For college application essays, kids from Chinese family lacking one aspect: Christianity and society.
For Ivies, Giving is an important attribute of students.This is from Christianity.
To write essay to reflect this, you need to show real life examples. Many Chinese kids don’t deeply understand this.
Of course, this is mechanism to buffer class conflicts. And this giving thing actually means the kids can be next generation upper class to rule over lower class. But it must be politically correct. Very complicated skill to be learned.