Application Essays And The Performance Of Merit In US Selective Admissions

1 August 2020
Application Essays and the Performance of Merit in US Selective Admissions
Ben Gebre-Medhin, bgebreme@mtholyoke.edu
Sonia Giebel, sgiebel@stanford.edu
AJ Alvero, ajalvero@stanford.edu
anthony lising antonio, aantonio@stanford.edu
Benjamin W. Domingue, bdomingu@stanford.edu
Mitchell L Stevens, stevens4@stanford.edu
word count (inclusive of all sections): 13,515
Key words: college admissions, evaluation, legitimation, holistic review, performativity

Application Essays and the Performance of Merit in US Selective Admissions
ABSTRACT
What sustains the broad conception of merit that organizes academic gatekeeping in the United
States? While prior analysts have offered “top-down” explanations of academic leaders
expanding criteria of merit to accommodate institutional self-interests, we identify a “bottom-up”
mechanism: the application essay. Integrating insights from several strands of sociological
theory, we posit that the essays required by schools with selective admissions sustain merit’s
breadth by enlisting young people (and their families, teachers, and consultants) in collaborative
performances of what might be considered meritorious. Analyzing essay prompts and utilizing
human readings and statistical analyses of 220,062 essays contributed by 55,016 applicants to a
public US university system, we find circumscribed genre expectations and class-correlated
patterns of self-presentation but also substantial range in what the university and its applicants
invoke as evidence to support competitive bids for admission. Our work provides a novel
explanation of an elaborate but opaque evaluation protocol and surfaces a paradoxically inclusive
component of an otherwise fiercely exclusionary evaluative regime.

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Sociologists have long recognized that the social power of schools rests on their ability to sustain
public deference to academic evaluations (Abbott 2005; Collins 1979; Cottom 2017; Meyer
1970; Weber 1958). A critical occasion for such deference is college entry, because admission to
selective schools is a mark of prestige and status honor for both students and their families
(Stevens 2007). Admissions is also materially fateful for colleges, since so many of the assets on
which they rely for their own prestige and prosperity -- measurable academic and extracurricular
accomplishment, intellectual acumen, cultural prestige, and tuition revenue, for example -- come
in the form of admitted students (Astin 1985). Generations of social scientists have explained
that, in the United States, an important way in which elite schools maintain public deference
while also netting the assets they need from entering classes is to maintain a broad conception of
what counts as merit in admissions. (Protestant) Christian character, leadership ability,
athleticism; diversity of race, cultural perspective, and life experience: all have been serially
added to the merit idea in ways that give admissions decision makers a good deal of flexibility in
explaining what makes candidates worthy of a seat at a highly selective school (Karabel 2005;
Lemann 1999).
Yet ideas about merit -- like ideas generally -- do not generate fealty on their own. Just as ideas
are social products, so too is adherence to them. This fact is a general problem for sociologists of
knowledge, who seek to explain not only where ideas come from but how they elicit advocates,
enlist new recruits, and are maintained over time (Camic and Gross 2008; Gross 2003). A key
insight of this tradition is that the active performance of ideas is a powerful, even essential
mechanism of their survival (Beunza and Stark 2012; Butler 1990; Goffman 1982; MacKenzie
2006). Sociologists of knowledge have been especially adept at applying this insight to the study

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of scientific communities, explaining how highly abstract and ineffable ideas elicit extraordinary
commitments when they are instantiated in practices that entail mundane, if carefully
orchestrated, work. “Seeing” economic development (J. C. Scott 1998), the activity of atoms
(Knorr-Cetina 1999), the surfaces of distant planets (Vertesi 2015), and the machinations of
financial markets (Beunza and Stark 2012; MacKenzie 2006) are examples of how highly
coordinated and routinized collective action engenders ideational commitment.
We draw on this line of scholarship to suggest an important yet little recognized mechanism for
sustaining deference to a broad conception of merit in US higher education. We start with the
observation that the entirety of the college application process is a carefully orchestrated
collaborative practice: in a word, a ritual (Emirbayer 1996). The process is elaborate and
scripted, requiring active participation by multiple parties according to precisely specified
protocols. Multiplied by hundreds of thousands of applications to a myriad of schools each year,
the practice represents a substantial annual investment in human attention. Our argument is that
this activity is productive at the same time that it is evaluative: it produces widespread
performance of applicant merit as complex, varied, and difficult to measure. We here refer to the
outcome of this distributed work as the merit idea.
The empirical focus of our investigation is the college application essay. Evaluation protocols at
admission-selective US schools almost invariably oblige applicants to submit written essays as
part of their applications. Essays are central components of selective admissions even while there
is scant evidence of their impact on the outcome of admissions decisions (Espenshade and
Radford 2009; Hossler et al. 2019; Rothstein 2017; Stevens 2007). We argue that regardless of

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their role in decision outcomes, the solicitation, production and consumption of essays instantiate
the merit idea in American educational culture. By obliging applicants to craft narratives of their
own worth and worthiness independent of the other information in their applications (grade point
average, class rank, high school curriculum, measurable extracurricular accomplishments),
schools enlist applicants in a ritual that sustains commitment to the merit idea over time.
Our focus on the production of application essays enables a novel contribution to the sociology
of academic selection in the United States. While prior scholars have recognized the role of
academic and judicial elites in accreting increasingly capacious conception of what might be
considered legitimate criteria for admission to elite schools, we call attention to the distributed
activity of countless young authors (and their parents, teachers, coaches, and consultants) in
perpetuating fealty to obliquely specified evaluation protocols. Our approach is in keeping with
general theoretical developments in the sociology of culture and knowledge, which have come to
complement “top-down” conceptions of truth and legitimacy with recognition of the “bottom-
up” contributions of those who put ideas into action. We believe ours is the first scholarly
inquiry to call attention to the sociological importance of college application essays
independently of any role they might play in the final determination of admission outcomes.
Empirically, we leverage a novel corpus of 220,062 essays included in 55,016 applications
submitted to State U, a large public university system with selective admissions. Across three
empirical studies, we show that the essay requirement both encourages and produces
heterogeneity in how applicants present themselves as worthy candidates. Patterned variation in
topic choice and essay content indicates class-based deployment of the experiential and

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ideational raw materials applicants enlist in their writings, even while applicants across the class
spectrum are ecumenical in what they consider relevant evidence of fitness for admission. In
addition to revealing a novel mechanism for fealty to the merit idea, our work surfaces a
paradox: the machinery of academic evaluation produces an inclusive conception of merit even
while it sustains a fiercely exclusionary evaluative regime.
In what follows we first consider prior work on the evolution of selective admissions and of the
merit idea in the US over time. Second, we elaborate a theoretical framework, anchoring our
work in classical and contemporary insights from the sociology of culture and knowledge. Third,
we describe our data corpus and explain the motivation of our analytic strategy. In the fourth and
fifth sections -- the empirical core of the paper -- we consider the essay requirement as it was
presented to applicants of State U in 2016, and present a series of empirical studies of how
applicants respond to the call when selecting essay topics and prompts. We conclude by
suggesting the harmony of our work with larger sociologies of culture, performativity and
evaluation.
BACKGROUND: SELECTIVE ADMISSIONS AND THE MERIT IDEA
The most elite colleges and universities in the United States organize admissions with an
evaluative protocol that aims to integrate multiple indicators of merit when deriving decisions.
Systems of holistic review oblige applicants to submit some combination of statistical and
transcript data describing their high school academic accomplishments, standardized test scores
(but see Furuta 2017), lists of verifiable extracurricular accomplishments, letters of
recommendation, and original essays crafted by applicants. Schools typically communicate to

