By now, several media outlets have covered the story about the Tennessee teen who got accepted to Yale with an essay about ordering pizza.
A few months ago, Carolina Williams made the unorthodox decision to write her personal statement about the joys of Papa John’s pizza delivery. What’s more shocking is that Yale ate it up — no pun intended.
Williams notes in her short essay that pizza “smells like celebration,” as she “loves to rejoice a happy occasion by calling Papa John’s.” She ends the essay with this over-the-top line: “Accepting these warm cardboard boxes at my front door is second nature to me, but I will always love ordering pizza because of the way eight slices of something so ordinary are able to evoke feelings of independence, consolation, and joy.”
The entire essay was absurd, but Yale clearly saw it as an opportunity to alter its reputation.
Boasting a miniscule 6.9 percent acceptance rate, Yale continues to be one of the most selective schools in the nation. Williams was one out of just 2,272 students accepted by the university this year. While Williams had several other qualifications — a high GPA, volunteer work, and other extracurricular activities — Yale made it clear that this essay ultimately set her above the fray.
Her admissions officer handwrote a personal message on her acceptance letter, and even sent her an email saying, “I laughed so hard on your pizza essay. I kept thinking that you are the kind of person that I would love to be best friends with.”
Who knew that “ability to be besties” was part of the acceptance criteria for Yale?
Like many universities, Yale has turned away from simply using a merit-based admissions process in an effort to become more “diverse,” placing a heavier weight on “feelings.” In other words, it’s not about what a student does, but about the emotions that they invoke through personal anecdotes. However, by reducing their admissions process to this level, they risk losing credibility as a prestigious university.
This entire story appears to be nothing other than a strategic PR move for the university, which has long suffered from being identified as a preppy, elitist school. Accepting an “average” kid who celebrates with pizza delivery is a thinly veiled attempt at showing that they are pushing to diversify their campus, not just racially, but socioeconomically as well.
After all, how many rich kids rave about ordering pizza?
As it so happens, Yale’s sappy acceptance note was in vain. In a brilliant turn of events, Williams chose to attend a more conservative alternative: Auburn University. The Princeton Review ranked Auburn University as having the most conservative student body of any college campus in 2013.
“I absolutely love Yale, but I felt so at home at Auburn,” she told HuffPost.
War Damn Eagle!
