It was a roadshow called Tufts: Who Gets In and Why that a couple of Tufts AO’s did at my son’s high school. It was open to the public. If you poke around the admissions website you might be able to find a schedule. Or you could call the office, say you heard about it and see if it’s happening at a high school near you.
While they did talk some about Tufts, the general insight into the process would be applicable to any competitive school.
The Tufts liveblog was interesting - it was the same era that there was an active AO on the Tufts forum here as well. I read the blog with interest. Link is indeed gone. Discussion here: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/tufts-university/821009-live-blogging-committee.html
For certain honors programs and competitive scholarships, essays can be a major determining factor. During interview weekends, my kids have been told how much their essays impacted their application.
Why would you think they don’t matter? What “evidence” is there of that?
Many eons ago, I was on the admissions committee for Columbia’s architecture school. (Grad not undergrad, but the contents of the folders were similar - transcript, GRE scores, 2 professor recommendations an essay and a portfolio.) Each folder was read by two professors and one student during lunch hour. We whipped through those things amazingly quickly. It really doesn’t take long to read a 500 word essay. (Well except for the one by the daughter of a famous architect who claimed she had no access to a typewriter and had the world’s worst handwriting. I got about half way through and decided she didn’t really want to be an architect, which in those days, at the very least, required a willingness to learn to write legibly. Her’s was the only one I did not read to the end.)
@mannysan1 - In my experience, not only the essays, but also the responses to supplemental questions matter a lot when a student applies to a very selective college which uses holistic criteria in its admissions decisions. Like many other’s mentioned above, my own letter of acceptance included a personal, hand-written note from the regional AO. She specifically mentioned my response to a supplemental question in which I included a reference to a blog (which combined both academic and ec interests of mine) that I’d been writing throughout high school. Again, as so many more experienced posters have written on CC, any written material on an application can weigh heavily in favor of, or against, a student’s application to a college/university that uses holistic criteria in the admissions decision,
Hence, why I made the comment about anecdotes and data. The entire thread is another example of some of the parlor games that exist on this site.
It is what it is. One can choose to believe or not believe whether a particular college reads essays or doesn’t. The colleges obviously will say that they do. The belief held by any applicant/parent certainly won’t change the outcome. But as another user suggested, one can certainly submit a crappy essay to test the hypothesis, and report the results back. 
If you have a 21 ACT and a 2.7 GPA, Harvard isn’t going to bother reading your essay. If you have a 34 ACT and a 4.2 GPA, that’s a different matter altogether.
I agree with SkiEurope…who really knows what happens in admission rooms? I would look at it another way…
the downside risk of submitting the student’s best essay is zero.
The downside risk of submitting a last minute essay could be denial of admission. I would spend time and effort on the essay just because of the potential downside risk.
We don’t know what happens in every admissions room, but unless you choose to believe that reporters who have been allowed to be flies on the wall, former admissions officers who have written books about the process, admissions officers who blogged the process and the numerous anecdotes of CC posters whose kids had essays that were quoted back to them are all lying, I think Occram’s razor tells you that at most selective colleges the essays, at least of viable candidates, are indeed being read.
The most honest thing I heard an admission’s officer say (GW for what that’s worth). They read every word. (Including all nine recommendation letters one candidate sent in - which they assured us was not a help, but they did read them.) The essays rarely make a difference one way or another as they just provide confirmation of what the teachers, the grades and the test scores were already telling them. Every once in a while an essay is so bad, that an otherwise viable candidate gets rejected, and every once in a while the essay is so beguiling they decide to take a chance on a borderline candidate.
Personally, I think my younger son was a bit of a borderline candidate at some of the places he was accepted to, and I think it is likely his essays made a difference, but of course I’ll never know for sure.
Let’s look at this using an hour invested approach.
School time 8 hours a day x 180 days a year x 4 years = 5,760 hours of high school
SAT / ACT Prep = 150 hours
Homework 3 hours a day x 180 days a year x 4 years = 2,160 hours of high school
So the whole high school investment is around 8,000 hours.
Now let’s say that you are trying to compare the delta of well-written responses to essays / free response questions. Let’s estimate a 16-hour differential per application and applying to a dozen school.
Only you can determine if a 200sh hour differential is worth it. I have the opinion that this is 2.5% of the time spent in high school and is definitely worth the time an energy. Others may think that this represents a work-month and feel it’s not worth the extra effort.
First, spend time figuring what it’s supposed to show. Many, many personal statements add nothing relevant to the review for that college. That’s a problem, for the highly competitive colleges.
During my freshman year in college, I was convinced that one of my profs was not reading our papers very thoroughly). So I inserted a phrase in the middle of my next paper that read something like “I doubt you’ll actually notice this, but here’s what I think:”
And yes, she read every word!
If you really don’t think colleges read your essay, just make up a bunch of gobbledygook and send that in. Good luck!
^My husband inserted an Aggie joke deep in an engineering paper in grad school. The professor caught it and was not impressed.
In the thesis for his master’s degree, our friend had a graph of stress versus strain. The usual units for strain are inches per inch. He labeled the axis as strain (light years per light year). Nobody caught that one.
^ Lol on the light years. That’s a lot of inches.
I’ve heard some tech writers tell stories of putting “If you read this, tell me and win a free lunch” somewhere in the midst of a document that needed to be reviewed. They say they rarely have to buy lunch. Much longer than a college essay, however. I’ve never done it; too worried about leaving it in accidentally.
If admissions were strictly according to stats submitted they would not need many employees since they could just hire someone to plug the numbers into the computer and use a cutoff to determine who gets in. Part of the application fee pays for the personnel who have to spend their time reading thousands of essays every cycle.
OP- do you also think colleges don’t spend time and effort in other ways? Orientation? Yes, they spend all sorts of time doing all sorts of things besides offering classes.
On the weekend, my kid received an email from his admissions counselor at one school – whom he had met at his high school info night – which said the admissions officer had just read his essay and how much he enjoyed it.
Other merit award letters included comments about his essay.
I’m convinced that they do read the essays. Why would they ask for them if they didn’t read them?
But y’all shouldn’t get too impressed by the anecdotes about the emails and handwritten notes commenting on your kids’ great essays. Because those comments coming back are just another marketing exercise. They’re not happening spontaneously. That “personal” touch seems to be increasingly common technique these days.
My kid was particularly impressed with the “personal” feedback coming from one school which culled out some things the kid wrote in their essays.
Kid was less impressed when I dug something out which indicated the school had sent out “personal” hand written notes to several thousand accepted students…
I’m sure I’m not the only CCer who’s a former tour guide. Visit admissions offices in February and March and see the empty donut boxes and zombie admissions officers…they’re up late reading something!
It’s worth mentioning that OP never implied that the essays aren’t read, but was challenging the depth to which they are scrutinized. A lot of posters seem to have missed the original premise.
If you comb through enough chance me and acceptance threads you will find a common theme–everyone and their parent thinks their essays are fantastic. (Just take a look at the posts on this thread!) Certainly that is the goal. Everyone should feel great about the work they submit. However the reality is that most essays are average, yet it seems that everyone that has posted received personal hand written notes or shout outs about how “special” their essay was. Hmmm.