The Personal Statement as a Marginalizing Rhetorical Device: Merit and Racism in College Access

Abstract

This paper is a literature review on the personal statement, merit, race, and racism through the application of colorblind and race-neutral policies. In an attempt to avoid racist admission policies, higher education place overwhelming emphasis on objective merits, such as grades. However, during the personal statement writing process, minoritized applicants' expression of merit may be affected by racial inequities, experiences, and educational preparation, both consciously and unconsciously. Therefore, by excluding race, colorblind merit policies may contribute to unexpected and unintentional racism in admission. In this paper, college-choice theory (CCT), critical race theory (CRT), and critical literacy theory (CLT) are used to interrogate colorblind merit in higher education to suggest why race is an important feature of applicants' narratives in the personal statement context. If race is significant to applicants' identities, then their narratives would be incomplete without it. There is a need to centralize both merit and race in personal statement research to allow education professionals to appropriately assess applicants' statements. Reintegrating race in assessments could improve our understanding of selective college admission processes and inform recommendations to refine instruction and evaluation of applicants' personal statement writing.

Multilingualism and Mismatching: Spanish Language Usage in College Admissions Essays

“…These correlational analyses were broad in their approach and did not investigate finer grained language patterns in the text, such as the use of Spanish. Other scholars have noted that race and ethnicity are central to students' experiences and the types of narratives and information they could and would provide through their essays likely reflect this [10,11]. Relatedly, diversity statements solicited from applicants in admissions are generally understood to be an opportunity for students to describe their ethnoracial identity and background [12].…”