is not just another excuse for inequality.
Editor’s note: This was first published by Forbes.
Dual enrollment (DE) is a catch-all term for the means by which students earn college credit while still in high school (or middle school). But that singular term covers a number of pathways with varying structures and delivery models. Do those differences impact student outcomes? And can program structure help ensure quality? A new report sought to find out.
A trio of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin examined data from the Lone Star State, which leads the nation in DE participation. Specifically, they identified over 108,250 high school students who entered ninth grade at traditional districts in 2015 or 2016 and who took at least one DE course within four years. The analysis focuses solely on DE delivered by a community college, thereby excluding any four-year institutions, and does not include students attending charter schools or any district school that integrated early college curricula with high school coursework. Although this results in an incomplete picture of the DE landscape, the findings are numerous and interesting. Here are a handful of important nuggets:
As for student learning, taking courses too early, mixing college undergrads with high school DE students, and taking courses fully online are all negatively associated with course passage and final grade. For example, regression models show that taking a DE course in ninth, tenth, and eleventh grades are all negatively associated with course completion and course grades compared to waiting to take the same DE class in twelfth grade. This holds true for both academic and CTE courses. Interestingly, the researchers hypothesize that stronger course outcomes among high school seniors may be related to better programmatic support for them (from both their high school and college teachers/counselors) at that point in time—closer to actual college-going—than to issues of student readiness. However, lack of student preparation and readiness for college courses cannot be ruled out for any of the negative outcomes.
For academic DE courses, taking the course somewhere other than the student’s high school (like on a college campus) is negatively associated with passing the course and with their final grade. For students in CTE DE courses, taking the course at the college rather than at the high school is also negatively correlated with final grade, but taking the CTE course at another location—not the high school or a college—positively predicts both course passage and final grade.
Having a college instructor rather than a high school teacher is generally associated with a lower probability of passing the course and a lower final grade. Students in academic course sections with full-time NTT instructors experienced a 1.6-percentage-point decrease in their probability of passing the course and a 0.04-unit decrease in final grade, compared with students in sections with high school teachers. The only exception is that, for academic courses, taking DE with a part-time NTT faculty member instead of a high school teacher is positively associated with course grade, although it negatively predicts passing the course.
As to future college-going, passing a DE course is associated with an 11.9-percentage-point increase in the probability of a student enrolling in any Texas postsecondary institution after high school for students taking academic DE courses, and a 10.0-percentage-point increase for those taking CTE DE courses. Academic DE students enrolling in college tend to opt for four-year institutions, while their CTE counterparts tend to opt for community colleges. Taking DE courses early in high school (before 12th grade) is negatively correlated with enrolling in any Texas college, but the relationship is only significant for CTE DE students.
Limitations of the research include the absence of charter school students and early-college high school students—to say nothing of four-year colleges—as well as a focus on final grades and course passage to the exclusion of all other possible measures of quality. There is some analysis of differentiation of outcomes per various instructor types, but no data to indicate whether DE provided at high schools by high school teachers might have lower standards than DE courses taken on college campuses and taught by professors. More research is needed to get the true picture of the value of DE in all its forms. But some takeaways might be worth the attention of high schools and postsecondary institutions: Students appear to need a lot of support to excel in tough classes, class location and teachers can impact outcomes, and that online-only classes are not the ideal means for launching most high schoolers successfully into the college world, even if they do expand DE access.
SOURCE: Wonsun Ryu, Lauren Schudde, and Kimberly Pack-Cosme, “Dually Noted: Examining the Implications of Dual Enrollment Course Structure for Students’ Course and College Enrollment Outcomes,” American Educational Research Journal (July 2024).
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Othiniel Mahone, the principal at GEO Academies 21st Century School in Gary, Indiana, joins Mike and David to discuss effective strategies for implementing and enforcing an “away for the day” school cellphone policy. Then, on the Research Minute, Adam reports on a study about the impact of middle school principals on various long-term outcomes for students.
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