The spring before I applied to college, the guidance counselors at my private school herded our mostly white grade into the gym and told us that the Supreme Court was about to ban affirmative action. There was, however, a loophole: Though the court would no longer allow colleges to screen applicants for race per se, they would probably still be allowed to ask applicants how race had shaped their lives. My guidance counselors called it the identity question. Like most of the rest of my classmates, I started thinking about how to spin my whiteness into something more interesting.
I went through the application process again last spring, as a freshman, hoping to transfer. This time I found a new question: “Tell us about a moment when you engaged in a difficult conversation or encountered someone with an opinion or perspective that was different from your own. How did you find common ground?”
It’s known as the disagreement question, and since the student encampments of spring 2024 and the American right’s attacks on universities, a growing number of elite colleges have added it to their applications. Caroline Koppelman, a private admissions consultant, has called it the “hot new it girl” of college essays. There’s no evidence that civility mania will improve campus discourse, but it seems poised to widen the inequalities that already plague hyperselective college admissions.
The trouble is that the disagreement question — like much of the application process — isn’t built for honesty. Just as I once scrambled to demonstrate my fluency in D.E.I., students now scramble to script the ideal disagreement, one that manages to be intriguing without being dangerous. “Is there a possibility that there’s a great essay out there that writes about the state of Israel and takes a risk and it’s excellent and that kid gets in? Of course,” Joie Jager-Hyman, a former assistant director of admissions at Dartmouth College and the founder of College Prep 360, a private admissions consulting service, told me. “But the system itself is set up that it’s so hyperselective, and you never have to defend a ‘no.’”
Then again, maybe demonstrating one’s ability to delicately navigate controversial topics is the point. Perhaps the trick is balance? Be humble; don’t make yourself look too right. But you can’t choose a time when you were entirely wrong, either. Or should you tailor your responses by geography, betting that, say, a Southern admissions officer would be more likely to appreciate a conservative-leaning anecdote?
The emerging consensus in the application-prep industry is that it’s best to avoid politics entirely. “We strongly advise leaning away from anything incredibly controversial that might make an admissions officer uncomfortable,” Ms. Koppelman wrote. “Avoid those hot-button political issues!” Dr. Jager-Hyman, for her part, usually advises students to choose a topic that is meaningful to them but unlikely to stoke controversy — like a time someone told you your favorite extracurricular activity was a waste of time. It’s a difference of opinion but, as she puts it, “No one’s going to really disagree with you.”
This fall, an expanding number of top schools — including Columbia, M.I.T., Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt and the University of Chicago — will begin accepting “dialogues” portfolios from Schoolhouse.world, a platform co-founded by Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, to help students with math skills and SAT prep. High-schoolers will log into a Zoom call with other students and a peer tutor, debate topics like immigration or Israel-Palestine, and rate one another on traits like empathy, curiosity or kindness. The Schoolhouse.world site offers a scorecard: The more sessions you attend, and the more that your fellow participants recognize your virtues, the better you do.
“I don’t think you can truly fake respect,” Mr. Khan said. That’s the hope, anyway. But in the college process, you can gamify almost anything. Students, as ever, will find ways to hack the system. And the fortunate ones won’t have to do it alone: They’ll have online guides, school counselors and private tutors to help them learn to simulate earnestness.
If colleges are serious about addressing the breakdown of civil discourse on campus, they can’t — and shouldn’t — attempt to screen out incivility at the gate. They need to look inward. Undergraduate education too rarely puts students in a position where substantive disagreement is expected, facilitated and taken seriously. Instead of granting themselves more and more opportunities to tone-police admissions files, institutions should reinvest in disciplines like philosophy, history and political theory that teach people how to reason through disagreement and should equip faculty members to lead hard conversations constructively.