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applicants that the purpose of essays is not just to showcase expository skills, but also to enable
evaluators’ assessment of applicants as individuals and whole persons (Bastedo et al. 2018). Put
differently, the essay provides a dedicated venue for applicants to represent their distinctive
worthiness for admission additionally to the other information included in their files.
Precisely how applications are apprised under holistic review remains shrouded in mystery. A
large body of research utilizing datasets describing characteristics of applicant pools and
admitted cohorts relies on inferential statistics to speculate about the relative weight admissions
officers give various applicant attributes (e.g. Espenshade and Radford 2009). Such studies have
not considered qualitative components of applications nor the gestalten process of holistic
evaluation. In a recent study of 311 admission officers, Bastedo and colleagues (2018) found
substantial variation in how officers approach the task of holistic review, with some reading
primarily to derive the “whole context” of an applicant’s lifeworld, others seeking a picture of
the “whole person” represented in the file, and still others prioritizing the obligation to read the
“whole file.” While there is general agreement across the admissions profession on the positive
value of holistic review, there is little shared understanding within the field about how it is best
carried out (Hossler et al. 2019). This ambiguity about best practices is remarkable in light of the
intense scrutiny selective admissions has received from legislatures, critics and courts in recent
years. What sustains the opacity of such a fateful moment of evaluation?
Social scientists have answered this question by recognizing that US colleges and universities are
self-interested, strategic actors. They compete with one another on multiple dimensions for
personnel, patronage, and prestige (Armstrong and Hamilton 2013). Undergraduate admissions is

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a key site of this competition, both for overall rankings of prestige and selectivity, but also as an
arena for triage on multiple and even competing organizational objectives (Clotfelter 1996;
Winston and Zimmerman 2004). In his ethnography of a selective college admissions office,
Stevens (2007) argued that opacity in admissions is essential to a school’s ability to manage the
varied intramural parties with competing stakes in admissions outcomes: development officers,
athletics coaches, and institutional research personnel who submit admissions statistics to third-
party ranking agencies such as US News. The opacity of decision making provides flexibility to
manage the competing organizational goals that are pursued through the admissions process.
However useful it is for organizational management, opacity comes with risks to the legitimacy
of admissions decisions. Holistic review is predicated on the ideal of meritocratic selection: a
longstanding promise schools make to their constituents that only those demonstrably worthy, on
the basis of their own accomplishments and promise to benefit from a costly education, will be
offered admission (Karabel 2005; Lemann 1999). It has come to be regarded as a safeguard
against the bias of any single measure of fitness for college, a status bolstered by recent claims of
race and wealth bias embedded in quantitative measures of merit (Dixon-Roman, Everson, and
McArdle 2013; Hartocollis 2019), and also a recognition that academic potential cannot be
captured fully by quantitative measures of prior accomplishment (Rothstein 2004). In order to
retain deference from applicants, their families, philanthropic patrons and government regulators,
colleges and universities are obliged to continually demonstrate that they allocate admission on
the basis of merit.

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To sustain flexibility and discretion in admissions, academic elites have incrementally expanded
and changed their conception of what constitutes merit (Karen 1991; 2002). In the latter decades
of the nineteenth century, when university leaders recognized Americans’ ambivalence about
intellectual endeavors, fears of the emasculation of their sons, and love of sports, they began to
recruit and celebrate applicants on the basis of their athletic prowess (Lifschitz, Sauder, and
Stevens 2014). To court the patronage and children of their wealthiest alumni, they accreted a
mythology of an institutional “family” to justify systematic preferences for legacy applicants
(Stulberg and Chen 2014). In response to the civil rights and Black Power movements in the
middle of the twentieth century, they created a novel academic value -- diversity -- to defend
affirmative recognition of ethno-racial identity in admissions protocols (Skrentny 2002; see also
Stulberg and Chen 2014).
Regarding the application essay specifically, historical scholarship traces its origins to the 1920s,
when the leaders of private schools favoring an Anglo-Protestant clientele grew concerned about
the growing proportions of academically accomplished Jewish students seeking admission and
its associated cultural prestige (Karabel 2005; Lemann 1999; Synnott 1979). Inviting character
references, requiring applicant photographs and soliciting personal essays were among the ways
admissions officers simultaneously expanded definitions of what was considered meritorious and
secured their own discretion in adducing it. Over time and however paradoxically, essays came
to be regarded as schools’ official recognition that applicants’ worth and worthiness cannot be
fully represented by standardized test scores, grade-point averages and other easily quantifiable
information included in application files (Stevens 2007).

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In sum, prior accounts have considered the evolution of admission protocols and the merit idea
from the point of view of university leaders and admissions officers: those who set the official
terms of applications and conduct evaluations. While they undoubtedly tell important parts of the
sociological story, these accounts fail to consider the contributory role of those who invest time
and energy completing applications. This task consumes countless hours of time and attention by
applicants -- as well as parents, teachers, guidance counselors, and a growing industry of college
consultants (Grusky, Hall, and Markus 2019) -- and produces millions of textual artifacts each
year. The entire endeavor of selective admissions would not be sustained without the consistent
enlistment of applicants willing to submit to this evaluative regime. A complete account requires
recognition and theorization of this enlistment.
THEORY: RITUAL, PERFORMANCE & GENRE
In the service of recognizing applicants themselves as participants in the production of the merit
idea, we integrate insights from several different domains of sociological theory.
First, we posit that the entire enterprise of selective admissions is amenable to conceptualization
as ritual: a web of carefully coordinated collective actions which reify otherwise ineffable beliefs
(Durkheim 1995). In US higher education, the application process reifies the idea that admission
to a selective college is predicated on the demonstrated accomplishments of applicants. This idea
is essential to the legitimacy of education as a mechanism for distributing material opportunity
and status honor (Weber 1958). The totality of the application ritual enlists myriad parties --
children, parents, guidance counselors, testing agencies, authors of recommendation letters, and
admissions officers themselves -- in carefully scripted routines that enact fealty to the idea of
meritocratic selection. If the application process were simple and concentrated, rather than

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complex and distributed, fewer parties would have the opportunities for enactment that so
powerfully sustain belief (Collins 2014; Goffman 1982).
Second, we draw from the sociology of knowledge to recognize the productive and collaborative
character of evaluation. In this theoretical tradition, evaluation projects do not just represent
reality; they actively perform and produce it (Beljean, Chong, and Lamont 2016). Their outputs
are cultural artifacts that instantiate the thing they purport to describe. To the extent that multiple
parties are implicated in this production, the entire enterprise is bolstered by distributed
commitment. MacKenzie’s (2006) famous summary description of econometric analysis as “an
engine, not a camera,” producing the reality of the economic forces it claims merely to represent,
is applicable also to the merit idea. We theorize that the merit idea is sustained through the active
participation of those who call for certain kinds of textual performances in application essays;
those who labor in responding to the call; and those who read the products of this labor. The
entire enterprise is a ritual performance of merit: a set of actions that produces artifacts
instantiating the merit idea (Goffman 1959).
An important feature of this ritual is that the artifacts it produces are variably amenable to
metrical compression. Grades, test scores, and counts of awards and honorifics are easily
tabulated for mechanical evaluation and comparison. By contrast, personal essays resist
standardized assessment. They are not easily commensurable in any a priori fashion known to
applicants. Even if particular schools might apply metrical assessments to essays behind closed
doors, we know of no instance in which such metrics are easily available to organizational

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outsiders. Because there is no clear, public, or agreed-upon metric for what “counts” as an
excellent or even acceptable essay, these components of applications are at lower hazard for the
reactive homogenization of metrical evaluation schemes (Sauder and Espeland 2009). There is
reason, then, to suspect heterogeneity in the content and composition of any corpus of essays.
Yet we do not expect the phenomenon to be stochastic. Third, drawing from the sociology of
culture, we build on Griswold (1981) to conceptualize application essays as a genre: a
recognizable type of cultural production whose outputs are shaped jointly and in patterned ways
by audiences, authors, formal requirements and social context. A genre (“the college admission
essay”) or a specific manifestation of it (“my essay”) are outcomes of the interaction of these
four factors. To conceptualize this interaction Griswold (2012) offers the heuristic of a diamond.
We deploy this heuristic for our case, as depicted in Figure 1.

