John Hupalo, host of MyCollegeCorner’s podcast, recently sat down with Ben Yeager, College Consultant with Dunbar Educational Consultants, for a closer look at the sometimes prickly, always frustrating student experience of writing the best, most representative college admission essays.
To see the full interview:
JH: Today My College Corner is looking at a serious pain point for students and parents in the college admissions process. It’s the dreaded essays, the personal statements, all the written stuff that has to go into a great application. I’ve known someone for a long time who is now a college consultant, currently with Dunbar Educational Consultants, a firm that’s been helping families with the college process since 1984. And the great news is he’s also a journalist. So for me it’s like the Daily Double for this topic. What more can you really ask for? A college coach and a journalist? I’m thrilled to welcome my friend Ben Yeager to My College Corner. Ben, welcome!
BY: Thanks for having me, John.
JH: Ben, I think it’s just great that we can get together. I’m a huge fan of genesis stories of how people found their way into their careers. I know you personally. I know you love the outdoors. I’ve seen you fishing on a surfboard for sharks in the Atlantic Ocean. So I totally get your early career writing for Outside Magazine, for a newspaper in Alaska. But what took you from sort of chasing schools of fish in the ocean to chasing schools of colleges for kids to try to help them get in and benefit themselves?
BY: Well, if only fishing for sharks from a kayak were a job! I’ve always been interested in writing and teaching. Teaching is sort of the other side of that coin, vocationally. These weren’t always easy opportunities to get. I wanted to write. I wanted to teach. I worked for various publications. I spent some time working for literary agencies. I got an MFA. I taught while there. And it started with a job coaching college admissions essays. And the more work I did, the more I wanted to learn about the consulting side, which entails starting with families much earlier, shaping their college search. And, at Dunbar, I’m now getting involved in much more of the process, not just the essays.
But college essays, it was like a new literary form for me to learn. And it combined pretty well with my pre-existing writing interests: essay, personal narrative, rhetoric. I also found it to be a pretty good platform for teaching. Because of the college context, students were very present. They were right there with you and they wanted to learn what you were teaching. I also think it’s not always taught in schools. It’s not a form that’s easy to pick up in schools. And many students benefited from having a crash course in personal writing and rhetoric that focuses on producing great writing.
JH: What’s really cool about what you said is the idea, I’ve never thought of it frankly, of a college essay is like a literary genre.
BY: In a way.
JH: What you said at the beginning is what really kind of intrigues me and where I want to start is that you’ve got to really get involved with the family. And the family, usually the unit that I imagine comes your way, is a parent who’s paying for the service, and then a student who may or may not be interested in actually working with you. Is that how that dynamic plays out? And how do you deal with that?
BY: I mean, often there’s a lot of different combinations. Motivated students. Unmotivated students. Parents who are very involved, parents who aren’t very involved.
JH: Yeah, I think that’s right. And I imagine for you to get your sea legs, to keep the ocean analogy going, with a family and a student in particular, you have to get that dynamic balance just right. And so let’s actually start moving in that direction.
There’s a little bit of an elephant in the room that I’d like to put on the table right away. And that is that there’s an awful lot going into getting the pieces together, getting the student’s package together in the form of their application. And the essays are one critical part. But how important are they vis-à-vis the other parts of the application like GPA and class rank and outside interests and extracurriculars? Where does this fall into the spectrum of things that the students are worried about?
BY: Yeah, that’s a really good question. Not a hugely obvious one for people doing this work. I’ve always worked on essays primarily, so they’ve always seemed really important to me, and writing is a massive part of the application. It’s kind of a majority of the work you’re doing when you’re starting to work on them. I think there’s kind of a breakdown, I think some essays, maybe 20-30% of them, will actively harm a student. Maybe they’re not clear or the writing is not on a level that the student is academically. Or they’re saying something that’s going to put somebody off. Even a really smart kid and a really qualified kid can write an essay like this that hurts their application. And there’s a ton of conflicting information out there as far as what goes into or what needs to go into essays, and conflicting resources.
Other essays don’t harm or help. They’re in the sort of “great wash” in the middle. And maybe another 20-30% will actively move the needle, or will actively help the student. It’s not exactly clear. And even writing a neutral essay that doesn’t harm or help isn’t easy. It takes skills that many people, not even just high school kids, don’t necessarily have. Having A’s is more important than GPA as a concept because everybody has A’s and grade inflation is rampant. GPA is kind of irrelevant without course rigor. So a high GPA with rigorous courses is huge.
