Application essays and the ritual production of merit in US selective admissions

Gebre-Medhin, Ben; Giebel, Sonia; Alvero, AJ; Antonio, Anthony Lising; Domingue, Benjamin W.; Stevens, Mitchell L.

doi:10.1016/j.poetic.2022.101706

Cited by 8 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…At first glance, this suggests that among applicants there are narrative materials that are broadly shared, regardless of intended major. In the aggregate, these results are similar in a qualitative study of first year essays which also found some parity in narrative choices [ 15 ]. The full table of codes is available in Table S7.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 77%

“…Previous work studying admissions essays has been mostly descriptive and correlational. For example, studies using both computational and qualitative methods have found that applicant gender, income, college GPA, and thematic choices have all been found to be correlated with admissions essays [ 4 , 5 , 15 , 16 ]. Another study found that word vectors trained on essays written by applicants in the highest income quartile performed better on the Google Analogy Test Set and various word similarity tests than essays written by the two lowest income quartiles [ 17 ].…”

Section: Admissions Essays and Beyond: Computational Methods And Syst...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Linguistic, cultural, and narrative capital: computational and human readings of transfer admissions essays

Alvero

Pal²,

Moussavian³

2022

J Comput Soc Sc

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Variation in college application materials related to social stratification is a contentious topic in social science and national discourse in the United States. This line of research has also started to use computational methods to consider qualitative materials, such as personal statements and letters of recommendation. Despite the prominence of this topic, fewer studies have considered a fairly common academic pathway: transferring. Approximately 40% of all college students in the US transfer schools at least once. One quirk of the system is that students from community colleges are applying for the same spots for students already enrolled in four year schools and trying to transfer. How might different aspects the transfer application itself correlate with institutional stratification and make students more or less distinguishable? We use a dataset of 20,532 transfer admissions essays submitted to the University of California system to describe how transfer applicants vary linguistically, culturally, and narratively with respect to academic pathways and essay prompts. Using a variety of methods for computational text analysis and qualitative coding, we find that essays written by community college students tend to be distinct from those written by university students. However, the strength and character of these results changed with the writing prompt provided to applicants. These results show how some forms of stratification, such as the type of school students attend, inform educational processes intended to equalize opportunity and how combining computational and human reading might illuminate these patterns. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42001-022-00185-5.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 77%

Section: Admissions Essays and Beyond: Computational Methods And Syst...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Linguistic, cultural, and narrative capital: computational and human readings of transfer admissions essays

Alvero

Pal²,

Moussavian³

2022

J Comput Soc Sc

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“…Applicants used to write two essays responding to the same two prompts, but starting in 2016-2017 applicants had to write four essays in response to eight prompts. Though there is slight patterning of prompt selection by socioeconomic level (Gebre-Medhin et al, 2022;, we focus instead on the complete text of the essays provided by the applicants and follow (Alvero et al, 2021) in merging them. This approach enabled us to maximize the data and get stronger computational results in our text analysis.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Authorship Identity and Spatiality: Social Influences on Text Production

Alvero¹,

Luqueño²,

Pearman³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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To answer questions about the relationships between intersectionality, geography, and textual production, we analyze a corpus of essays written by every in-state Latinx identifying applicant (n = 254,820 essays submitted by 83,538 applicants) to the University of California system over two admissions cycles (2015-2017). After computationally modeling the essay content and style of the essays, we then predict different identity characteristics of applicants and spatial characteristics of their school communities. Essay content and style are very strong predictors of nearly all of the different outcomes and data compared and are stronger than previously reported results on similar data. We complement these results with an analysis of applicants that were misclassified in our studies and found that first gen., low income women from areas with high proportions of White residents and lower median income had the highest rates of misclassification.

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“…As tokens in engineering, women resist being seen as different from men and therefore less acceptable as an engineer (Faulkner 2009; Yoder 1994). The high-stakes admissions context of our study, on the other hand, ostensibly rewards “standing out,” especially when applicants advance narratives of hardship, challenge, or experiences as marginalized or minoritized individuals (Gebre-Medhin et al 2022; Silva 2013; Waller-Bey 2020). Women seeking limited spots to enter a gender-transgressive environment are thus faced with a conundrum of tokenism: how do they demonstrate worthiness as prospective engineers, irrespective of gender, while simultaneously showcasing their distinguishing experiences as women breaking gendered boundaries?…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, because personal essays resist quantification and commensuration, there is no standard by which to assess whether one’s essay will be more highly valued than another’s (Espeland and Stevens 1998). In other words, the subjective nature of personal essay writing means that applicants do not know which narratives might be deemed meritorious (Gebre-Medhin et al 2022), creating conditions with high evaluative uncertainty. These conditions are further heightened by the fact that applicants do not know who will be evaluating their application (Aukerman and Beach 2018).…”

Section: Gender and Narrative Self-presentationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Signaled or Suppressed? How Gender Informs Women’s Undergraduate Applications in Biology and Engineering

Giebel

Alvero

Gebre-Medhin

et al. 2022

Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World

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How does gender inform initial academic commitments and narrative self-presentation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields during the college application process? Analyzing 60,000 undergraduate applications to the University of California, the authors surface two key findings. First, extant gender segregation of academic disciplines also manifests in intended major choice. Additionally, gender and SAT Math scores together strongly predict intent to major in biology and engineering, the most popular and gender-segregated majors. Second, using natural language processing, the investigators find that author gender is more predictive of essay topics written by prospective engineers than prospective biologists. Specifically, women intending to major in engineering write about essay topics that signal their gender identity to a greater degree than women intending to major in biology, perhaps to mitigate gender-transgressive academic commitments. The authors subsequently argue that prescriptive and proscriptive ideas about men and women’s academic choices remain highly salient in a moment of imagining future academic and professional selves.

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Application essays and the ritual production of merit in US selective admissions

Cited by 8 publications

References 47 publications

Linguistic, cultural, and narrative capital: computational and human readings of transfer admissions essays

Linguistic, cultural, and narrative capital: computational and human readings of transfer admissions essays

Authorship Identity and Spatiality: Social Influences on Text Production

Signaled or Suppressed? How Gender Informs Women’s Undergraduate Applications in Biology and Engineering

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