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Figure 1: The Application Essay Genre
Griswold’s diamond enables us to describe the production of essays as a collaborative project of
schools and applicants. Akin to a ritualized “call and response” interaction that creates meaning
between speaker and audience (Loeb 2014), the annual interchange between colleges and
applicants constructs the essay genre. Admissions offices (the audience) elicit a call for
production when they require essays for consideration for admission, signaling that such essays
deliver evidence of one’s merit for selection. Applicants (authors) respond by crafting texts
according to the formal requirements of the essay. These are specified in part by the terms of the
call (requirements of topic and length, for example), but also by generalized expectations about
what the genre “application essay” can accommodate. The call typically offers applicants
considerable discretion in how to craft their responses, allowing them to choose essay prompts,
topics, phrasings and words.

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The vertical line in Figure 1 is a graphic representation of the tendency for social context to
manifest in the content of particular essays. Following Griswold, we expect that essay authors
will draw on the experiences and cultural materials (vocabulary, idioms of narration and
storytelling, e.g.) available to them in their particular social situations, such that essays will bear
traces of those contexts. Prior research on admissions essays has noted distinctive inflections on
the topic of “diversity” submitted by authors of different class backgrounds (e.g., Kirkland and
Hansen 2011). Our own work below investigates the socioeconomic context of applicant authors.
Integrating notions of ritual, performativity and the cultural diamond enables us to theorize that
the output of this four-pointed interaction is not just essays. It also includes the merit idea itself,
as depicted in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Performative Production of the Merit Idea

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Schools’ call for essays describing merit elicit multifarious expressions -- call them
performances -- of merit by whole cohorts of young people each year. Fusing insights from
performativity theory and the sociologies of culture and knowledge, we theorize that this activity
yields both a vast corpus of comprehensible textual artifacts and the veracity and legitimacy of
the merit idea in US academic culture generally.
We illustrate the utility of our approach through a series of empirical inquiries into the
production of essays submitted to a public university system with selective admissions. We first
establish the broad conception of merit as it is reciprocally performed by a selective public
research university system and its applicants. Next, we establish the extent to which the merit
idea is refracted by the socioeconomic circumstances of authors. Together they suggest a
heterogeneous but also broadly inclusive performance of merit: precisely the sort of performance
that might substantiate general faith in a fateful evaluative regime.
DATA AND ANALYTIC STRATEGY
We leverage a dataset comprising applications submitted to a multi-campus public university in
the United States (hereafter “State U”) between 2015 and 2017. For the analyses reported here,
we begin with a random sample of 60,000 applicants drawn from a universe of more than
165,000 individuals who submitted application materials in November 2016 for matriculation in
Fall 2017. Applicants who did not report residency in a US state or territory, as well as those
who declined to report a household income, were excluded. These restrictions yielded a sample

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of 55,016 individual applicants and 220,062 corresponding essays that serve as the empirical
basis of analyses below.
Those seeking admission to State U’s undergraduate programs are obliged to complete a
centrally administered, standardized application that governs admission to all of the campuses in
a multi-site university system. In addition to submitting transcripts and test scores, those
applying for admission in Fall 2017 were offered eight prompts and were required to write
essays of 350 words or less in response to four prompts. The average length of the essays in our
sample is 307 words; approximately 90 percent of essays exceed 220 words.
We leverage these data in three studies to empirically investigate the interactions represented by
the horizontal and vertical dimensions of Griswold’s diamond. Doing so enables us to portray
how selective colleges, applicants, applicants’ socioeconomic situations, and essays themselves
are reciprocally implicated in a performative construction of the merit idea. In Study 1, we
examine the interaction between schools and applicants (the horizontal dimension), utilizing
qualitative analysis of essays to observe the range of phenomena that schools and applicants
consider falling within merit’s purview. Next we investigate the vertical dimension of the
diamond, representing the relation between essay production and the socioeconomic situations of
applicant authors. In Study 2, we examine the essays quantitatively to surface embedded
relationships between social class and essay topics. In Study 3 we conduct a network analysis to
visualize how social class is implicated in the prompt selection process that precedes essay
writing.

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VARIETIES AND LIMITS OF MERIT
Academic evaluation systems may define merit narrowly or broadly. For example, merit is
defined quite narrowly in university systems in China, India, and the UK, where test scores alone
determine admissibility (Carnoy et al. 2019). By contrast, the mechanics of US admissions
systems suggest that merit is defined broadly in this society. To the extent that not only test
scores, class rank, and grades but also athletic and musical ability, family background and (in
some cases) ethno-racial identity are officially legitimate criteria for considering college
applicants (Espenshade and Radford 2009), we assert that the merit idea is exceptionally broad
in the US.
Additional empirical evidence for merit’s breadth in the US academic context may be drawn
from examination of the kinds of accounts admissions protocols expect applicants to provide in
application essays and the texts that applicants submit in turn. Doing so is important for gauging
the full breadth of the merit idea, for two reasons. First, the narrative flexibility of application
essays may accommodate a considerably wider range of attributes than those represented with
the quantitative information elicited through other components of applications. Second, as with
any social accounts (M. B. Scott and Lyman 1968; Tilly 2008), essays will betray what authors
believe the interactional event calls for. Systematic reading of a corpus of application essays will
reveal the range of legitimate accounts that authors believe obtain in this evaluative exchange.

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Study 1: The Composition of the Application Essay Genre
During the study year, State U offered eight essay prompts and required applicants to respond to
four of them. The prompts are reported in Table 1, which also lists the number of responses for
each prompt submitted during the 2016 study year.
Table 1: STATE U Application Essay Prompts and Number of Submitted Responses, 2016
Summary Verbatim Prompt Text Count
1. Leadership
experience
Describe an example of your leadership experience in which you
have positively influenced others, helped resolve disputes, or
contributed to group efforts over time.
31,576
2. Creative
side
Every person has a creative side, and it can be expressed in many
ways: problem solving, original and innovative thinking, and
artistically, to name a few. Describe how you express your creative
side.
20,874
3. Talent or
skill
What would you say is your greatest talent or skill? How have you
developed and demonstrated that talent over time?
25,228
4. Educational
barrier or
opportunity
Describe how you have taken advantage of a significant
educational opportunity or worked to overcome an educational
barrier you have faced.
26,607
5. Significant
challenge
Describe the most significant challenge you have faced and the
steps you have taken to overcome this challenge. How has this
challenge affected your academic achievement?
34,328
6. Academic
inspiration
Think about an academic subject that inspires you. Describe how
you have furthered this interest inside and/or outside of the
classroom.
34,292
7. School &
community
service
What have you done to make your school or your community a
better place?
20,941
8. Why I stand
out
Beyond what has already been shared in your application, what do
you believe makes you stand out as a strong candidate for
admissions to State U?
26,216

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The prompts themselves cover a broad but finite topical range: personal hardship, creativity,
leadership, personal growth, talent and community service. The menu of prompts offers
flexibility and choice to applicants, but also provides parameters for legitimate accounts of
worthiness. State U does not ask applicants to reflect on a particularly meaningful relationship,
or demonstrate their loyalty to their country, or atone for a self-professed sin, for example. While
these prompts suggest that there are seemingly many correct answers, the limits of the call
encourage some kinds of responses more than others.
That said, by themselves the prompts tell us little about the breadth of what applicants might
consider reasonably falling within the purview of the solicitation. Assessing this breadth is
important if we are to empirically observe what actions, attributes, experiences and meanings
comprise merit in US academic culture generally. A narrow range of topics in responses would
indicate that applicants have a circumscribed understanding of the merit idea -- or at least that
they expect that admissions officers do. By contrast, a broad range of chosen topics would
indicate that applicants have a broad conception of merit -- or at least that they presume
evaluators do. Since State U does not provide applicants with complete topical latitude in their
given prompts, we suspect that there are also bounds to what applicants consider meritorious in
their accounts, however diverse they may be. If our suspicions are correct, the broad but bounded
nature of application essays should betray evidence of a genre we here call merit narratives.
To further investigate the scope and content of merit narratives, we qualitatively examined a
subset of essays submitted to State U in 2016. We selected prompt #5 for analysis, which asks
applicants to describe their “most significant challenge.” We chose this prompt for two reasons.

