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Through such admissions policies, colleges end up giving the nation's high school students crash courses in cynicism. They teach young people that money talks, fairness is for losers, who you know matters more than what you know, and some people are simply entitled to what others may never attain, no matter how hard they work.

Considering how much selective colleges and universities favor applicants who take such lessons to heart, should it surprise anyone that about half of all graduate- and professional-school students admit on surveys to having recently cheated?

Investors take note: MBA candidates have been found to be the biggest cheaters of all, with 56 percent admitting to having cheated in the past year, in a 2006 survey published by the Academy of Management Learning and Education. Many business schools have responded to the latest economic crisis by broadcasting their intent to beef up their ethics classes, but they might as well be promoting sobriety in a bar.

Historians of education say the Great Depression shook the nation's faith in its leadership and helped inspire many selective colleges to reform their admissions policies to do more to take in the best students and not just the best-connected.

Our latest economic crisis could inspire similar soul-searching and a renewed emphasis on meritocracy in higher education. But it also could have the opposite effect, prompting selective colleges and universities to even more heavily favor those applicants with cash and connections in an effort to repair their own finances.

If the recent devastation of their endowments should teach such institutions anything, it is that basing their admissions policies on the short-term pursuit of monetary gain is likely to cost them -- and the rest of American society -- dearly down the road.

The first challenge for the writer: picking a topic.

Any topic can work — or fail, Muth said.

"It shouldn't be an essay about community service. It should be about a moment of time," he said. "Start writing an essay about John who you met at a homeless shelter who talked to you about his life. Like any piece of good writing, then you're going to make that come alive.

The biggest problem for students, he said, is starting with too wide a focus. "By the time they get to the details, they run out of space," he said. "I'm all for cutting to the chase."

Hilary Brandenburg, who will attend New York University in the fall, wrote about her summer internship at fashion house Liz Claiborne in New York. "I used my experience as a way to frame myself and what I was interested in studying at the schools that I applied to," said Brandenburg, 18, of Washington, D.C.

"I had a lot of different topics I started," she said. "At school we were told to come up with a list of anything we thought would be interesting about ourselves. We went through a lot of workshops and they gave us prompts and then we had to think about ourselves."

She said her internship "was the easiest thing for me to write."

Brandenburg said her biggest frustration was keeping within the word limit. "In the end, it helped me refine what I wanted to say and it became more to the point," she said.