I was scrolling through Twitter this morning and noticed a thread by Mehrsa Baradaran being shared by lots of people I follow. I simultaneously nodded in agreement and shook my head in frustration as I read through the tweets that detailed her experience helping a student with college applications. Below is the entire thread:
So I’m helping a kid I know with some college applications and I have some thoughts. My friend has a GPA of over 4.0 and a star in track and cross-country. She grew up Black in a white rural town in CA–oh and she’s homeless. She’s living with a friend’s family.
— Mehrsa Baradaran (@MehrsaBaradaran) December 31, 2019
So I convince her to apply to some top colleges and offer to help her jump thru all the dumb financial and non-financial hoops. It occurs to me, after 10 or so applications in, that if you wanted to design a system to keep out poor kids, this one is probably your best bet
— Mehrsa Baradaran (@MehrsaBaradaran) December 31, 2019
We’ve already paid over $1000 (even with fee waivers). I have no idea how she was ever going to pay that money or who in her life was going to help her with the 100s of essays we’ve written!
— Mehrsa Baradaran (@MehrsaBaradaran) December 31, 2019
And the essay questions!!!! Columbia asks “what exhibits, lectures, theatre productions and concerts have you liked best in the last year?” I’m tempted to write “Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera–psych–my town doesn’t even have a movie theatre!
— Mehrsa Baradaran (@MehrsaBaradaran) December 31, 2019
I ask her what kids do for entertainment and she says: “um…. drugs.” Another school asks her what her favorite periodicals, newspapers, websites are. She doesn’t have access to a computer except when she does homework on a school computer. She doesn’t get the New Yorker
— Mehrsa Baradaran (@MehrsaBaradaran) December 31, 2019
These are minor annoying questions. The major one is “tell us what you’re most excited about coming to Stanford, etc.” She’s a first gen college student. She has no idea what Stanford is like. She has never traveled outside her town.
— Mehrsa Baradaran (@MehrsaBaradaran) December 31, 2019
It just seems like anyone who can answer these questions has got to be coached. I am trying to help, but I don’t even know. I literally only applied to one college because my friend helped me with the application. I barely know what Stanford is like,
— Mehrsa Baradaran (@MehrsaBaradaran) December 31, 2019
but I really hope my friend gets in and I really would love to go back in time and help my 18 year old self fill out these applications and do SAT prep, etc. We have to have a better system.
— Mehrsa Baradaran (@MehrsaBaradaran) December 31, 2019
So often, we see broken systems up close and simply accept it and move on. Hopefully Baradaran’s decision to put this out to her nearly 20,000 followers on Twitter will be a catalyst for the right people to care and for something to change.
This post originally ran on the Good School Hunting Blog here:
