By MATT FLEGENHEIMER
Published: October 28, 2011
Penn Weinberger had grown attached to his college admissions essay. The topic — coping with a brother’s attention deficit disorder — was important to him. The anecdotes clicked. The characters had dimension. The meaning, as his teachers at Hunter College High School had long advised him, was shown, not told.
The only problem with Penn’s writing was the math: It was 650 words, outside the 250- to 500-word range re-established by the Common Application this spring — after a four-year experiment with no upper limit — but only now being grappled with as deadlines for early admissions approach next week.
“I just had to chop down all the emotion,” Penn said.
Unlike other parts of the application, which, in its online version, cuts students off midword if they exceed character limits, the personal statement won’t be truncated, raising the question in school corridors: Does 500 really mean 500?
In a word, no. In two words, kind of.
“If a student uploaded a 500,000-word essay, there’s nothing we could do,” said Rob Killion, executive director of Common Application, which is accepted by more than 400 colleges and universities. “However, we do ask that all students follow the same rules their peers are following.”
Mr. Killion said the word limit was reinstated after feedback that essays had grown too long. But essays are not labeled with word counts.
Jon Reider, director of college counseling at San Francisco University High School, agreed that concise writing was laudable but said that the implication of a strict limit was misleading. “I worry about that kid who’s written 530 and thinks he has to cut 30 words,” he said. “It just puts another stage of anxiety in front of these kids.”
Jeffrey Brenzel, dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale, said he did not stop reading if an essay ran long, but “if they go over the limit, the stakes go up.”
While Penn’s classmates at Hunter have debated on Facebook whether the limit will be enforced, Duncan Hosie, a senior at San Francisco University High School, has winnowed his essay about democracy and family from 890 words to what he described as “a 500-word haiku.” Michail Paunwar, a senior in Westfield, Ind., excluded the painful hospital scenes about his father’s colon cancer, figuring admissions officers could do without “a sob story.”
And a senior in New Jersey, whose first draft topped 700 words, said she decided to fictionalize portions of her piece, merging characters or events. “That really got rid of a lot of words,” she said.
Then there is Eva Peter, a classmate of Penn’s at Hunter, who said the final version of her essay about liking sports and science as a girl was “a worse piece of writing” than the 700-plus word original. Characters are intact, but less vivid. The message persists, though less pointedly.
“It fulfills the duty of a standard college essay,” she said with a shrug.
And, at 497 words, it fulfills the mandate of the Common Application. At 499, so does this article.