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First, it is the most popular prompt chosen by applicants in the case year, eliciting over 34,000
submissions. Second, this prompt closely parallels prompts included in the Common Application
and the Coalition Application utilized by hundreds of US colleges and universities nationwide.
The relative ubiquity of the prompt suggests it might elicit responses representing general
cultural understandings of the merit idea.
Coding Methodology
Four coauthors worked collaboratively and iteratively to observe the universe of challenges
narrated in a random sample of 3,519 essays submitted to the “challenge” prompt. Although our
analyses achieved theoretical saturation (Glaser and Strauss 1967) with respect to types of
challenges within a reading of about 500 essays, we eventually coded just over ten percent of all
the challenge essays for their use in Study 2. We employed a constructivist approach (Lincoln
and Guba 1985) to identify challenges, examining whole essays to see full depictions of
struggles, disappointments, and setbacks. Throughout the coding process we fully segregated
essay texts from demographic data describing authors (in other words: coders were blind to
applicants’ demographic characteristics).
Over the course of two months, the coding team members read identical sets of essays randomly
selected from the corpus of texts written to prompt five, “significant challenge” (n = 34,328) to
generate codes capturing what we came to call the “primary challenges” depicted in essays. We
began with open coding (Corbin and Strauss 2008) of challenges and, through sharing and
consultation, created definitions as well as criteria for inclusion and exclusion for each code
(MacQueen et al. 1998). We iteratively tested and refined the codebook through nine rounds of

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reading, coding, and discussing batches of an initial sample of 504 essays. We concluded this
process when (a) no new codes surfaced and (b) the team attained a Fleiss Kappa statistic,
describing inter-rater reliability, above 0.80.i
Team members then read and coded an additional
3,015 essays, for a total reading sample of n = 3,519.
Findings
Analysis surfaced fourteen primary challenges, as represented in Table 2. Primary challenges
display a wide range: from material (economic insecurity) to physical (health/ability) to affective
(inter/intra-personal) challenges and including abuse, academics, death, discrimination, and
challenges related to sports. We also identified 85 subcategories within the primary challenges,
indicating a fairly heterogeneous set of experiences applicants drew upon to construct their
narratives. Affective challenges were the most common and the most heterogeneous, ranging
from challenges of self-confidence and identity struggles to experiences with bullying, friendship
strife, and conflicts with parents. Challenges which we coded as “domestic instability” were
similarly common but narrower in range and included descriptions of a variety of marital issues
such as divorce, fights, and infidelity, as well as instabilities in the home initiated by (for
example) household moves and parental military deployments. Perhaps most telling of the range
among challenges affecting academics was that explicit academic challenges (“A challenge I had
was English class in 9th grade because I did not understand the work.”) were offered in less than
ten percent of the essays.
Table 2 also contains excerpts from two essays coded with each primary challenge. We include
two excerpts to illustrate the within-challenge heterogeneity we observed and to portray the

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agency applicants exercise in their textual performances. When State U called for “significant
challenge” as evidence of worthiness for admission, applicants responded broadly and creatively.
The 85 distinct topics generated across our analysis demonstrate the flexible and inclusive nature
of the merit idea instantiated in response to the challenge prompt. Authors deem many
phenomena as falling under merit’s purview. At the same time, our analysis yielded a finite
number of reported challenges, suggesting at least some shared cultural parameters around what
might count as a challenge worthy of consideration by admissions officers.
Table 2: Primary Challenges, Examples, and Frequency in 3,519 Essays
Primary
Challenge
Illustrative Excerpts Frequency
Abuse
“That was not her first time physically abusing me and I certainly
knew it was not going to be the last one either.”
“My dad had sexually molested me from as young as I can
remember.”
49
Academics
“One challenge that I struggled with during my time was in
elementary school. I really had trouble during sixth grade in which I
grossly [sic] terrible in my [state] test. When my mom saw bad I was
struggling, I decided to make a stand in which I choose to stay back
one year.”
“A challenge I had was English class in 9th grade because I did not
understand the work. For that, I got lazy and did not do or turn in any
work and failed the class.”
340
Affective
Inter/Intra-
Personal
“Around my Junior High I began to realize that I had lost a significant
amount of confidence in myself which translated over to a decline in
my personal goals.”
“The thought of being disregarded by my friends eventually grew so
strong that I couldn't function in any aspect of my life.”
657
Death
“In the early hours of August 19, 2013, I began the most difficult
challenge of my life. My father woke me to say that my stepmother
had died of cancer.”
266

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“When she died at the beginning of my freshman year, I lost a friend,
a parent, and a role model.”
Discrimination/
Stereotype
“This challenge, being unable to digest why people are prejudiced,
has moved my life in a positive direction by broadening my
perspective on discrimination and allowing me to advocate for
equality.”
“It was engraved into my head that I was just another dark face
destined to be a negative statistic. I began to feel that my dark skin,
and the depression I gained with it, was a challenge that only death
could fix”
118
Domestic
Instability
“My father frequently cheated on my mom when I was growing up,
and in the long run, he ended up leaving our family. I resented him
for years and I grew up thinking I was never enough.”
“This was the fourth state that I had moved to in the past four years so
I didn't think it was going to be that big of a deal, except it was.”
528
Economic/Materi
al Insecurity
“Coming from a low-income background has been, and remains my
greatest challenge. have struggled having a casual living since my
parents do not have stable, well-paying jobs.”
“We didn't hesitate the tears that rolled down our eyes as we were
forced to acknowledge that we were now homeless.”
176
Failure
“My freshman year I ran for class president and although I had never
been part of any leadership organization I was still determined to
campaign and get involved. Unfortunately, I did not win.”
“My recent failure was a major setback but I didn't realize it was
setting me up for a life lesson.”
30
Immigration
“I've helped my parents out in job applications, bill payments, or any
important paperwork. When it came to meetings or doctor
appointments I was always there serving as a translator.”
“It is a big challenge for me to enter US high school and adapt to the
new circumstances. When firstly transferred from China, I strived to
enter this new community without holding back. In my mind,
American juveniles are willing to accept new items. I was so
desperate to understand them.”
295
Mental Wellness
“Throughout sophomore year I suffered from depression. I gained
weight, my grades slipped dramatically, and I didn't have the
motivation to even leave my bedroom.”
“Anxiety provokes chronic pain and scars; it's a challenge that an
individual should overcome accompanied with others.”
273

22
Physical
Health/Ability
“Seering pain suffocates my lungs with each breath. The only
thoughts to cross my mind, however, are to score that winning goal,
finish that race, or complete that last assignment. When breathing
becomes a labor, simple tasks like walking or even talking become
strenuous.”
“My oldest brother, the once D1 lacrosse player, ASB president, and
one of the smartest I people I know fell victim to opioid addiction.”
405
Sports
"Whoosh" was the sound of the wind as I had kicked the soccer ball
to win the game, but it unfortunately went straight to the goalkeeper's
hands. My confident world came tumbling down as if it had never
existed.”
“Accustomed to being a team leader and consistently contributing to
the team, I thought that my excellence would continue into high
school. Boy was I wrong.”
166
Time/Scheduling
Pressure
“Playing two sports while enrolled in challenging course work
became my life after freshman year of high school. I had to learn to
balance sports, academics, and family because there was not enough
time in one day.”
“My senior year was the year I decided to really challenge myself
while my peers decided to take it easy. I signed up for four AP classes
while my other peers signed up for one or two. With this challenge of
taking four AP classes eventually something bad was going to
happen. I ran into many bad grades in those classes, not because they
were too hard, but because it was overwhelming the studying I had to
do.”
182
Travel
“During my junior year of high school, a time when I should
have been maximizing AP courses here at home, I chose a different
challenge. I chose to study abroad.”
“Looking back to when I first got off the airplane with two suitcases
that was as big as I was, I can say that it was the biggest challenge in
my life. However, I can confidently say that I successfully overcame
my challenge and significantly grew from it. Living away from home
at such a young age brought many challenges.”
34
The frequency of each primary challenge is related to the topical breadth within them. Relatively
infrequent descriptions of discrimination were largely limited to experiences of racial and gender
discrimination (“...I was just another dark face destined to be a negative statistic”) or reflections
upon one’s own bias or societal discrimination (“This challenge, being unable to digest why

