How the College Essay Declared War on Critical Thinking

Elite Universities Are Still Asking the Wrong Questions

This essay was originally written for The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

Every fall, I attempt to convince my yearly cohort of college-counseling students that writing is the single most important skill they will ever learn. Many of them stare at me in disbelief, insisting that the rise of generative AI has made the need to write nearly obsolete. Deep into college-application season, however, my students soon realize that the good writers among them will not only have an easier time cruising through their college essays but may also see better admissions results. After all, the college essay is meant—at least in theory—to identify innovative thinkers.

Despite what our schools may have students believe about the relative uselessness of writing, strong writers achieve disproportionate professional success because good writing is a proxy for creative thinking—and creative thinkers become society’s visionaries. Take Steve Jobs, who was a storyteller before he was a programmer, or Thurgood Marshall, who reshaped American law not only through legal mastery but through powerful rhetoric. These mavericks have gone down in history not necessarily for their technical proficiency but for their aptitude for creativity.

Writing is the best tool we have to showcase creative thought.

The act of writing allows the human brain not only to communicate existing ideas but also to generate new ones, with countless studies demonstrating the power of writing when it comes to shaping critical thinking.

A good writer is therefore a strong thinker—and this distinction transcends academic disciplines. In my counseling practice, for instance, I routinely observe smart STEM students producing more insightful essays than average humanities students, because good writing is not so much a measure of technical ability as it is a proxy for the capacity to express ideas. Because creative thinking is invaluable in any walk of life, writing ability remains the most important predictor not only of academic but also of professional success.

Such is the rationale behind the college-admissions essay, which helps colleges identify students who demonstrate a unique aptitude for critical thinking and, by extension, a potential for long-term success.

Or at least that should be the rationale. Even in the college essay’s earliest days, critical thinking was never the main criterion.

The American college-admissions essay was born in the early 1920s, when a growing demand for higher education prompted elite colleges such as Harvard and Yale to identify additional methods to screen incoming college freshmen. The first iteration of the college essay focused less on academic potential than on the nebulous designation of “fit.” In 1919, Columbia University—my alma mater—unveiled the first “modern” college application, requiring applicants to provide information on their religious values and other metrics that allowed admissions officers to evaluate applicants on the basis of not just intellectual potential but of ideological conformity. As a result, the college-essay process soon became a racist endeavor meant to weed out “undesirable” candidates of Jewish origin, on the grounds that these students would not be a good “fit” for an educational environment driven by Protestant values.

In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, however, with many universities forced to drop their racial quotas, the college essay evolved into a tool for admissions officers to gain a glimpse of applicants’ “backgrounds and perspectives.” Soon, the college essay became less about the discriminatory idea of “fit” and more about the ideas that students could bring to the intellectual table.

Around the same time, the revamped college essay shifted admissions practices towards a more holistic evaluative model that relied less on grades and test scores than on the applicant’s intellectual potential as a whole. In one sense, this model is still in use today: I have students with perfect GPAs and SAT scores who not only fail to secure admission to “elite” colleges but who are also destined to land in menial professional roles—not because they aren’t smart but because they have never learned to effectively express their ideas. In theory, the college essay should be an effective tool to separate “smart but dull” from “smart and interesting” students. Though many college-consulting professionals have expressed doubts about the viability of the college essay in the face of generative AI, so-called large language models will only ever fall into the category of “smart but dull,” giving truly visionary students a chance to shine by demonstrating their capacity for original thinking.

That is, if college admissions departments still cared about original thinking.

For a brief moment in time—the halcyon decades following the Civil Rights era—the college essay did indeed allow strong writers and thinkers to rise to the top of our society. In his book On Writing the College Application Essay, for instance, former Columbia admissions officer Harry Bauld wrote that the college essay “shows you at your alive and thinking best.” That was 1987. Today, colleges seem to be doing everything they can to move the college essay away from the model of “thinking” prowess towards the infamous doctrine of “fit.”

Sound familiar?

After decades of fighting against discriminatory admissions practices disguised as filters for “character” and “belonging,” our society has begun once again to evaluate college applicants on the basis of arbitrary values, reenvisioning the college-admissions process as a convoluted exercise in virtue-signaling.

Let’s take several colleges in North Carolina as examples.