Class rank doesn’t really exist anymore, but test scores are extremely important. These things will open the door and they’ll get you into a particular range. They’ll open up certain schools to you. But even when the numbers are right, the competition is still really fierce. And I think the power to articulate yourself in writing is a huge part of that arsenal. Writing can make you unique. An admissions officer can only really react or be so moved by a number. So the writing is a real opportunity and that’s about as much as I think people know quantitatively.
JH: You know that’s really interesting because you made the point, I saw you talk about this somewhere else, you have to take what’s in your control. Which is finding the right level, the right thing to write about.
I wanted to ask you about this. I was out in the bookstore the other day and I found this book, “Real College Essays That Work”. And in this book, which, by the way, is now 10+ years old, there are good general concepts in here, but one of the concepts that’s here that I want to ask you if you agree with is in here Fiske says “Choosing the right topic is the most important key to writing a good essay”. Do you think that’s where it starts? Or where do you think the great essay starts?
BY: It’s funny to distinguish college essay from essay in a way because I do think we are just talking about writing in the end. I don’t know if I would ask a student to limit their essay to a single topic necessarily. As a coach or an editor or a consultant, that’s not really the approach I would take. I would say to cast a wider net. A lot of companies and coaches work with a certain templating process. This might be resources online. There are broad lists of quirky questions. Or maybe it’s an internal process or a pre-writing process, right? But it’s kind of about generating lots of different material. I tend to have my own approach with this.
JH: What is that? How do you like to go about it?
BY: It just helps to have a student write a lot about themselves. Anything that they can sort of think of. I like to comb through it with them and look for ideas or themes that aren’t manifesting multiple times. Something that might be of greater meaning. Or a way to build an essay or frame an essay. Sometimes it comes together like puzzle pieces. Sometimes students will come with an idea of what they want to write about. Or they’ll have five or six or three or four things that they’ve done that are stand-out that should probably be written about. So you have obvious things to work with.
JH: I saw you talk to a group of students about this. And I thought one of the brilliant pieces of advice I hadn’t heard before – ask them to ask their friends or their parents about something unique about them or something that they remember, or some quality that they have. Because it wouldn’t come to us necessarily, particularly introverts who are not really going to want to maybe be introspective like that.
BY: Yeah, I agree with that. I think parents can be really helpful. There’s a lot of time there are these sort of early childhood anecdotes that show like a kernel of something that the student loved or sort of grew up to start doing. And the student doesn’t always remember these things, or there’s no other way to get them than from the parents. So it can be helpful to just get some brainstorming in an e-mail from parents or talk to them.
JH: I’d imagine most of your work with the student is one-on-one. But do you have this kind of conversation with both the parents and the students at the same time? Hey, this is where we’re going to go. Parent, here’s how you can help. Student, kind of open your ears. Don’t reject everything your parent says right out-of-the-box which is often I think what happens with high school seniors. They want to go out in the world on their own. This is their application. And so that dynamic we talked about at the beginning between the parent and the student that you have to manage is probably a pretty interesting part of your job.
BY: Yeah, definitely. There’s all sorts of combinations. It’s a huge part of the job. Sometimes there’s a certain topic a parent wants to see written. Sometimes it is something that should be written. It’s an extraordinary story, or it shows something that a college would find competitive. Sometimes a student doesn’t want to write about that. Sometimes there’s various tension. It’s all about managing different expectations.
JH: Are there topics that are just like verboten? The parent comes in and says “I want” and you’re just like “this is not gonna work”. Are there areas that you just really want to stay away from? Is there like a template or some form that the colleges are looking for? This is what they want and this is how you have to say it?
BY: There’s sort of a crowdsourced list that’s growing out there. There’s a lot of stuff. There’s, like, “voluntourism”, right? Mission trips. You don’t want to talk about something that shows a lot of privilege, like a lot of international travel or sort of luxury stuff. You don’t want to make a college worry about being in loco parentis. So you don’t want to write about certain kinds of mental and physical health issues. Climbing mountains, winning games, sports injuries. Other people’s tragedies or cancers. An easy way to think about a verboten topic is how common is it? How often is this story told? How many essays like this are they reading? But you can always pull off an overly common topic if it’s interesting, or if it’s written well. That’s just what good writing does. If you’re defamiliarizing the familiar.
JH: You just said something that I think is really important. You said “the essays that they’re reading”. Are they actually reading these essays?
BY: It probably depends on the school. I think if you’re applying to a very small, selective liberal arts school, definitely. I think it’s a huge part. But I think if you’re applying to a big Southern flagship, maybe not. And if you’re already in a certain range and they’ve accepted you based on numbers, maybe they don’t need to. I think a lot of these processes are pretty black box. There’s a little bit of hedging involved.
JH: So that’s interesting. I write blogs. And I’m never satisfied. Like I can always do one more draft. And then you realize there’s this huge diminishing return that you’re coming up with. You spent a lot of time for no real gain. How do you deal with that? How do you know when to tell a kid to just put your pencil down, you’re where you need to be with this essay?
BY: I think a lot of time it’s self-evident that the essay is just sort of working. You want to keep an eye on the student’s fatigue level. How close you are to the deadline. I think other people and other readers are really important. In the past, I’ve told students when we feel like we’re pretty close to loop in their parents or a trusted English teacher. An odd number of people to get a consensus is kind of the logic.
I do have one more thing to say about the verboten topic thing, in the vein of making something interesting or defamiliarizing the familiar. I really think you can make a common topic interesting, but I think if there are verboten topics, I really think what’s more accurate is that there’s verboten tones. Self-satisfaction, putting down other people, excessive negativity. These are tones you know when you read. And I think that’s more accurate or more forbidden than certain topics. Certain tones.
JH: What about the use of humor? Is there an appropriate use of humor in this? What do you think about that?
BY: If you can be funny, by all means, it’s true.
JH: Just go do it.
BY: Yeah, it’s also a huge component of voice. But it’s really hard to pull off in writing or pull off reliably in writing.
JH: That’s why I was going to ask you. So I might think I’m the funniest guy in the world and I write something and I’m laughing hysterically. And then you read it!
BY: It is sort of a gamble. But there are people who built entire careers based off of this. It’s not an easy thing to do. But an essay should orient you to a speaker, to an authentic voice. This is often what the first few sentences do. As you start to see someone’s point of view or hear someone’s voice. If you can do that with humor, that’s a huge boost.
JH: Actually that Fiske book that I put up before, that’s what the whole book is about. They talk about do this and then this is a successful essay and here’s why it was successful, and here’s where this person got in. Again it comes down to how the students at this point in their lives have like 1,000 things coming at them at the same time. And it really comes down to how much time can you get them to focus on this essay to get it to the point where, like we talked about before, “okay, for this school, this essay is as good as it’s gonna be. Let’s just go do it”. That’s a huge issue.
BY: It’s also tricky. The way I see it is it’s like a fine art. It’s an art form. It’s rhetoric. It’s something that’s been taught for a really long time. And a student, or any adult, has either picked it up or hasn’t. So you have to build in, or start to teach, or at least convey the rules. Ways to put a structure together. Ways to have a voice sound good. You asked me something about formulas, but it’s more about rules. Rules to a certain form that it can be difficult to do well without any sort of prior experience. And it can be a tough thing to teach really quickly.
JH: When I saw you at this little forum over the summer, one of the students was really paying a lot of attention and then he asked you, of course, “Can I just have ChatGPT write my essay for me?” And I would not have ever thought of that, but I’m sure students do all the time. What’s your thought about that mind frame? “I’ll have somebody else do it. I’ll polish it up and it’ll be okay.”
BY: I think that’s a pretty self-defeating frame of mind. I just don’t think that’s a good tool for this sort of task. And I kind of dread the day that it is a good tool. When it comes to voice and metaphor and making references, I just don’t think GPT can do that well. I think it would kind of be like shooting yourself in the foot a little bit. AI is kind of aggregating what’s out there, and you, or an authentic voice of yours, isn’t something that it can pull externally from the Internet. Yale Admissions actually has a pretty good podcast about this. I just don’t think it’s a match at this point.
JH: I didn’t think a college consultant/journalist would think that writing an essay with ChatGPT is a great idea for a high school student. But I think the way you frame it is really interesting.
BY: I just don’t think a writing style is going to come through. I think an overwritten mismatch of a lot of different ones will probably come through. I think a discerning reader would know that something’s not right. Because a lot of this AI-aggregated writing is pretty technically perfect. But there’s like multi-clause sentences and it’s really long and ornate. You can kind of just tell that it wasn’t human-written.
