The Question Nobody Prints on the Common Application

There's a question your kid has to answer on every college application.

It isn't on the Common App. It isn't in any supplement. No college will ever say it out loud. That's why I call it the invisible question.

Here it is.

Why should we take you instead of the 50,000 other kids who look exactly like you on paper?

I have this conversation with kids several times a week, most weeks of the year, and it's an uncomfortable one. I tell them: I know you're special. I know your mom and dad think you hung the moon. But to this college, right now, you are a dime a dozen.

That's not an insult. It's a description of the pile. Thousands of applications, similar grades, similar scores, similar activities lists. I call it the sea of sameness.

Getting out of it is not about deserving it more. It's marketing.

Let me tell you where I learned that.

Years ago, long before I did this for a living, I bartended at the Four Seasons in Boston. The retired founder of Avis used to come in about once a week. Eventually I knew him well enough to ask about the ad campaign, the famous one. "We're number two. We try harder."

I told him I never understood it. Why would you advertise being worse than Hertz?

He corrected me. We never said we were worse, he said. We said we were smaller. His ad people had it down as a weakness. He thought it could be a strength, because America loves an underdog, and smaller means scrappier, hungrier, more hustle than the behemoth across the street.

They took the one fact that looked like a liability and made it the entire pitch.

That stuck with me for 20 years before I had any idea I'd end up advising kids on college applications.

Because that is exactly the job.

Your kid has strengths and weaknesses. Every applicant does. The work is not pretending the weaknesses aren't there. It's deciding what to lead with, what to build the story around, and what to quietly let sit in the background.

Most families do the opposite. They present a complete, balanced, evenly weighted inventory of their kid. Every activity gets a line. Every interest gets equal billing. It's thorough, it's honest, and it reads as beige.

Beige is what the sea of sameness is made of.

An admissions officer reading your kid's file for seven minutes is not going to assemble the pieces into a compelling case on your behalf. That's not their job. It's yours.

So before the essays, before the activities list, before any of it, answer the invisible question.

Why you instead of the other 50,000?

If your kid can't answer that in a sentence, the application isn't ready. And no amount of polishing the prose is going to fix it.

Onward.

-Andy "We Try Harder" Lockwood

P.S. Working out what your kid should lead with is the single highest leverage hour you'll spend on this whole process, and almost nobody spends it. Inside the Lockwood Inner Circle we walk families through exactly that, using what we do with our private 1:1 college advisory clients. A dollar gets you in: lockwoodinnercircle.com