The college essay wrongly encourages students to cast themselves as victims, to exaggerate the adversity they’ve faced, and to turn genuinely upsetting experiences into the focal point of their self-understanding. The college essay, dear reader, should be banned and banished and burned to the ground.
It would be nice if you could put a warning in the instructions that you’re not looking for a sob story (unless, of course, you like having “misled by a shitty guidance counselor” as a weed-out criterion).
The goal of the instructions is to be vague so students feel like they can write about really anything without being penalized. We could have very specific criteria that would likely produce better essays on average, but the goal isn’t for us to receive good essays; again, it’s just to get an idea of who the student is. Otherwise in addition to “no sob stories,” we’d need “no sports essays, no writing about your parents, no religious trauma etc.” We don’t want to be dictating what students write.
It’s also not to say that every student writing about the circumstances they’ve gone through is a bad essay. I read an excellent one this year from a student who immigrated from the Dominican Republic and faced a lot of racism. They linked their experience to the broader cultural decay that America is experiencing though, and the real topic of the essay was the hypocrisy present throughout the messaging of the American hegemony; how we often preach diversity while actually hating it. They didn’t try to focus the essay on themselves and their circumstances, they just related what they experienced to a larger topic they were clearly passionate about.
If we had a big warning that said “No sob stories,” we might not have received that essay, and that student might not have received an award.