Do colleges even care whether students can write?

I don't know about anyone else, but I found this bit in the New York Times "The Choice" blog more than a little bit disturbing. Commenting on the all-important personal statement, Erica Sanders, a University of Michigan admissions officer, "stressed that writing style – something students may obsess over – is less important than 'psychedelic' three-dimensionality and shows of authentic personality.' We can fix that a student’s a comma fiend, that they don’t have verb-tense structure,' she said."

If Sanders were talking about, say, thirteen year-olds, I could understand. But we're talking about college here, and a pretty academically serious one at that. Even if most students can't recite a complete list of rules governing comma usage, they should at least be able to write competently and clearly.

I'm not entirely sure what Sanders means by "verb-tense structure" (the phrase strikes me as the academic equivalent of a Sarah Palin-ism), but presumably most seventeen and eighteen year-old applicants to a highly competitive college should have mastered basic subject-verb agreement and know better than to suddenly switch tenses halfway through a sentence simply because they feel like it. Those are things they should have learned well before even high school -- if they're still struggling with them in college, that's a problem.

"Psychedelic" and "authentic" are very admirable aims, but they're no substitute for basic skills once those students admitted based on personal factors actually get into the classroom and start writing papers riddled with errors. Perhaps Ms. Sanders should consider running some of her ideas about what makes a qualified applicant by some Michigan faculty members. Given that most of them are probably not grading on the "psychedelic" qualities of their students work, it would certainly be interesting to hear their take on things...