23
people are prejudiced”). The repertoire of challenges concerning the affective realm, on the other
hand, is quite broad. They took the form of either personal struggles (“I began to realize I had
lost a significant amount of confidence in myself”) or interpersonal challenges (“being
disregarded by my friends”).
As Griswold’s cultural diamond suggests and as cultural sociologists have long argued
(Bernstein 2003; Bourdieu 1990; DiMaggio 2018), students’ social contexts likely instantiate in
personal narratives and linguistic expressions, whether subtly or explicitly. While we remained
grounded in the data and developed the codebook without the expectation of identifying class-
inflected types of challenges, the fourteen primary-challenge metacodes clearly exhibit potential
relationships with social class. Divorce and family instability, job loss and income volatility, and
adverse health problems all correlate negatively with income (Western et al. 2012).
Correspondingly, we might predict that essays coded as Domestic Instability, Economic/Material
Insecurity and Physical Health/Ability skew toward applicants from lower income backgrounds.
In other words, we expect that applicants author narratives derived from their social contexts,
and as such, income-stratified challenges are a likely result.
Close readings of the essays surfaced evidence of such stratification. Some categories, like
“sports,” were rife with narrations that suggested comfortable socioeconomic standing. Take for
example the following essay about an applicant’s initial experiences on a swim team:
Swim trunks were not a good idea. Swim trunks were most definitely NOT a good idea. My
floral-print knee-length suit stood in sharp contrast to the Speedo briefs upperclassmen wore.
This was my first day as a freshman on the swim team. I joined because I love the beach:
relaxing salty breezes, warm sun, and soft sand. Standing there, I looked more ready to grab a
boogie board and catch waves than compete. In a whirlwind, we were off, and I was in the water.
Coach separated me from the others and brought a senior girl over to teach me some basics. I

24
floundered to imitate her flip turn and came up sputtering. Two minutes in, and I was already
spectacularly demonstrating inadequacy. My next few weeks of practice were all governed by the
same principle: try not to drown. I had mixed results. Each day after practice, I staggered to my
mom's car and begged her to stop on the way home for food. Food was the only means to revive.
A wrap, and an entire box of s'mores flavored poptarts: these were my lifeblood. I could struggle
to stay awake two more hours. I had to fight the call of the reclining chair in our family room
and do my homework. Balancing my new sport while earning top grades is one of the greatest
challenges I have ever faced. Swimming is that exhausting. Months of practice passed and
eventually I improved. Sheer willpower propelled me through that first season. I finished in the
best shape of my life and as a member of a very close and positive community. Now, as a senior,
I am the captain and one of the strongest sprinters on the team. Swimming teaches me
endurance. All the miles in the pool shape my confidence and resolve, and I've translated these
lessons to my academic performance because I've expanded my capacity to focus, endure, and
keep working long after I am ready to stop.
This account details many of the trappings of an upper-middle class upbringing: extracurricular
sports requiring costly facilities (a swimming pool), a mother available for pickups and dropoffs,
favorite foods and a home commodious enough to include a family room. The narrative suggests
a way of life described by Annette Lareau’s (2003) term “concerted cultivation.” Though the
essay makes no explicit reference to wealth or income, cues about socioeconomic context are
sprinkled throughout the essay. By contrast, the following essay (which we coded “domestic
instability”), includes more overt references to class:
My mother had me when she was in her third, but final year of high school. Yes, my mom
graduated in three years. My biological father at the time already had a son and wife so me and
my mom weren't exactly in the picture. So my mom had to find me a caretaker for me while my
mom worked days and nights, two sometimes three jobs, was tough for my mom. I went to many
houses as a child and had many people take care of me. Also two men also came into mine and
my mom's lives. Growing up till pretty much fifth grade I lived out of a backpack. I would stuff
clothes and other special belongings I had into my backpack and go visit my family. I would go
visit my dad. Then go visit my step dad that raised me when I was a child. He has been a good
father for what I can remember and I have siblings that stay there as well. Then I would go stay
with my grandma, aunts, and uncles. Living out of a backpack growing up taught me to be true
to myself, see life from different perspectives, try and keep negativity away from me, and that I
really only got myself. I learned to stay true to myself by being alone most of the time on my way
to another family to stay with. I would feel neglected and always wonder why me? But, through
this I learned that only I know who I am and I won't let people define me if they don't completely
understand my story. By staying with other families I learned many customs and traditions. I
learned that not everybody lives the same and shouldn't be ignorant and believe people do. Also
by doing this I would be down a lot so I had enough negativity around me. Through all that

25
negativity I couldn't allow myself to believe that life is negative and I wouldn't allow others to
feel life was negative so by that I would help many people out.
A mother’s multiple jobs, “living out of a backpack,” and constant moves between various
family members’ homes are problems engendered by economic precarity.
Yet despite the differences in content, both essays follow a similar narrative structure. They both
are retrospective and autobiographical, concluding with life lessons learned through hardship.
This similarity in structure was common across the entire reading sample, affirming the influence
of genre conventions on authors seeking to narrate a wide range of experiences. We take this as
further evidence of the paradoxical character of merit narratives: despite their topical
heterogeneity, they evince a formal similarity.
The intent of Study 1 was to investigate the breadth of merit as it was performed by State U and
its applicants in interactions represented by the horizontal axis of Griswold’s diamond. Findings
revealed considerable breadth in conceptions of merit, formal similarity among essays, and
variation in signals of the socioeconomic circumstances of applicant authors. Copious qualitative
empirical research (Lamont 2000; 1992; MacLeod 1995) and recent quantitative inquiries
(Alvero et al. 2020; Kirkland and Hansen 2011) would lead us to expect a clear relationship
between authors’ class backgrounds and the content of submitted essays. In the next section, we
pivot to investigating the vertical axis of the cultural diamond, employing quantitative analyses
to discern the extent to which authors’ class situations are related to essay content.

