As anxiety strikes those prospective college students across the country who have yet to craft their 500-word personal essays, Andrew Ferguson explores the topic for a Newsweek column.
Among his findings? The essay feeds into young people’s disturbingly high rates of self-absorption:
“The greatest strength you bring to this essay,” says the College Board’s how-to book, “is 17 years or so of familiarity with the topic: YOU. The form and style are very familiar, and best of all, you are the world-class expert on the subject of YOU … It has been the subject of your close scrutiny every morning since you were tall enough to see into the bathroom mirror.” The key word in the Common App prompts is “you.”
College admission contains the grandest American themes—status anxiety, parental piety, intellectual standards—and so it was only a matter of time before it became infected by the country’s culture of obsessive self-esteem, sometimes called narcissism. It is revealing that essay questions are called prompts, a word suggesting that all a healthy, red-blooded American high-schooler needs is a little nudge to start yapping about himself without pause till he hits the 500th word. Even essay questions ostensibly about something outside the self (describe a fictional character or solve a problem of geopolitics) invari-ably return to the favorite topic: what is its impact on YOU?
A system that places its highest value on the comfort with which a young person can expose—or pretend to expose—his inner self will be to the great advantage of such people. What this says either way about a student’s ability to perform academically is anybody’s guess.
