An excellent piece, Liza! I'm still on sabbatical from social media but I like to pop in every now and then and see what's going on. Old habits die hard, I guess. In any case, you are on point as always. Elite universities continue to shoot themselves in the foot and keep their own gradual decline going by butchering with college essay. Innovative and critical thinkers are essential for our society as today's creative thinkers are tomorrow's leaders, inventors, businessmen, lawyers, doctors, dentists, nurses, teachers, entrepreneurs, writers, poets, musicians, artists, and more! Where would be as a country without great leaders like George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Ronald Reagan, or Bill Clinton? Or businessmen like Walt Disney, Colonel Sanders, Dave Thomas, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Walton, Henry Ford, or Reginald Lewis?
Or inventors like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Johannes Gutenberg, Archimedes, James Watt, Antonie van Leewenhoek, or Dr. Jonas Salk? To create the George Washingtons, Steve Jobs and Thurgood Marshalls of tomorrow, our society desperately needs creative thinkers! To understand one's thoughts, you need to be a good writer which will help you put all the pieces together. But the college application process doesn't foster this. In the past, universities would use the college application process to weed out groups they didn't want at their university like Catholics, Jews and black people. They wanted to weed those folks out because they wanted white students with Protestant values only.
Now academia is doing something similar but instead of on the basis of religion or race, they are now doing so on the basis of political views and moral values. If those are anything other than liberal or leftist, REJECTED! You're not good enough for our university! Don't you know college is an exclusive club you have to have the right views to get into? They've tried to tone this down with wokeness starting to go out of fashion, but it still remains a problem to some extent. DEI should NOT be what elite universities are concerned about! What matters is how strong a thinker and writer a student is! Here would be what I'd propose, get rid of DEI or politically or morally discriminatory questions and ask them questions about their life and experiences in the world and how they've influenced them and about what they'd do in challenging situations. Adopt rigorous punctation and grammar standards for the essays. It should be made illegal to bring up whether explicitly or implicitly, someone's identity, political views or moral values. Screening students will now be against the law! The use of ChatGPT will be considered cheating and get that student instantly disqualified from admittance.
It's worth noting that the college essay teaches the prospective student nothing. It may or may not get them a place in an elite university, but there is no feedback mechanism from the school to tell the student what worked and did not work about their writing. They might improve if they are self-directed and the act of writing taught them something. But writing is sterile in the absence of feedback.
Colleges have become instruments to enforce conformity to left-wing ideals, replacing critical thinking skills with DEI - in other words, teaching students WHAT to think, not HOW to think
Remove the word ‘the’ and ‘essay’ and you’ve got the deeper truth.
An excellent piece, Liza! I'm still on sabbatical from social media but I like to pop in every now and then and see what's going on. Old habits die hard, I guess. In any case, you are on point as always. Elite universities continue to shoot themselves in the foot and keep their own gradual decline going by butchering with college essay. Innovative and critical thinkers are essential for our society as today's creative thinkers are tomorrow's leaders, inventors, businessmen, lawyers, doctors, dentists, nurses, teachers, entrepreneurs, writers, poets, musicians, artists, and more! Where would be as a country without great leaders like George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Ronald Reagan, or Bill Clinton? Or businessmen like Walt Disney, Colonel Sanders, Dave Thomas, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Walton, Henry Ford, or Reginald Lewis?
Or inventors like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Johannes Gutenberg, Archimedes, James Watt, Antonie van Leewenhoek, or Dr. Jonas Salk? To create the George Washingtons, Steve Jobs and Thurgood Marshalls of tomorrow, our society desperately needs creative thinkers! To understand one's thoughts, you need to be a good writer which will help you put all the pieces together. But the college application process doesn't foster this. In the past, universities would use the college application process to weed out groups they didn't want at their university like Catholics, Jews and black people. They wanted to weed those folks out because they wanted white students with Protestant values only.
Now academia is doing something similar but instead of on the basis of religion or race, they are now doing so on the basis of political views and moral values. If those are anything other than liberal or leftist, REJECTED! You're not good enough for our university! Don't you know college is an exclusive club you have to have the right views to get into? They've tried to tone this down with wokeness starting to go out of fashion, but it still remains a problem to some extent. DEI should NOT be what elite universities are concerned about! What matters is how strong a thinker and writer a student is! Here would be what I'd propose, get rid of DEI or politically or morally discriminatory questions and ask them questions about their life and experiences in the world and how they've influenced them and about what they'd do in challenging situations. Adopt rigorous punctation and grammar standards for the essays. It should be made illegal to bring up whether explicitly or implicitly, someone's identity, political views or moral values. Screening students will now be against the law! The use of ChatGPT will be considered cheating and get that student instantly disqualified from admittance.
It's worth noting that the college essay teaches the prospective student nothing. It may or may not get them a place in an elite university, but there is no feedback mechanism from the school to tell the student what worked and did not work about their writing. They might improve if they are self-directed and the act of writing taught them something. But writing is sterile in the absence of feedback.
Colleges have become instruments to enforce conformity to left-wing ideals, replacing critical thinking skills with DEI - in other words, teaching students WHAT to think, not HOW to think
This is exactly right. Thanknyou so much!