26
ESSAYS AND SOCIAL CONTEXT
Are some essay topics the exclusive province of affluent applicants or of those from modest
backgrounds? The answer to this question has implications for the utility of the application essay
as a tool for sustaining the legitimacy of the merit idea. If social class is transparently evident in
application essays, the essay requirement is potentially at hazard for delegitimation. Just as
standardized test scores have steadily lost legitimacy in recent decades as high scores are
increasingly recognized as directly correlated with social class (Furuta 2017; Grusky, Hall, and
Markus 2019; Lemann 1999), a strong correlation between textual performances of merit in
application essays and the social class of authors would provide evidence for future critics that
the essay requirement is yet another mechanism of inherited privilege in elite college admissions.
Yet if the relationship between social class and essay content is opaque, partial, and
unpredictable, the essay requirement might serve admissions officers as a bulwark against
critiques of class bias in their evaluations. In other words, the extent to which a corpus of
application essays is resistant to a class analysis is an index of essays’ utility as evidence in
support of the merit idea.
We pursue this line of inquiry in Studies 2 and 3 below, both of which take advantage of
information in our dataset linking application essays with the self-reported household income of
applicants. In Study 2 we use regression techniques to observe for any relation between
household income and applicants’ choice of topics in their responses to prompt #5 -- the
“challenge” prompt considered above. In Study 3 we leverage State U’s requirement that

27
applicants choose four essay prompts (from eight, represented in Table 1) and network-analytic
techniques to observe for any similar relation at a different level of authorial discretion.
Study 2: Household Income and Topic Choice
In Study 1 we derived fourteen (n = 14) mutually exclusive primary topics and coded a random
sample of essays submitted in response to Prompt 5, whose first sentence reads, “Describe the
most significant challenge you have faced and the steps you have taken to overcome this
challenge.” This coding strategy enables us to observe the topic of each essay in tandem with the
household income of its applicant/author. Figure 3 provides two visualizations of this
observation. The dot-and-whisker graph on the left side of Figure 3 reports the mean of reported
household incomes of the applicants in the sample who submitted essays with that topic (n =
3,519; error bars represent 95% confidence intervals). The bar graph on the right side of Figure 3
reports the proportion of each challenge relative to the overall sample, broken down further by
the proportion of authors writing to each topic who report incomes above, equal to, and below
the median RHI (reported household income) of the overall sample.

28
Figure 3: Income statistics by primary challenge (within Prompt 5). “Mean RHI per
challenge” (left) plots mean as points and 95% confidence intervals as whiskers. “Challenge
Proportion per primary challenge” (right) plots the proportion of essays assigned to each
primary challenge with respect to median RHI for the sample (n = 55,016): light blue for those
with below median RHI, white for those with RHI equal to the median, and dark blue for those
with RHI above the median.
These figures provide suggestive evidence of correlations between social class and topic choice
that are not sociologically surprising. Economic/material insecurity, abuse, domestic instability
and immigration appear to be topics chosen more frequently by lower-income authors; sports,
failure and travel by higher-income authors. Yet there also is noticeable class dispersion across
the fourteen topics. For example, about a third of essays about domestic instability were
submitted by higher-income authors. Well over half of the authors who wrote about
affective/interpersonal troubles were in the lower half of the income distribution represented in
our sample. Additionally, none of the fourteen topics are the exclusive choices of lower- or
higher-income authors. There are at least a few relatively well-off applicants who write about
economic/material insecurity, and a few non-affluent applicants who write about sports and
travel.

29
Method
Regression techniques enable us to expand upon these initial observations about the relationship
between topic choice and social class. We use a multinomial logistic regression model to predict
primary challenge using RHI. Prior to the multinomial logistic regression analysis, we tested
associations between each topic and RHI using standard logistic regression. We found that nine
of the fourteen topics have a statistically significant relationship (p < .05) with RHI relative to all
other primary challenges; estimates are reported in Appendix II. To communicate results, we rely
on estimates of the probability of an essay being coded as a given challenge conditional on RHI.
To efficiently display our findings, we focus on those challenges that showed some baseline
level of association with RHI. This descriptive strategy enables us to observe how challenge
topics change across the RHI spectrum.
Findings
Figure 4 depicts the visual representation of our findings from the multinomial analysis. The left
panel of Figure 4 displays the topics for which individual logistic regression results were
significantly correlated with applicant household income. As in the analysis above, many of
these associations comport with sociological intuition. Challenges of domestic instability,
immigration, and financial troubles are significantly more prevalent among lower income
applicants, while interpersonal/emotional problems, mental health issues, and challenges related
to sports and travel are associated with higher RHI.

30
Figure 4: Multinomial logistic regression results. Probability of primary challenge by RHI (Log
scale). The figure on the left visualizes primary challenges found to have statistically significant
relationships with RHI (p<.05). The figure on the right visualizes primary challenges not found to
have significant relationships with RHI.
Yet the regression analyses indicate the partial independence of applicants’ class backgrounds
from their conceptions of what qualifies as a challenge meriting consideration by academic
gatekeepers. After coding more than 3,500 essays, we do not find evidence that household
income has strong effects on students’ choice of topics under physical and academic difficulties,
deaths of friends and loved ones, time and schedule dilemmas, and experiences of
discrimination. This suggests a substantial pool of experiences that are translated into merit
narratives by applicants across the class spectrum.

31
Taken together, the findings presented thus far comport with our assertion that the academic
gatekeepers who write essay calls, and those who respond to those calls, have broad but
nevertheless discernible conceptions of what falls within merit’s purview. Just as theories of
cultural production would predict, the class background of applicants is evident in the corpus of
essay texts. But by no means are these accounts of merit reducible to the social context of their
authors.
“Significant challenge” is but one of eight prompts offered by State U, and its popularity among
applicants may suggest its exceptional populism as well. As a further empirical test of our theory
about the democratic character of merit’s performative production in college essays, we take
advantage of the fact that applicants to State U each were obliged to submit multiple essays.
Study 3: Household Income and Prompt Choice
In 2016 State U provided eight potential essay prompts. Applicants were asked to write
individual essays responding to four of the prompts (See Table 1). This protocol enables us to
observe another potential relationship between social class and performances of merit in essay
submissions. To wit: do applicants’ prompt choices vary systematically with household income?
The answer to this question provides an index of the class stratification of merit performances.
On the one hand, if affluent applicants perform merit substantially differently than non-affluent
applicants, that would be evidence of a stratified culture of merit as well. On the other hand, zero
correlation between household income and prompt choice would be evidence of an egalitarian
culture of merit: it would suggest that rich and poor applicants alike think about merit, and
strategize to perform it, similarly.

32
As above, we begin with a simple visual description of the relationship between (individually)
chosen prompts and household income in Figure 5. In this figure we order the eight prompts by
the average household incomes of those who chose each prompt as one of their four for
submission, with the lowest average RHI are at the top of the figure. The graph to the left
indicates a rough tripartite clustering, with four prompts in a mid-range RHI grouping and two
prompts both below and above this middle cluster. The four prompts in the middle cluster fall in
a band separated by less than $2,500 (8. “why I stand out,” 6. “academic inspiration,” 3. “talent
or skill,” and 1. “leadership experience”). The lower-income cluster includes the only two
prompts which have mean RHI below $100,000 (5. “significant challenge” and 4. “educational
barriers and opportunity”). The higher-income cluster comprises two prompts where mean
applicant RHI exceeds $110,000 (7. “school & community service” and 2. “creative side”).ii
Once again, this pattern comports with sociological intuition: lower-income applicants are
somewhat more likely to write about “challenges” and “barriers,” while more affluent applicants
are more likely to write about their “creative side” and “service” to school and community. We
might expect young people from relatively less advantaged backgrounds to talk about problems
overcome, and those from privileged backgrounds to opt for merit performances that emphasize
self-actualization and service to others (Jack 2019; Khan 2012).
Yet there also is considerable class heterogeneity in prompt choice. Consider the bar graph on
the right side of Figure 5, which reports the proportion of applicants writing to each prompt
relative to the overall sample, as well as the proportion writing to each prompt who report

33
incomes above and below the median RHI of the overall sample. Again we observe that no
prompt is the exclusive province of a single class group. This figure also suggests a further
dimension of performative complexity, specifically: a greater proportion of above-median RHI
applicants write to “significant challenge” than to “creative side;” the proportion of below-
median RHI applicants writing to “educational barrier or opportunity” is about the same as the
proportion writing to “leadership experience.” In sum, this simple description suggests that State
U’s four-essay call gives applicants across the class spectrum opportunities to draw on a varied
repertoire of merit performances. A network analysis enables us to pursue this further.
Figure 5. Income statistics by prompt. “Mean RHI per prompt” (left) plots mean as points and
95% confidence intervals as whiskers. “Proportion of applicants per prompt” (right) plots the
proportion of students who responded to each prompt with respect to median RHI for the
sample (n=55,016): light blue for those with below median RHI, white for those with RHI
equal to the median, and dark blue for those with RHI above the median.
Method
We construct a network projection representing the relationship among the prompts chosen by
55,016 applicants in the 2016 study year. The projection connects two prompts if an applicant

