As fall becomes winter, tensions among high school seniors runs high and morale takes a downward dive. Understandably so, given the current state of the college applications process. For more than a decade now, the issue of accommodating a more efficient application system for student use has been placed on a backburner. In the past, some online platforms like The Common Application and Universal College Application created sites that keep a student’s portfolio organized for several different colleges at a time in order to curb some confusion.
As fall becomes winter, tensions among high school seniors runs high and morale takes a downward dive. Understandably so, given the current state of the college applications process. For more than a decade now, the issue of accommodating a more efficient application system for student use has been placed on a backburner. In the past, some online platforms like The Common Application and Universal College Application created sites that keep a student’s portfolio organized for several different colleges at a time in order to curb some confusion. But even these websites can hardly be classified as easily accessible, and many colleges still refuse to utilize these online resources or integrate them into their selection process.
While it is reasonable to make this process rigorous so as to showcase our individual abilities, a majority of the process is repetitive and awkward. Questions are often the same, if not similar, and yet we eagerly answer every one of them repeatedly to satisfy each college’s’ requirements. Essays are extremely specific. So much so that, more often than not, any one essay most likely cannot be used for another. And, because colleges have no choice but to be more selective, seeing as there are more applicants due to increased pressure for higher education in the current job market, students are applying to more and more schools to secure acceptance.
Students are then pushed to a completely avoidable brink, as we drown in what seems like a expansive sea of personal essays, each with a distinct subtopic or maximum word count for that specific application just to make an already strenuous process as problematic as humanly possible.
All of these factors point to a solution in the form of simple solidarity.
Like the paths pursued by The Common Application and Universal College Application, a singular network that includes every college in the nation on one application would save students from facing a wall of email notifications about numerous different applications-in-progress or a mass of bookmarked pages at the top of their computer screens to keep from forgetting about that one application you started on a week ago but lost the URL for and forgot to finish.
There, a few harsher conditions to work under than an environment in disarray. Glenn Ebersole, strategic business thinking coach and Chief Executive of J.G. Ebersole Associates, advocated for the benefits of maintaining organization that “…you will be able to be more focused on what you want to achieve… you will be able to be more productive… you will be able to manage your time more effectively… you will be able to do your work more economically… you will be able to reduce the clutter in your workspace and reduce your stress levels.”
Basically, a little clean up can go a long way. The messy system we now rely on has the power to break rather than make an applicant’s chances.
Obviously there is only so much creating a single website to manage all applications can do and the cooperation of colleges to shorten this unnecessarily lengthy affair is necessary to any progression in regulating the chaos. But because many schools has so far been unwilling to compromise in lieu of preserving images of selectivity or exclusive academic prowess, reform does not seem to be in the foreseeable future.
