I’m awkward. Stop me on the street, and you will hear a discombobulated string of random words. Catch me while I’m drunk, and you might be able to wring a decent conversation out of me about the merits of Bruce Springsteen, but only on a good day. Most of the time, an army of linguists couldn’t tell you where my sentences begin and end.
Thank goodness, then, that my acceptance to this university didn’t depend on my charisma or personality. Unfortunately, awkward bookworms like myself could very well face more rejection from colleges in the future if the latest addition to holistic undergraduate applications catches on.
Michigan State University will soon give its undergraduate applicants the option of submitting a personal statement in the form of a video, as a supplement to the traditional written essay. The content of the video will be the same as a typical personal statement. The student will sell himself or herself to the college admissions office to the best of his or her ability, offering skills and enthusiasm in exchange for the opportunity to lose a large pile of money and gain a college education. But in this case, the student will do so verbally while flashing a huge smile at the camera, instead of typographically with the boring ol’ written word.
MSU’s newest addition to its undergraduate holistic admissions family could be useful in some cases. International students or those with a natural handicap might express themselves better while speaking rather than writing. In most cases, though, a video personal statement reveals no measure of college aptitude that isn’t already shown in a written essay. Worse, a video could cause other completely irrelevant factors to bleed into the holistic admissions process.
Since the content of the written and visual personal statements are largely the same, the main difference between the two is the skills needed to communicate. One uses writing and reasoning skills, the other uses oral skills with a healthy dose of personality and charisma. This latter set of skills has no place in determining a qualified undergraduate student at a public university. Sure, talking to people is probably a more useful skill in life, and can take you further than writing can in jobs and relationships and so on. But oral speech and interpersonal skills are not the primary concern of a university — writing and reasoning skills are. Every discipline on campus emphasizes these skills — essays in the humanities, lab reports and the like in the sciences, business proposals in business. Speaking skills, on the other hand, are not as prevalent in a university. I haven’t heard of more than two departments that consistently grade a student on being an active and engaging speaker. Sure, discussion sections and seminars use something called the “participation grade,” but this is based mostly on your willingness to say something, anything, rather than the actual content of what you say, unlike essays.
Of course, many universities consider more than skills that help you succeed in the classroom, like writing. Many also want to know how you will contribute to the off-campus life, if your grades aren’t that hot. Will you start a student organization? Book a kickass band (read: not O.A.R.) to play on campus? Write for the student paper (sure, why not)? Happily, many universities already have ways to look at how active you are out of the classroom. They look at your extracurricular activities in high school or the actual content of your personal statement. The ability to speak well is by itself a very poor indicator in comparison.
Ultimately, MSU veers dangerously close to unconsciously considering factors like charisma and personal appearance in their holistic admissions. Holistic admissions, while useful in determining how a student can contribute to a university, can be and have been easily abused to exclude the socially inept and draw in the unqualified but socially adept. Harvard began the entire policy of holistic admissions in the 1920s as an effort to keep Jews out of the school, a fact mentioned in sociologist Jerome Karabel’s book “The Chosen.” Jewish applicants consistently scored higher than average on test scores, but were seen by the administration as introverted, sickly and grade-grubbing. In response, Harvard began using other standards, such as “character,” that evolved into the holistic admissions process we have today with letters of recommendation, extracurricular activities and personal statements. The same thing happened at Ivy League schools in the 1950s. Admissions officers actively searched for qualities of athleticism and “manliness” over pansies and the effete with better grades, often writing comments such as “seems a tad frothy” or “short with big ears” on student applications.
Of course, nothing of this magnitude is going down at MSU. The danger is from unconscious bias, not some intentional social purging. But the very fact that holistic admissions can be abused so easily should inspire caution in any new addition to a college application that exposes attractive but totally irrelevant personal traits. The stiff, tongue-tied and butt-ugly of the world will thank you for it.
Jack Garigliano ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in history and English.
