YouTube Goes to College

March 4, 2010 | Written by Ruth Shannon

As a hardened, wizened 23-year-old, I regularly shake my fists at young people who don’t know how easy they have it (“What do you mean everyone in your preschool class had their own laptop?  In my day …” etc.).  But my bitterness at having been born slightly too early to reap the benefits of a fully-computerized childhood reached a new height when I read the New York Times report last week that Tufts University has become the first college to solicit YouTube videos as optional supplements to its undergraduate application.

Nearly everyone who’s gone to college in the last few decades knows that applying to colleges is one of the hardest, most humbling, and consequential processes that occurs within the larger hard, humbling and consequential process of adolescence.  How do you get the admissions staff at your dream school to understand what you yourself know very well: that you are the smartest, coolest, best-looking, most interesting person who has ever existed?  Armed with only a stack of papers detailing your dubious contributions to your high school literary magazine, letters of recommendation from the teachers who maybe weren’t your favorites but were the ones you were least afraid to ask for a recommendation, and a couple of essays you’ve proofread so hard you don’t even know what they’re about anymore, you’re expected to make a lasting, favorable impression that stands out among thousands of students.

Enter YouTube.  Everyone loves it: the perennial time-waster, the medium that vaults Taiwanese teenagers and overweight housewives to their fifteen minutes of fame with equal momentum.

It’s no great surprise that Tufts, a top-tier university noted for its unorthodox essay questions (this year’s options include “Are we alone?” and “Kermit the Frog famously lamented ‘It’s not easy being green.’  Do you agree?”), is the first to give new media a place beside the traditional written essay.  It’s also no surprise that students have been eager to take advantage of the video option: about 1,000 of the 15,000 applicants for Fall 2010 have submitted links to their videos.

The videos are as various as the applicants themselves.  One student performs a rap about her recent jaw reconstruction surgery – through clenched teeth, because her jaw is still wired shut.  Another edits himself into an interview with James Lipton on “Inside the Actors Studio.”  Another builds a remote-controlled flying elephant and videotapes it flying around his backyard.  But whatever the subject matter, the videos all have one wonderful thing in common: they each showcase students being themselves from their own homes, speaking in their own voices, doing what they do best, and showing what makes them who they are.

The questions that come to this jealous college graduate’s mind – oh, to have been born in 1992 and spared the agony of trying to fit my academic personhood into a 9×12 envelope! – are: what does this mean for the future of college admissions?  And what does this say about the present wave of college applicants?

The second question is easier to answer.  Kids who are seventeen and eighteen in 2010 have probably never known a house without a computer inside it.  They probably learned to type before they learned (or instead of learning) to handwrite.  YouTube and Facebook have been staples of their lives since they were about twelve.  The first movie they saw in theaters was probably something like Independence Day (which doesn’t have anything to do with anything, but it makes you feel ancient, doesn’t it?).  In other words, it’s now totally reasonable to expect a teenager to pick up a camcorder (or their cell phone), create a one to two minute video that says something about him or herself, and upload it onto the web for the world to see (some of the videos, such as Amelia Downs’s performance of her “math dances,” have received tens of thousands of views on YouTube).

The answer to the first question is anyone’s guess.  In the Times article, Lee Coffin, dean of undergraduate admissions at Tufts, is careful to emphasize that the videos are optional and the written element of the application is still the most important.  Even if the supplemental YouTube video does become part of other schools’ applications (my guess is it will), it seems unlikely that it will replace writing entirely as a means of evaluating prospective students (as well it shouldn’t).  While some people may have reservations about the intrusion of new media into an institution as traditionally analogue as a college application (in an interesting letter to the editor appearing in the Times a few days after the Tufts article, a high school counselor from Mamaroneck expresses concern that the videos will be absorbed into the lucrative admissions industry, saying “Video producers and directors can now join private college consultants, SAT tutors and essay editors raking in high fees from families willing to pay whatever it takes to gain an advantage in the college admissions race.”), I think that including a video option is fair and realistic.  We all know that the kids who look best on paper are not necessarily smarter or more interesting or better community members than the kids who didn’t get the best grades in high school, or don’t happen to be as good at crafting short essays about themselves.  If the point of a college application is to give a student an opportunity to present his or her accomplishments in the best possible light, it makes sense to play to the very modern strengths of a new generation.

More from RFI Studios

• Cyberbullying: Who is Responsible? – Right Brain
• User Generated Media: The Movie! – Right Brain
• My new eTerm – Right Brain
• Who are you REALLY!? – Right Brain
• A Usability Disaster – Right Brain

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