34
wrote essays for both of them. Nodes represent the eight prompts put forth by State U, and
incorporate two elements related to this summary data: size, which represents the number of
essays written to a prompt, and color which represents the average income of applicants that
chose that prompt. Edges also feature two elements: thickness, which represents the number of
individuals who chose prompt pairs, and color, which represents the average household income
of the applicants who wrote to each prompt pair. We manually composed the spatial structure of
the network along a horizontal axis representing mean reported household income, with prompts
associated with lower household income placed to the left and higher income to the right.
Findings
The results of our projection are presented in Figure 6. Prompts associated with lowest RHI are
significant challenge and educational barrier or opportunity (the red nodes to the left). Prompts
associated with highest RHI are creative side and school or community service (the dark green
nodes). The four remaining prompts have incomes between high and low RHI: academic
inspiration, leadership experience, why I stand out, and talent or skill.iii
As the graph proceeds
along the horizontal axis we observe an expected relationship between prompts signifying
hardship and lower incomes, as well as a relationship between leisure and abstraction and higher
incomes.iv
We also see choice patterns suggestive of class inflection. Among students who wrote
to the challenge prompt (lowest mean income), fewer chose also to write to creative side (highest
mean income) than any other prompt (10%). On the other hand, those who wrote to creative side
most often also wrote to academic inspiration (19%) and significant challenge (17%). In
addition, two of the most jointly selected prompts by authors of significant challenge and
creative side were shared: leadership experience and academic inspiration.

35
Yet once again, it is hard to look past the complexity and heterogeneity of prompt selections. It is
telling that all prompts share at least a few ties of joint selection with all others. State U’s
requirements invite -- indeed oblige -- applicants to put on an ensemble of merit performances.
Applicants respond in turn by drawing on a very wide repertoire of substantially shared cultural
material. In fact, a comparison of the co-occurrence rates of the students who selected the prompt
with the lowest mean RHI (significant challenge) and those who selected the prompt with the
highest average income (creative side) are remarkably similar, with the compared co-occurrences
never differing by more than 3 percent.

36
Figure 6. Undirected network graph of prompt combinations. Nodes represent each of the eight
prompts. Edges represent essay pairings among individual applicants. The color of the nodes and
edges corresponds to average income, where red is low income and green is high. The size of
nodes and edges correspond to the frequency of essays written to each prompt and the frequency
with each pair was chosen (respectively).
DISCUSSION
We have argued that application essays constitute a genre of cultural production that serially
enlists young people in collaborative performances of merit’s variety and wide distribution
throughout the class structure. In contrast with prior sociological and historical accounts of
selective admissions, which have emphasized the role of academic and cultural elites in evolving

37
conceptions of merit, we focused on the diffuse activity of legions of rank-and-file admissions
professionals, and of applicants to selective schools (and their parents and guidance counselors
and admissions coaches) who submit essays describing their own merit to admissions-selective
schools. Integrating classical sociological insight on ritual with cultural-sociological approaches
to genre and theories of performativity, we conceptualized the merit idea as sustained by a
carefully orchestrated annual activity of call and response that reliably produces millions of merit
narratives each year. In this conceptualization, the college application process is productive of
actions and instantiating artifacts that generate fealty to a broad and inclusive conception of merit
in American educational culture.
Utilizing a dataset comprising thousands of applications to a selective public research university
system, we found a delimited but nevertheless wide variety in what applicant authors consider as
representations of merit worthy of consideration by academic gatekeepers. We also found class-
correlated patterns in prompt choices, with applicants from lower-income households more often
writing to prompts associated with hardship (challenges, barriers) and those from higher-income
households more likely to elect prompts associated with abstract traits (leadership, creativity).
While our investigation was limited to a single school, the basic protocol of State U’s application
process is generally shared across most admissions-selective schools in the US (Hossler et al.
2019).
Submitted essays are the material artifacts of a carefully orchestrated and widely distributed
cultural production system. Applicants contribute essential labor by selecting prompts and
composing texts. Our qualitative analyses of essays submitted to a single prompt (“Describe the

38
most significant challenge you have faced…”) revealed an astonishing variety of responses: 85
distinct topics. Because this work gets done in particular social contexts and in light of different
life experiences, aggregate responses betray systematic variation. As in other domains of cultural
production -- popular music (Lena 2012; Peterson 1997), product design (Molotch 2005), and
interior decor (Halle 1994), for example -- essays bear traces of the class situations of their
makers. Indeed, our quantitative analyses revealed patterning by class, with affluent applicants
more likely to invoke circumstances that imply expendable income (travel) and concerted
cultivation (organized sports), and poorer applicants more often invoking circumstances
associated with precarity (economic insecurity, abuse). Yet, other challenges, such as mental or
physical health and personal failure, were invoked about equally by students above and below
the median household income in our reading subsample. Further, none of the challenges invoked
were class-exclusive. These results lend evidence to our argument that the essay production
system elicits great breadth of topical output across demographic circumstances, a surprisingly
democratic outcome in a system that necessitates exclusivity and stratification.
Our argument is that the merit idea is collaboratively constructed through a routined ritual
exchange. As in other rituals of call and response, meaning is made through enactment: “Both
the call and the response are part of the participants' cultural knowledge; the speaker and the
audience supply cultural understandings that facilitate the creation of meaning in the…text.”
(Johnson 1994, 411). And while colleges maintain greater authority as the gatekeepers of
admission, the agency afforded to applicants as authors of meritorious accounts is a critical part
of the process: applicant authors are the “bottom-up” co-producers of the merit idea. In making

39
these contributions, applicants contribute to the fundamental legitimacy of the entire evaluative
regime.
Though we do not have means to empirically observe it, we suspect that the legitimacy of merit’s
variety is sustained, in part, by the absence of ratings or rankings of essay quality that might
otherwise discipline production to a few formats and topics. In contrast with metrical traces of
merit such as grade point averages, high school class rank, test scores, and athletic win records or
rankings, written essays are hard to commensurate (Espeland and Stevens 1998). Compared with
these measures, the essay form invites a presumption of uniqueness: of experience, expression,
or point of view. By making essays required components of applications, right alongside more
standardized reports of merit, selective colleges call out a strong message about merit’s variety
and complexity to each and every person seeking admission. Applicants’ responses enact
deference to the merit idea and contribute to an ever accumulating stock of cultural objects
instantiating that idea.
We imagine that some readers might expect us to acknowledge a much more instrumental theory
of the value of essays, namely, that their primary purpose is to inform admissions officers’ final
decisions on applications. However intuitively appealing this theory may be, it largely awaits
empirical investigation. Admissions offices fiercely guard the secrecy of their evaluative work
and have to date largely succeeded in maintaining the mechanics of evaluation in a black box. To
our knowledge, the only observational study of holistic review in the scholarly literature is by
Stevens (2007), who found that “the numbers” describing applicant characteristics such as test
scores, high school grade point averages, curricular difficulty, and athletics ratings were the most

40
important components of applications, with quantifiable household characteristics such as
parents’ social prominence, legacy status, and record of donations important second-order
factors. He found that personal essays had negligible to no role in admission decisions and were
rarely invoked in committee reviews. While this evidence is only from a single school, it at least
suggests that there may be utilities of essays additional to their instrumental value in rendering
decisions.
Our theorization of essays as productive of the merit idea perfectly comports with the secrecy
surrounding the mechanics of admissions decisions. The fact that almost no one outside the
carefully guarded doors of admissions offices really knows just how -- or even if -- application
essays are included in evaluative protocols only re-enforces faith in merit as a broad idea.
Because applicants cannot know for sure just what evaluators are seeking from essays, neither
can they know if their own performance of merit is sufficient. Applicants certainly learn if they
are or are not admitted, but they cannot know precisely why.v
In addition to protecting the
discretion of admissions offices, evaluative opacity sustains the faith that all applicants have at
least some unmeasurable margin of merit, and that merit itself is hard to definitively specify.
Finally, even if future inquiries were to open the black box of evaluation and discover -- perhaps
even measure -- an instrumental role of essays in the production of admissions decisions, such a
finding would not counteract our general argument about the productive dimensions of the essay
requirement, and indeed of the college application process more generally. Regimes of
evaluation can be instrumental, productive, and ceremonial at the same time (Espeland 1998;
Lamont 2009; Posselt 2016).

