90 seconds is not much time. It is barely enough time for a student to introduce herself, explain why an obscure hobby matters to her, or show the corner of the basement where she builds model airplanes. Yet several highly selective colleges have decided those 90 seconds may tell them something that hundreds of words and four years of accomplishments do not.
Brown invites applicants to submit a short video introduction and suggests subjects as ordinary as a family tradition, a favorite place or something that brings them joy. WashU offers a similar optional video and tells applicants that professional production is unnecessary. This is an interesting request from universities that already possess transcripts, recommendations, activity lists and carefully constructed essays. Apparently, after collecting all that information, they are still looking for the person.
I have watched college applications become substantially more polished over the past two decades. Students have better advising, sophisticated editing tools and, now, artificial intelligence capable of producing competent prose in seconds. The application contains more information than ever, but some of its signals have become harder to interpret. A beautifully constructed sentence once told you something about the person who constructed it; today, it may tell you considerably less.
That makes the ordinary nature of video prompts more revealing. Colleges already know who won the robotics competition and who founded the nonprofit. What is harder to discern is how those students inhabit the world: whether they are funny, intense, generous, curious, self-conscious or wonderfully obsessed with something nobody thought to put on the activities list.
This matters because admissions officers are not selecting accomplishments. They are assembling a community of roommates, classmates, lab partners, newspaper editors and people who will sit around dining -hall tables at midnight. Two applicants can look nearly interchangeable on paper and be entirely different people to spend four years around. For generations, admissions officers have tried to infer that difference largely from writing and recommendations.
Videos offers something slightly different: behavioral evidence. How does a student tell a story when there is no paragraph to revise? What makes her face change? What does he choose to show when nobody has asked for another accomplishment? These are imperfect signals, of course, but human beings have always made consequential judgments from them.
Students, predictably, are already learning to polish those too. There are scripts, lighting setups, multiple takes and discussions about which bedroom background communicates the appropriate degree of interestingness. Every new window into the applicant eventually acquires curtains.
That may be the real story behind the college video essay. For years, selective admissions rewarded applicants who became exceptionally good at presentation. Now that sophisticated presentation is available to almost everyone, its informational value is beginning to decline. The scarce commodity may no longer be polish, but evidence of the person underneath it.
Which leaves colleges in a peculiar position. After decades spent constructing ever more elaborate systems for evaluating applicants, some are finding value in asking a teenager to turn on a camera and talk for 90 seconds.
Marc is the author of Untangling the Ivy League, a best-selling guidebook on the Ancient Eight. He earned a BA from Cornell University and an MBA from University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Marc chaired the admissions ambassadors at Cornell and the admissions advisory board at UNC.