JH: When we started, you mentioned something that I just want to pick up on and highlight. I think you said it really nicely at the beginning, was that the level of the essay really needs to match the level of the student. So if like a solid B kid all of a sudden is writing Shakespeare that might set off some alarms in the admissions office. Just talk a little bit about framing the proper essay based on what the student’s performance has been in high school.
BY: You don’t want someone writing with a level of poetics, or someone writing with a level of sophistication and insight, which very clearly doesn’t match the student. That’s just sort of an instinctive thing for me. I haven’t really gotten any external information that raises alarm bells on the admissions level. But I can only assume that if you see a beautifully written, extraordinarily written, well-written essay that they’re not looking at the rest of the package and being, like, this person has B’s in English and isn’t on any literary journals or doesn’t write for the newspaper. How can that be right? I think writing at this level in high school is pretty rare.
JH: Have you ever had a situation where the kid comes with an essay and you’re pretty sure that the parent wrote it, or somebody else wrote the first draft? Is that a common thing or does it happen?
BY: It does happen. It’s possible their parent is a pretty good writer or has experience and is helping at home. And if the student is happy with the help they’re getting and the work they’re producing, I would just make sure that they keep up that work, because it’s not just the personal statement. It can be dozens of other essays.
JH: So let’s go to the Ben Yeager secret sauce. What are the two or three things that you found most help the kids that you’re working with?
“…creative writing isn’t really like building birdhouses.” – Ben Yeager
BY: It’s kind of an ironic question in a way, because I don’t really think of myself as bringing something necessarily consistent. Because no two writers and no two essays are alike. It has a craft element, but creative writing isn’t really like building birdhouses. Like I said before, I do like to cast a wide net with possible material. I don’t like to approach an essay with preconceived notions of what the essay is, or I don’t want to work with an essay or have a student write an essay from start to finish right off the bat. It can be too hard to restructure or work with if it’s come to you completed.
A lot of this is teaching how braiding works in an essay. Different points of association. How an idea moves through a text I think is central to good essay writing. So there’s a little bit of teaching about how that works. I think ethos has a lot to do with it, being good with kids, and especially being good with writers. It helps to spend a lot of time in workshops working with other people’s writing.
You don’t want to be dismissive; you want to always keep it constructive. Another factor is loving writing and having that come across or being able to impart that. There’s a Flannery O’Connor quote that’s something like “if you survive childhood, you have a lifetime of material to write about”. I think the idea there is there’s no story or detail that’s too small or too common. It’s back to that idea of defamiliarizing the familiar, letting students know that there’s always something in a story.
JH: Let me go to the parent side of the coin here, because a lot of our listeners and watchers are parents. And they’re trying to help their kids. So they’re always two parts of that: what can I do or not do to help my kid in this process. And then the other part that always comes around is that there’s so much happening and there’s all this allocation of resources, so the question becomes how much does it cost? I’m not asking how much you charge, I’m asking is the cost, the bang for the buck, worth it for families? Are there some families you just say to them, “you know what, I’m not really sure that I can be helpful here to get you to the next level”?
BY: I’ll start with the bang for the buck idea. It is all relative depending on what a family can afford and how much help they want to get on the entire process. It is a very difficult and very Byzantine process with really high stakes for a lot of people. I don’t know if the stakes are high objectively, but these resources range from free ones online to one-on-one coaching with experts that starts in 8th or 9th grade. So it’s a massive range.
An essay is an often overlooked part of the process and it’s a big part of the process. A lot of it depends on a student’s motivation level. If the student’s motivated, they can get a ton out of the process. The more material they bring me, the more willingness, the more we can make with it, the better the product, the more we can get out of it. And some of these programs, I think the writing is very important. I think it could be very central. But it plays a role in basically all admissions. So I think the deeper the students and the parents are capable of going, the more material we’ll have, the more themes and ideas and moments to use. So depending on what a family can afford and what their expectations are, I think they can get a lot out of it.
JH: I would think so too. And again, your expertise in keeping them focused – them meaning the parent and the student – in the proper way and getting to the end zone as quickly as they can with a great essay has got to warm your heart and then you can move on to other things that you’re working with them. Is there one piece of advice that you can give a parent to make the experience they have with you, or college coaches generally, the best it can be?
