Making an Art of the Sob Story

Interested in reading some good sob stories? Try sitting in the chair of an admissions officer on any of the University of California campuses.

There’s the essay written by an aspiring UC Berkeley student whose family home and possessions were turned to ashes by a wildfire--everything except her dad’s Berkeley class ring. Or the one from a UCLA hopeful whose grades dipped while she worried about her girlfriend’s drug problem.

And then there are the deaths of beloved grandfathers.

Hundreds of them.

“If you believe these essays, California is the most unhealthy state in the union,” said Rae Lee Siporin, UCLA’s director of undergraduate admissions. “There are more sick parents. There are more dying grandparents. There are more burned down houses and natural disasters than anywhere else in the world. That is what we hear about over and over again.”

But if UC officials are tired of these stories, they only have themselves to blame. They asked for them.

No longer able to consider race or gender in picking the freshman class, the officials are trying another approach to maintain diversity in their student body: “We are really looking for kids who have achieved something in the face of obstacles,” said UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl. “We just can’t take race into account as one of the obstacles.”

So as admissions officers tackle reading the 85,000 personal essays that poured in before the university system’s Nov. 30 application deadline, a common theme emerges among the applicants competing for limited seats: how they have faced adversity.

“The word is out on the streets,” said one college advisor, “that you have a better chance of getting into UCLA if your essay reads like a soap opera.”

To be sure, many of these “personal statements,” as UC officials call them, are sobering and true tales from teenagers coping with the gritty reality of the urban jungle.

Take Lupe Gonzalez of Los Angeles. She wrote about being punched and kicked by three “gangsta girls” when she was a high school freshman. Besides leaving her face “swollen, red and blue,” the beating forced her to transfer to another school--and set her on track for college.

Attending the university, she wrote, will help her shatter her family’s expectations that she is destined to “end up pregnant like my sister.”

Yet it’s not just inner-city youths writing about life’s challenges. At one civics class for high school seniors, the question of how many were applying to the University of California arose. A dozen hands shot up. How many wrote their essays about overcoming challenges? Nine hands.

And this was Beverly Hills High.

One student wrote about the loss of her mentor, a former teacher who had died. Another wrote about a friend who was killed in a car accident. A third wrote about how she was preoccupied helping a girlfriend who dipped too deeply into drugs. “My grades weren’t very good in the ninth grade,” she said, “so I thought I should try to explain it.”

About 40% of Beverly Hills High students are of Persian descent, and counseling director Vivian Saatjian-Green finds herself discouraging some from writing about “being refugees from Iran after the fall of the shah.

“We say, ‘Let’s move on, it’s been 20 years now. You weren’t even born when this happened.’ ”

Such gamesmanship, of course, has always been around for those brainy teenagers aspiring to the nation’s elite colleges.

Morton Owen Schapiro recalls the tragedy-laced essays he used to read at Williams College. “Ninety percent of them were about my grandfather died or my best friend killed himself or died in a car accident,” said Schapiro, now USC’s dean of letters, arts and sciences. “They were sad stories, but the same stories over and over.”

Yet gaining admission to one the nation’s elite universities is more competitive than ever and students know they need an edge.

UC Berkeley freshmen have an average SAT score of 1,307 (out of 1,600) and a mean grade-point average of 4.15--which is possible because UC grants five points on a four-point scale for an A in an Advanced Placement or honors course. The average SAT score of UCLA freshmen is 1,275, and the mean grade-point average is 4.13. Grades and test scores inch up every year.

So when Peter Butcher of Santa Barbara began the lonely task of filling out a UC application, it was quite natural for him to wish that his 3.9 grade-point average and 1,360 SAT score were just a tad better.

And it was during this rite of passage--a time marked by high anxiety and pitifully low self-esteem--that he had to tackle the most excruciating part: the essay.

Perhaps no other piece of writing carries such weight in determining one’s destiny. Living in a material world, teenagers are suddenly supposed to turn introspective and spill their guts on paper in a way that will sum up their accomplishments, demonstrate their maturity and perhaps even show a flair for writing--all in a couple of pages.

Peter wrote drafts and then tore them up. He hired a private education consultant, and they pored over drafts together. He finally settled on a topic that seemed to fit: his history of “dysgraphia,” a learning disorder.

That seemed more comfortable than the alternatives. For many years, UC applicants have picked from three topics: A) “Describe the qualities and accomplishments you would bring to the undergraduate student body”; B) “Describe one of your intellectual achievements”; and C) “Describe any unusual circumstances or challenges you have faced and discuss the ways you have responded.”

To Peter, answering the first two felt like bragging.

“It was easier to talk about the challenges you face than talking about how great you are,” he said. “It’s a matter of sounding egotistical. I’m not a person who does that.”

When Life Needs to Imitate Art

Tugging on the heart strings of college admissions officers comes naturally for many students.

They know these stories sell. After all, they are bombarded with them at the movies, on television and sports pages: The hero or heroine must surmount daunting hurdles--or suffer through a life-shattering event--before emerging as the champion or the queen of the ball.

In an example of art imitating life imitating art, the hip television writers on the hit show “Felicity” explored the trend of fudged tragedies. Felicity, the show’s namesake character who developed a crush on a boy and followed him to a New York university, secretly reads his application essay while working part-time for the university. He had written a three-hankie tale about his older brother, who died of brain cancer. The problem was, as she later discovers, he never had a brother.

Good fiction is not the only inspiration available for students who pine for a powerful tale to spice up their young and often uneventful lives. They can now purchase such “hardship” essays over the Internet.

Furthermore, a cottage industry of private educational consultants knows what subjects to plumb.

