[Aunche]

My first thought is that maybe they didn't like your college essays. The funny part is that college essays are the most obviously biased towards the privileged. Poor people can't afford touring colleges, so their "why this college" essays can't be as specific. Meanwhile, the rich can pay someone to ghost-write their essays.

[csa]

> Poor people can't afford touring colleges, so their "why this college" essays can't be as specific.

The "why this college" essay can trivially be addressed by looking through the university website.

Most applicants don't even do this.

A simple formula for this essay is:

- $APPLICANT has a demonstrated interest in $TOPIC(S).

- $ELITESCHOOL has $RESOURCES about $TOPIC(S) that $APPLICANT would like to explore.

This can obviously be iterated, expanded, and refined, but that's the basic formula for knocking it out of the park on that sort of essay.

Touring colleges has little to no impact on this essay.

Ghost-written essays also come across as shallow unless the parents also pay off teachers to write recommendation letters that corroborate the BS. It happens, but it's not common.

[Aunche]

> Most applicants don't even do this.

> A simple formula for this essay is:

Sounds like a perfect job for a talented ghost writer. The problem with college websites is that only maybe 5% of is actually useful for essay writing. The rest is meaningless generic fluff. College tours allow you to experience some quirks of the school that you can sprinkle in to make your essay more interesting.

>Ghost-written essays also come across as shallow unless the parents also pay off teachers to write recommendation letters that corroborate the BS

You're comparing strong student with a modest background to a weak student from a privledged background. For students of equal ability, privledged ones have much better access to resources for writing a good essay. As far a recommendations go, that's also highly biased towards elite private schools. They have much smaller class sizes, so students are able to form much closer relationships with their teachers and teachers can write more personalized rec letters.

I suspect that you're greatly overestimating your BS-detecting abilities, which makes sense because you'd otherwise be hopelessly paranoid and cynical. My wife used to work part-time editing essays at a large college-consulting service, and it definitely helps. For example, simply by writing a lot of essays, you gain an intuition about how much you're able to BS without sounding fake. On their own, students are much more likely to overshoot or undershoot.

As far as my personal experience goes, my approach towards college essays was to write raw, avant-garde essays that obviously signal my personality. My writing skills weren't strong enough to make this work, but I could rely on the adults around me, a few of whom were alum at prestigious universities to refine the drafts into something that was actually coherent. I definitely couldn't have done this if I were from a poorer background.