BY: I don’t know if that advice would extend to working with me in particular, instead of just work in this process in general. Fifteen or twenty years ago, I don’t know if all this help and all this process were necessary. But today this process is very complicated. It’s competitive and overgrown. And there’s an overwhelming amount of nuances between schools. It’s a lot of writing. It’s a lot of bureaucracy. It’s more of a particular kind of writing that most people, let alone college students, don’t have experience with.
How to write meaningfully about yourself is really difficult and it’s a difficult thing to ask a student to do. And there are things that are happening in the culture that are reflected in the prompts, in what the schools are asking students. Like trends they want to see acknowledged, whether students are “change makers”. They’re asking students to reflect on things socio-culturally or politically that are often beyond their maturity level. There are submerged things that students are looking for, certain formulas. And people who do this work have accumulated a lot of specific knowledge. And often when you’ve hired a professional, it’s best to trust that professional.
JH: Is there anything else that that you’d like to wrap up with or talk about before we thank you for being here and we go on?
BY: Yeah, two things we didn’t really cover were is there a formula that colleges want to see? And how do you build ethos or rapport with a student? I do think both of those are pretty important.
When it comes to formula, it’s a really tough question. Is there something specific a college wants to see? I’m not sure there’s a specific standard. There might be a range of sophistication and insight level depending on where you’re applying. There are lots of tropes that you see or you think of when you think of college essays. Like “in medias res”, where you began in the middle of things, where you just start a narrative suddenly. And there’s sort of stakes that come from that, not knowing where a student is.
Or it’s a single, bottled experience. And at the end of it, you get some sort of quality, like perseverance, determination, that comes out of that one experience, like a canoe trip or something. I don’t necessarily go for these because I like to pull in multiple points of association and have an essay mean something bigger than a single narrative or bigger even than the student. But there are things colleges do want to see like impact. What have you done? What have you done that’s benefited others? Insight. What can you make something mean? And some sort of cohesion between those two things. And story is a big part of it. What happened to you? Voice. We talked about voice. How well does a person come off the page? Insight, structure, form. I’ve seen experimental essays that work pretty well, whether it’s epistolary, in the form of letters.
So it’s really just about what makes good writing work. It should be real. It should feel detailed. It should flow logically. It should read colloquially. It should understand how paragraphing works, what a paragraph alone should do. From all I’ve gathered, colleges just wanna see authenticity, which is what readers want to see anyway, which is what good writing does. It’s kind of about just seeing a brain or a sensibility working on the page. Moving between ideas, seeing your intellect moving.
JH: That’s really interesting and it’s great advice of trying to say: here I am and this is what it is and this is my 750 words or whatever number of words I’m going to get to describe myself and talk about my intellect all in a very small compartmentalized way to do that, which in some ways is unfair. But also it is what it is and you have to judge. So that’s why people like you have dedicated their lives to helping kids understand how important it is and what they can do to be successful. So I think that’s absolutely awesome.
BY: Yeah, when it comes to writing, it offers the applicant in a third dimension that might not come through based on what courses they’ve taken or scores they’ve achieved.
JH: We could probably talk about this for another hour. Anything else?
BY: Well, yeah, when it comes to building trust, a lot of it is it’s a very word-of-mouth derived service. It comes from referrals off the bat, so there is an element of trust that comes through referrals. And ethos is a big part of it. How you talk about what you do. There’s an element of being direct. You have to be clear about what you can and what you can’t do, those clearly laid out expectations. You want to update the parents regularly so that it doesn’t feel like a black box, the work you’re doing with the student. And you want to make the student know that it’s ultimately their process. They are the client. You’re respecting their autonomy. And then when they start to see their story or their sensibility or they start to pull up a Common App together like magic that they’re really proud of, it starts to become a self-fulfilling process. And it all comes down to conversation. Finding common ground with the student.
JH: That’s great, Ben. I really appreciate you taking the time to be in My College Corner today. It was just awesome to have you here. I look forward to seeing you in your kayak, fishing for sharks again sometime in the not-too-distant future.
BY: Maybe next June.
JH: Well, that’ll do it for this edition of My College Corner’s “Ask the Expert” with today’s guest, Ben Yeager, a college consultant, an essay expert, and a counselor with Dunbar Educational Consultants. For more free great content to help you plan and pay for college, follow My College Corner on LinkedIn, Facebook, our YouTube channel, and at My College Corner.