No obvious family tragedy or personal challenge? Not to worry. They urge the teenagers to dig deep into themselves and come up with a highly personal, awkward or downright embarrassing moment--the real-life stuff sure to catch the bleary eye of an admissions officer plowing through hundreds of personal essays.

One of these essays, cultivated by West Los Angeles educational consultant Vicky De Felice, ended up enshrined in a how-to book, “The Best College Admission Essays.” Its focus: a teenager’s nightly ritual of slathering himself with ointment to rid himself of “the dreaded zit.”

Besides catapulting the reader into the world of teenage angst, the essay had a message: “As you get older and take on a new face, you see that those things weren’t really life and death matters.”

Ada Horwich, a licensed clinical social worker in Beverly Hills, helps teenagers write their essays--a process she compares to psychotherapy: “They’re discovering who they are and trying to put it on paper.”

The predominant themes, she said, are often the same: overcoming obstacles.

As a counselor at North Hollywood High, Susan Bonoff said there is a simple reason that life’s challenges pop up as a common topic. Many of today’s students, she said, “carry a lot more baggage than students did when I was going to high school.”

She disagrees that students wear hardships on their shirt sleeves. In fact, she finds herself nudging low-income students to write about things that amplify their accomplishments: the student who retreats nightly to the garage to study because the family apartment is too chaotic; the student whose mother disappears for months at a time, leaving him in charge of his little brother.

“Some of these kids don’t even see it as a problem. They see it as reality,” Bonoff said.

In contrast, middle-class students struggle with the essay, she said. “They haven’t had any obstacles in their lives and feel that they are behind the 8 ball because they don’t have any reason why they haven’t done better.”

Sunita Puri, who attended Palos Verdes Peninsula High before being accepted to Yale, has little patience for classmates complaining about life’s hard knocks when they grew up in what she calls “one of the most sheltered areas in Southern California.”

“I read six essays about parents with cancer and I know that one of the students made it up,” she said. “People are ruthless. They’ll do anything to get into a big-name school.”

Complementing Grade Information

The idea of having aspiring students write about the challenges they had faced emerged as a way to help spot exceptional students whose promise isn’t fully reflected in grades and test scores. It has taken on a much larger role as the university has phased out affirmative action, the tool long used to boost the number of black and Latino students.

In place of racial preferences, the university now gives added weight to students who excel despite a disability, low family income, parents with no college education or an array of difficult personal or family situations.

That’s where the essays come in. UC admissions officers, as a rule, do not consider letters of recommendation, and applicants are not granted interviews. So the essays become the vehicle, as UC Undergraduate Admissions Director Carla Ferri says, “to tease out as much as possible the context of the student’s achievement, everything that cannot be explained by checking a box” on the eight-page application.

How these special circumstances are weighted has been left up to each campus, and neither UCLA nor Berkeley has rendered those additional criteria into a point system that can clearly be factored into the formula weighing grades and SAT scores.

Instead, the two campuses admit roughly half of their freshmen on the basis of superior grades and test scores alone, and then allow admissions officers some latitude--without strict formulas--to pick the second batch by considering applicants’ academic standing in the context of life challenges, personal achievement or intellectual development.

Outside of the admissions offices, when people argue about the role of application essays, they often focus on how the university has attempted to substitute socioeconomic barriers for affirmative action.

For example, let’s say that a Latino student writes that his teachers had low expectations for him as a student and so they pointed him toward auto shop, instead of college preparatory courses. If the student’s race leads to a disadvantage, can that be considered?

University attorneys have mulled over that question and decided that a disadvantage of that sort can be considered, said Gary Morrison, UC deputy general counsel. Acknowledging that someone has suffered a disadvantage because of racism or sexism is not the same as giving preference to race or gender, he said.

But critics like UC Regent Ward Connerly think that approach is just a “back door” way to give applicants preferences for race. He said the expanded criteria lend themselves to abuse and suggested that the matter will end up the subject of a lawsuit.

“There is no way to verify that someone was race-tracked,” he said. “We are opening the door to a lot of sob stories about hardship: ‘Now give me the preference because of racial discrimination.’ ”

But while Connerly and others focus on the possibility that personal statements might be used to reintroduce affirmative action, what has struck admissions officers is that not just the poor or ethnic minorities, but the sons and daughters of the privileged, are writing about challenges they have faced in their young lives.

“One story that a student wrote was how disadvantaged he was because his mother loved his sister better and he felt unloved all of his life,” said Siporin, UCLA’s admission director. “There is a significant difference between whiny crybabies who are writing to make you feel sorry for them, and those who are coping with horrendous life situations.”

Bob Laird, who retired last month as UC Berkeley’s admissions director, said he grew weary of too many students “straining to find hardships to write about.”

“It’s not unusual to run into a student from an upper middle-income family who says, ‘We don’t have a chance because we don’t have a hardship.’ But they’ve got it backward. What gets lost in translation is that we are interested in students of high achievement, period.”

Laird, Siporin and other UC admissions directors stress that point over and over at workshops they hold for high school guidance counselors every September.

“Do not manufacture hardships,” Siporin said, urging counselors to spread the message in their schools. “Students don’t have to survive a tremendous ordeal to get admitted.”

But then admissions directors read sample essays to the counselors. One heart-wrenching tale explored a Laotian refugee’s anger, resentment and finally acceptance over being abandoned by her wayward mother. Another came from a Latino student who painfully detailed his teenage years in an abusive home fueled by alcohol and drugs. Finally out on his own, he wants to become a UCLA-trained psychologist so he can help others become “survivors.”

The powerful words humbled the audience, turning the boisterous room into a place of hush-quiet reverence.

Reflecting on the mixed message, Laird said, “We get caught in our own little web.”