Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
A recent survey of college professors by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that nearly 90% thought that the students they teach were not very well prepared in reading, doing research and academic writing by their high schools.
At the same time, many college admissions officers ask students for 500-word “personal statements,” which have become known as “college essays,” and many high school English department spend a lot of their writing instruction on this sort of effort.
History departments and English departments are assigning fewer and fewer term papers, so it is not surprising that lots of students are arriving in college not knowing how to do research or write academic papers.
Why is it that college admissions officers and college professors seem to be working at cross purposes when it comes to student writing? College professors want students to be able to write serious research papers when they are assigned in their history, economics, political science, etc., classes, but that is not the message that is going out to high school applicants from the college admissions offices.
Most of the attention, if not all, in the college counseling offices at the secondary level is on what it will take to gain students admission to colleges, not on whether, for example, they have the academic knowledge and skills to graduate from college. That is someone else’s concern. Recently the Gates Foundation has taken up the challenge of trying to find out why students drop out of community colleges in such large numbers.

But in the college admissions world, at the Higher and Lower Education levels, the attention, when it comes to writing, is on the short personal statement to accompany the application. There are several reasons for such a dumbed-down requirement. Admissions officers are too busy, for the most part, to read academic papers by students, and they like to have some personal information by the student to give them a more personal feeling for the applicant. The fact that there is a huge industry of “personal essay” coaches and tutors doesn’t seem to give them pause.
With this requirement in place, it becomes the task of the English Department at the high school level to teach students even more about how to write about themselves in 500 words or less. Such writing requires no reading or research of course, which makes it a lot easier (and more dumbed-down).
Meanwhile, students who receive the International Baccalaureate Diploma continue to meet the requirement for the Extended Essay of 4,000-5,000 words, and they, like those published in The Concord Review, arrive in college miles ahead of their “personal statement” peers who have no idea how to write a college term paper.
Part of the problem lies with the Higher Education Faculty, which almost never takes any part in the admissions process, but leaves the 500-word personal essay in place–but then they complain that the students they get can’t read, do research, or write very well.
As I have said many times, college coaches routinely take a personal interest in the athletic admissions requirements for the high school students they recruit for their teams, because they need to know if they can play or not, but college professors pay no attention at all, either general or personal, to the academic admissions requirements for the high school students they will see in their classes.
Thus the admissions department at the college and the college faculty work at cross purposes, as the admissions department pursues their interest in the short personal essay, while the college faculty members do nothing to encourage the sort of serious academic writing (and reading) they say they wish the students who come to them had done in high school.
Perhaps college professors might take another look at the reading and writing requirements put out by the admissions offices at their own colleges and universities.
They might even begin to influence the high schools to raise their standards for academic reading and writing, and, in the process, find that they have better-prepared students to take advantage of their teaching, and more students would actually have a chance to complete the work at the colleges to which they are admitted.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®