650 Words is not Enough: Web Event 2

About this time last year, I was being considered for the Posse scholarship. If I was awarded the scholarship, the Posse office in Houston would train me in workshops for developing leadership skills and then pay my tuition at Bryn Mawr for four years. And what was the purpose of this scholarship? In the Posse Foundation’s mission statement, they say they have three goals:

“1. To expand the pool from which top colleges and universities can recruit outstanding young leaders from diverse backgrounds.

2. To help these institutions build more interactive campus environments so that they can be more welcoming for people from all backgrounds.

3. To ensure that Posse Scholars persist in their academic studies and graduate so they can take on leadership positions in the workforce.”

When I got the scholarship, I was in the unique position of having to explain why a white Jewish girl was being offered money to diversify Bryn Mawr’s campus. Many of the other people with whom I’d been competing for my position in the program and who had assumed they had been rejected because they were not “diverse” (read: non-white) enough demanded an explanation.

Luckily for me, the Posse foundation takes more than one part of a potential scholar’s identity into account when choosing from their pool of candidates. I wanted to write this paper on considering intersectional identities in the college admissions process mostly because I see their work as a practical example of the way institutions can diversify without compartmentalizing the complexity of identities.

The standard college admissions process usually starts with you filling out the Common App, which asks you questions about your family, grades, financial situation, extracurricular activities, and job experience, and then has you write a personal essay responding to one of five generic prompts. Some schools also require supplemental essays and/or fees from around $10-$80 that may be waived if your financial situation is considered dire enough that you cannot afford to pay this fee. This process reduces a college’s candidates to which boxes they check on a form: they are judged by their position in our country’s social/economic strata. Standard admission policies attempt to gauge your success at school from the way you look on paper - which identities you fit in and which you don’t, how productive you have been judged in the past without any context as to what you were experiencing during that time.

However, the Posse Foundation considers each applicant holistically and gets to know them from more than just words on a page. The Posse foundation conducts what they call a Dynamic Assessment Process to select its candidates out of the students nominated for the process. This process whittles down the number of applicants to a group of ten students per school through a large group interview where students are split into smaller groups and are observed as they accomplish certain tasks, such as completing puzzles or leading micro-lab discussions; a one-on-one interview with a Posse staff member; a final smaller group interview after which about half of the candidates will be eliminated; and going through the standard Common App college admissions process for your selected college. In all of the interviews you are expected to be truthful and as open as possible about anything you have struggled with in your past or present circumstances. They make an effort to get to know the student and take time to understand each applicant’s background. Posse does judge you dynamically - they look at the way you have grown and will grow, and how you respond to change. For instance, if a candidate had experienced poverty as a young person in a way that affected their education, but was in a wealthy tax bracket at the time of college admissions, they would be judged as a person from that wealthy tax bracket by a standard admissions process, but would be able to explain to Posse how their circumstances made them who they are today. Being able to tell that story brings a whole new dimension of your personality to the admissions process. There is simply not room on the Common App to explain yourself - even though they increased the word limit to 650 words. Posse does take into account that people from marginalized identities will have experienced institutional oppression, but tries to understand it from your point of view. For instance, as a queer person growing up in the South, I know I could have had a much more difficult educational experience than I did, and I expressed that when interviewing for Posse. They did not have me only say that I was queer and then extrapolate what they assumed to be my experience from that.

Posse’s alternative admissions process is formed with the purpose of bringing a truly diverse group of people to the table - I was told after I got into Posse that the diversity they were looking for was a diversity of ideas, opinions and backgrounds rather than specifically ethnic or racial diversity, and this has stuck with me through the whole process. Ideally, if everyone was admitted under these standards, students with many different paradigms would be able to express their points of view and diversify classroom discussion. The question would not only be what the college has to offer people who identify with marginalized groups, it is what these people have to offer the college.

I know Posse is not perfect, and I would not purport them to be so. They have problems with access - for instance, one needs transportation to make it to the interview, let alone all the required Pre-Collegiate Training meetings. However, unlike other institutions, they crip their assessment process in untraditional ways - they assess leadership capability and interpersonal skills in many different formats, such as in large discussions, one on one, presentations, written work, and more. Unfortunately, due to practical reasons, the time and pace for the DAP sessions are set.

The nonstandard admissions process, the ideal process, would look queered/cripped. It accommodates for individual difference, which may or may not be medicalized/standardized. A holistic admissions process such as Posse’s accepts that all identities are intersectional/nonstandard - everyone has a story to tell.