During oral arguments for the pending Supreme Court cases on affirmative action, Justice Samuel Alito proposed a hypothetical: If an applicant immigrated from Africa to a white, rural area in the US, couldn’t they write an essay about dealing with “huge cultural differences,” leaving race out of it?
As a former foster youth who felt tasked with explaining an incredibly complicated personal history in several hundred words on my college applications, this argument makes me want to bash my head against the wall. So much of the rhetoric around admissions supposes that it’s easy for an applicant to summarize their life. But it’s not, and the experiences of those of us who’ve been through the child welfare system make that abundantly clear.
College essays are not an alternative to making a school diverse, and their limiting format can force applicants to turn their lives into florid trauma porn. Colleges should, of course, consider the circumstances and systemic forces that shape opportunities for applicants, but sometimes the burden of laying out those issues in an essay can be so arduous that it discourages people from even applying. Recognizing these complications is essential to understanding the debate over affirmative action — and what should come next if, as expected, the Supreme Court strikes down race-conscious admissions this term.
Take my situation as one example: Even though, as a white, working-class teenager, I was in a privileged position for someone who had been placed in a stranger’s house, my living situation negatively impacted my education, and that was definitely a factor for universities to weigh. But getting into those specifics was a grueling process for me. As I recounted in my book Acceptance, before foster care, I spent nine months in a locked residential treatment facility. My foster care file was closed after I got a scholarship to attend boarding school in another state. I spent school breaks couch-surfing with friends, sleeping in my car, and staying at a shelter.
Admissions officers, who are probably unfamiliar with the nuances of the foster care system, might not recognize how common it is for teens to get placed in facilities and for kids to leave care without being able to live at home. They may not be acquainted with the broader obstacles — interrupted education, lack of adult support, the impact of trauma, and more — that translate to only 1-11% of foster care alumni obtaining a bachelor’s degree.
When I was 17, I didn’t have this context either. Instead, I fixated on the murky details that made the situation feel like it was my fault. My mom had agreed to my placement in a therapeutic home. She maintained that I was sent to live with strangers because I was “unstable”; in fact, it was her hoarding that rendered our apartment unlivable and made me want to die. My application was all about my individual experience, which left me struggling to clarify a complex institution whose workings were opaque even to me.
During the time I was applying to colleges, I lay awake nights, terrified no one would believe my story. If I messed up any aspect, I was sure I’d face scrutiny and punishment. This fear proved to be founded when, last year, former foster child Mackenzie Fierceton’s story received national attention. Fierceton, a master’s student at the University of Pennsylvania and recipient of the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, saw her life fall apart over allegations that she had lied about aspects of her past.
Fierceton tells me that when she was a high school senior, the opportunity to share her story was liberating; being grilled by administrators about the most painful details of her life was not. “You’re asking people to share their lived experiences and then you’re like, ‘I don’t believe you’ or ‘You didn’t do it right,’” she recalls. The information in her college essays, she adds, “was all used as ammunition.”
Fierceton attributes this scrutiny, in part, to misconceptions about abuse and child welfare, citing “the cultural bias of what color people are, what income people are, whose kids go into foster care.” Brief essays are simply not enough to debunk stereotypes or show the full complexity of your experience. “You get 500 words,” Fierceton notes. “To really educate people, you need a New Yorker-length article.” (The University of Pennsylvania ultimately released Fierceton’s master’s degree shortly after that magazine published a 10,000 word investigation that took eight months to report, edit, and fact check.)
As a teenager, the burden of proof felt crushing for me. After I submitted my applications, almost every admissions office wanted to verify the facts. With no way to access court records that I didn’t know existed, I scrounged up the evidence I could find: a letter from my county-appointed mentor, an email from my social worker, a note from a homeless shelter. As paltry as this documentation seemed, I felt lucky to have it — so many hardships leave no paper trail. Then what would I have done?
As I rehashed the details, I felt tremendous pressure to remain upbeat and positive. Colleges, I knew, look for “over-comers.” A double bind haunts any student who discusses adversity: Be honest and risk seeming like a Debbie Downer or omit negative details and raise questions about dropped classes and school changes. In my essays, I struggled not to sound too glum while describing my situation. I had to find the bright side of sleeping in my car. Personal statements are meant to illustrate in a few pages what makes a human unique. They aren’t designed to highlight longstanding, societal issues that an individual can’t change. This makes personal statements a bad vehicle for demonstrating injustice.
Sixto Cancel, who is Black and Hispanic, wrote a personal statement for his application called “America’s Angriest Colored Child,” about his resilience while bouncing between homes. He argues that individual experiences of adversity are beside the point; affirmative action, he maintains, exists as a structural solution to a structural problem that denies opportunities to a group of people. “It has nothing to do with ‘highlight your trauma,’” says Sixto, who now runs an organization dedicated to improving child welfare, and calls the suggestion of replacing race-conscious admissions with essay writing “almost insulting.”
Stephanie Gravalese, whose essay described her experience as a ward of the state and the racism she faced as an Afrolatina in a predominantly white school, says Alito’s proposed solution “trivializes the experience of being taken away from my parents.” Making college applicants write purposefully lurid prose about trauma like abuse, neglect, and family separation equates those experiences with the common essay prompt “what I did on my summer vacation.” The larger problem, Gravalese says, is that “those of us who were in foster care and experience racism are part of a community that the system was not made for.”
People who’ve been in the child welfare system hold a range of views on race-based affirmative action, but everyone I interview agrees we would have benefited from a more inclusive college application. The admissions process should allow teens of all backgrounds to share our lives and the challenges we’ve faced — systemic and personal — instead of shoehorning our stories into a format designed for middle-class white kids with means and family support.
This means revamping the application. QuestBridge, an organization that provides an alternative admissions path for high-achieving, low-income students, already offers a model. Their demographics questionnaire is far more in-depth, which gives applicants space to describe widespread barriers that are left out of the Common App, such as caretaking responsibilities and immigration hurdles. Universities can also identify the unwritten rules inherent in admissions and spell them out for applicants who aren’t typically taught how to play the game. These changes are imminently doable. In recent years, for instance, colleges have already taken steps to make the process fairer, including the movement to make standardized tests optional.
As a high school senior, I craved a way to explain my circumstances that didn’t also require spilling my guts. If the Supreme Court strikes down race-based affirmative action, as anticipated, doubling down on essays is not the only alternative. Instead of asking students to contort their lives to fit a word count, serving up tales of triumph or trauma, universities will have a unique opportunity to rethink how they consider pervasive obstacles and, in doing so, make admissions more equitable for everyone.
Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take
