HEIs around the world are introducing contextualised admissions that is selection procedures not only based on grades, exams or general aptitude tests but including the examination of personal data, ‘personal statements’ and, less often, interviews to evaluate non-academic factors (Bastedo 2021). This trend has notably been driven by policy pressures to reduce social and ethnoracial inequalities in access to HE. As a result, much of the research on this topic has explored whether consideration of these data makes admissions fairer (Boliver et al. 2015) and under which conditions (Bastedo et al. 2018; Boliver and Gorard 2020; Mountford-Zimdars and Moore. 2020). The focus of this presentation is different. Considering the increasing level of competition among disadvantaged and diverse applicants to gain access to selective institutions, it focuses on how they use the requested personal writings to ‘stand out from the crowd’ (Jones 2013) of similar students. In addition to exploring differences on the number of interests and activities mentioned and on students’ level of aspiration and HE plans, we consider two types of qualitative differences. We draw on Phil Brown’s (2000) distinction between three idealtypical principles of social organisation (‘membership’, ‘merit’ and ‘market’) to show the degree to which these students tend to present themselves as similar in their cultural interests, activities and aspirations to traditional elite students or to emphasize their scholastic or non-scholastic merit or to put forwards qualities and ‘talents’ rewarded in job markets (Brown and Hesketh 2004; Author 2023). We also focus on the degree of elaboration of these students’ ‘storytelling’ (Polletta et al. 2011) and the extent to which it highlights their disadvantage or diversity to justify benefiting from a compensatory institutional sponsorship (Grodsky 2007). We examine applications to Sciences Po, a selective French HEI that in 2021 introduced contextualized admissions for all candidates including those from disadvantaged ‘partner’ secondary schools who, since 2001, had been admitted through a special procedure called ‘convention education prioritaire’ (CEP). The latter are nevertheless still evaluated by a different jury, compared among themselves only and ranked in separate admission and waiting lists. Our interpretations are based on the analysis of the personal narratives of 100 candidates (20 ‘traditional’ and 80 CEP with equal proportions in each group of admitted and rejected applicants) out of a total number of more than 10 000 applications to Sciences Po’s Bachelor’s program in 2021, as well as of interviews with evaluators and admission officers.

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