Of the five most competitive colleges in North Carolina—Duke, Davidson, Wake Forest, UNC-Chapel Hill, and NC State—three ask the ubiquitous “fit” question, prompting students to identify their reasons for wishing to attend these universities in a short-answer statement. Duke explicitly uses the language of “values” in its prompt, suggesting that the university cares less about academic preparation than it does about the morals of each individual applicant. Share the wrong moral values—conservatism, religious traditionalism, or moral absolutism, among others—and risk facing a rejection letter in your inbox the coming spring.

The “fit” question is not the only way these colleges screen for values. UNC-Chapel Hill and Wake Forest both insist that students demonstrate their readiness to make contributions to their “community,” thereby favoring students with a natural bent towards communal rather than individualistic values. Wake Forest, in fact, has no reservations about framing its “community” prompt in terms of social justice:

Dr. Maya Angelou, renowned author, poet, civil-rights activist, and former Wake Forest University Reynolds Professor of American Studies, inspired others to celebrate their identities and to honor each person’s dignity. Choose one of Dr. Angelou’s powerful quotes. How does this quote relate to your lived experience or reflect how you plan to contribute to the Wake Forest community?

Similarly, Wake Forest asks students to identify their top-five favorite books. While this might seem an innocuous and even intellectually worthy question, there is no doubt that a student who includes Born a Crime by Trevor Noah will fare better in the admissions process than a student who dares to list Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

Perhaps the most egregious sin of the college-essay process is the way that its covert screening for “values” goes hand-in-hand with its conformity to the current political moment. Every year, colleges adjust their prompts to reflect the spirit of the times rather than focusing on students’ intellectual merits, and these amendments allow colleges, in turn, to virtue-signal to the rest of the world that they care more about arbitrary political movements than they do about the intellectual caliber of their students. Adapting to the rise of wokeness in 2014, for instance, Duke added the following college-essay prompt:

Duke University seeks a talented, engaged student body that embodies the wide range of human experience; we believe that the diversity of our students makes our community stronger. If you’d like to share a perspective you bring or experiences you’ve had to help us understand you better—perhaps related to a community you belong to, your sexual orientation or gender identity, or your family or cultural background—we encourage you to do so. Real people are reading your application, and we want to do our best to understand and appreciate the real people applying to Duke.

This year, however, with wokeness falling somewhat out of vogue—and despite Duke students’ defense of the “queer” essay prompt—the university scrambled to replace the “gender identity” statement with the following:

Meaningful dialogue often involves respectful disagreement. Provide an example of a difference of opinion you’ve had with someone you care about. What did you learn from it?

My gut reaction to the viewpoint-diversity essay, which overtook this year’s college-admissions process, was excitement: It seemed that colleges were finally moving away from screening for arbitrary values and more towards tolerance. The further we got into the college-admissions process, however, the more I grew skeptical of the prompt’s intentions. The college-essay process still largely denies intellectually curious students a chance to share their ideas in favor of pandering to the current political moment. Indeed, the “viewpoint diversity” prompt has become this year’s new “it” essay, with colleges largely looking to avoid censure from the Trump administration following 2024’s disastrous “tentifada” phenomenon. While the prompt may have been implemented with good intentions, the vast majority of my students chose to take the liberal position in their essays, not only virtue-signaling that they can “talk” to conservatives (a ludicrous concept to begin with) but also once again giving colleges the excuse to screen for viewpoint over intellectual merit.

While colleges can claim they don’t discriminate, the very act of asking about “fit,” “values,” and even “difference of opinion” on an application raises eyebrows, especially given what we know about historic discrimination on the basis of “fit.” After all, neither ideological conformity nor interest in community service correlate with long-term professional success—especially when the majority of students from elite universities will graduate to pursue individualistic roles in the private sector.

Good writers who refuse to outsource their thinking to ChatGPT will often emerge victorious in the college-admissions process. But they largely go against the tide of a system increasingly hostile to original thought. Forced to draft hackneyed essays about the virtue of doling out soup to undocumented migrants, these visionary thinkers have been effectively deprived of the opportunity to showcase their intellectual merit by admissions officers who police virtues at the expense of humanistic inquiry.

If colleges wish to remain institutions devoted to intellectual excellence rather than moral choreography, they must abandon their obsession with “fit” and return to the college essay’s original purpose: to identify students most capable of independent thought.

It is precisely those students who go on to shape ideas, build institutions, and sustain our free, pluralistic society.

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