Talking to my 17-year-old brother on the phone the other day, the call was all about one thing: college admissions. He had just gotten back from a research trip/apprenticeship in Churchill, Canada, where he was studying the effects of climate change on polar bears, and was wondering how to incorporate it into his essay on the application. He’s a cross-country skier, primarily, but didn’t want to write his essay about skiing because he didn’t think it was distinctive, didn’t think it would separate him from his peers in the eyes of the all-seeing admissions officer. I’m not inferring that my brother is insincere about where he spends his time and what he does; he came back from Canada inspired, as far as I could tell. It is more the feeling of the whole ordeal—the idea that, to get in to a school, the candidate must portray a brand of themselves, trying for a sense of cohesiveness and “spice” in who they are and how that is shown on the six pages of a college application.
This branding of self through admissions came to me while I was reading Joseph E. Davis’ The Commodification of Self and he was commenting on the “self-brand in order to stand out from the competition.” (pg 47) Davis argues that to stand out in modern times, you need to dumb down your real, multifaceted self, to a certain extent. You have to create your own brand, and the brand, by definition, is somewhat intangible—an image, or Debord’s spectacle. I think that this is manifested in various parts of life, but none so explicitly as in undergraduate admissions. Colleges are intentionally vague on their websites about who will gain entrance to their ivory towers—criteria such as “academic curiosity” and “a sense of self” are matched with what could be argued, equally subjective grades and standardized test scores.
With these muddled directions, and with their fantasy-castle college accepting 1 out of 10 applicants, it is no wonder that applicants turn to trying to make it as simple as possible for the admissions officers to see “who they are.” This involves trying to make applications more “smooth” in terms of readability and connectedness; college counselors advise trying to “send a message” with the application, sounding chillingly like the definition of brands today. Applicants put on their brand mask; my brother is a driven cross-country skier with a passion for the environment and saving the animals native to his home. This is not remotely all of who he is, of course, but it is what he is exuding. It is his comparison to his classmates; it is what he says when asked about what he is interested in doing for the rest of his life. If you wear a mask too long, you may not remember what your face looked like in the first place.
The other effect of this student brand competition is the quantification of un-quantifiable values. A person’s artistic, athletic and academic skills are transformed into exchange-values as they are stacked up next to extremely different individuals. Kids stack themselves up next to their friends, and enter the capitalist brand market of not valuing the uniqueness and integrity, the different use-values, of each person, but determine who is the best, in terms of being a person. My brother and I used to have a joke going—instead of one-upping each other in terms of a certain field of expertise, we would just say, “Yeah, but I’m better than you.” We’d always laugh at this, because we realized how ludicrous it is to compare one person to another, holistically. This is what the culture of self-branding, exemplified in the college admissions process, is trying to do—establish a monetary system for intrinsic human worth.
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