41
Our work calls attention to the paradoxical inclusiveness of the application essay as a vehicle for
the production of the merit idea. There is now consensus that, in tandem with the steadily
growing bifurcation of the national class structure, the terms of selective college admissions have
had very large effects on American educational culture (Carnevale, Schmidt, and Strohl 2020;
Cooper 2014; Friedman 2013; Grusky, Hall, and Markus 2019; Reardon 2011). Admission to
selective schools has come to be widely regarded as high-stakes and fateful, an annual
tournament of merit with known winners and losers (Binder and Abel 2019; Deresiewicz 2015;
Markovits 2019). The work presented here reveals that at least one component of the admissions
machinery sustains the possibility of a more horizontal and porous conception of college access.
In its currently preponderant form, the application essay genre obliges schools and families alike
to participate in an officially inclusive ritual of college application. The idea of merit that is
jointly performed -- and, we argue, sustained -- by this ritual.
While the analysis presented here specifically investigates the relationship between merit
narratives and social class in the United States, future research on the implication of gender,
ethno-racial, organizational and cross-national variation in performances of merit would likely
yield rich insight. With its great variety of cultural traditions and demographic niches and an
exquisitely complex postsecondary ecology, we might expect merit narratives to vary
systematically by the characteristics of colleges and authors alike. For example: do applications
submitted to historically Black colleges, women’s colleges, or conservative religious institutions
betray distinct characteristics? Do merit narratives vary with the characteristics of high schools
their applicant authors attend? Finally, do merit narratives betray the patterned cross-national

42
variation evident in accounts of worth and worthiness demonstrated in prior cross-national
studies (Lamont 2000; 1992; Warikoo 2016)? Wherever large numbers of people are called upon
to narrate themselves, empirical pursuit of such questions is highly tractable.
CONCLUSION
Our analysis provides a novel explanation for sustained adherence to a costly and mysterious
evaluation protocol at the heart of the US college admissions process. Whatever roles they may,
or may not, play in decision outcomes, application essays instantiate faith in a broad and
inclusive merit idea. Yet as with any faith, this one can be challenged by articulate critics and
undermined by systematic evidence. Journalists and social scientists alike are producing texts
which seek to substantially reform, if not abandon, the inherited machinery of selective
admissions which currently sustains the merit idea described in this paper. Books with titles like
The Merit Myth (Carnevale, Schmidt, and Strohl 2020), Tyranny of the Meritocracy (Guinier
2015) and The Meritocracy Trap (Markovits 2019) combine fierce polemics with piles of
empirical data to argue for the considerable dissonance between American academic culture’s
prevailing idea of merit as independent of privilege and the final outcomes of competitive
admissions decisions which, they argue, increasingly favor the rich, famous, and well-connected.
Given the growing number and prominence of these counter-narratives, we suspect that
performances of merit in college application essays will become only more important to
academic gatekeepers, elicit more creativity and anxiety among college hopefuls, and receive
more scrutiny from social scientists.

43
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52
APPENDIX II
Individual Logistic Regression Models
(Primary Challenge and Log RHI)
Topic Coefficients
Economic/Material Insecurity -0.447*
Abuse -0.225*
Domestic Instability -0.321*
Immigration -0.233*
Time/Scheduling Pressure 0.035
Death -0.041
Mental Wellness 0.158*
Physical Health/Ability 0.0971
Academics 0.104
Discrimination/Stereotype 0.172
Affective Inter/Intra-Personal 0.184*
Sports 0.522*
Failure 0.570*
Travel 0.678*
*p < .05

54
APPENDIX IV
Tukey HSD Post-hoc Test For Pairwise Comparisons of Means
Prompt Comparisons Difference Conf Interval (low) Conf Interval (high) P Value at .05
Prompt 1 vs Prompt 2 11142.944 7874.2994 14411.5886 0.0000
Prompt 1 vs Prompt 4 -11440.262 -14489.5461 -8390.9779 0.0000
Prompt 1 vs Prompt 5 -16179.4842 -19036.6104 -13322.358 0.0000
Prompt 2 vs Prompt 3 -12197.399 -15625.8029 -8768.9951 0.0000
Prompt 2 vs Prompt 4 -22583.206 -25971.1442 -19195.2678 0.0000
Prompt 2 vs Prompt 5 -27322.4282 -30538.5069 -24106.3495 0.0000
Prompt 2 vs Prompt 6 -12686.956 -15903.673 -9470.239 0.0000
Prompt 2 vs Prompt 7 -6505.942 -10089.718 -2922.166 0.0000
Prompt 2 vs Prompt 8 -13546.981 -16946.0082 -10147.9538 0.0000
Prompt 3 vs Prompt 4 -10385.807 -13605.7526 -7165.8614 0.0000
Prompt 3 vs Prompt 5 -15125.0292 -18163.6286 -12086.4298 0.0000
Prompt 3 vs Prompt 7 5691.457 2266.0557 9116.8583 0.0000
Prompt 4 vs Prompt 6 9896.25 6902.6962 12889.8038 0.0000
Prompt 4 vs Prompt 7 16077.264 12692.3642 19462.1638 0.0000
Prompt 4 vs Prompt 8 9036.225 5847.576 12224.874 0.0000
Prompt 5 vs Prompt 6 14635.4722 11837.9017 17433.0427 0.0000
Prompt 5 vs Prompt 7 20816.4862 17603.6085 24029.3639 0.0000
Prompt 5 vs Prompt 8 13775.4472 10770.0323 16780.8621 0.0000
Prompt 6 vs Prompt 7 6181.014 2967.4974 9394.5306 0.0000
Prompt 7 vs Prompt 8 -7041.039 -10437.0377 -3645.0403 0.0000
Prompt 4 vs Prompt 5 -4739.2222 -7732.0901 -1746.3543 0.0001
Prompt 1 vs Prompt 7 4637.002 1371.5069 7902.4971 0.0004
Prompt 1 vs Prompt 8 -2404.037 -5465.6369 657.5629 0.2516
Prompt 1 vs Prompt 6 -1544.012 -4401.8567 1313.8327 0.7278
Prompt 3 vs Prompt 8 -1349.582 -4581.1931 1882.0291 0.9116
Prompt 1 vs Prompt 3 -1054.455 -4148.6369 2039.7269 0.9695
Prompt 6 vs Prompt 8 -860.025 -3866.1229 2146.0729 0.9889
Prompt 3 vs Prompt 6 -489.557 -3528.832 2549.718 0.9997

55
NOTES
i
The codebook, which includes definitions and descriptions of the fourteen meta-codes as well as a listing of the
eighty-five sub-categories, is attached in the Appendix I.
ii
We conducted an ANOVA test for difference in means which was significant at the .0001 level. Further Tukey
post-hoc comparisons between group means provided additional evidence for these three clusters. The results can be
found in Appendix IV.
iii
Statistical evidence for these groupings is presented in Appendix IV.
iv
Cultural sociologists might be tempted to associate personas with these clusters of choices, with hardship
narratives at the left of the network, exemplary citizenship narratives at the right, and earnest hard work at the
middle.
v
Although reports suggest some enterprising students are finding ways around this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/17/us/students-gain-access-to-files-on-admission-to-stanford.html

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