U.S.News & Word Report, December 20, 2004

 

Drowning in applications

 

by justin ewers

 

Jake Levy-Pollans remembers ex­actly when he finally got his life back. It happened on a Wednesday morning in early December— when he turned in the last bit of college application paperwork to his counselor's office. Since summer, Jake, a 17-year-old senior at Community High School in Aim Arbor, Mich., has been liv­ing one day at a time: Wake up, go to school, do homework, toil over college essays, go to sleep, repeat. Sure, he asked for some of it: He applied to 11 schools, a mixed bag of big and small—from the Universities of Michigan and Wisconsin to Brandeis, Georgetown, and Grinnell. Five required him to fill out their own applications, but since the other six accepted the Common Application, a standardized form recognized by more than 200 schools, he figured he could keep the paperwork under control.

That's when he hit his first snag. Even the schools with common appli­cations, he discovered, often required "supple­ments" brimming with additional questions and essays. He started filling out forms in August, thinking he had plenty of time. Three months later, he was still scram­bling to explain just how dynamic a guy he was and how much he de­served to be admitted— in a total of 12 different essays. Each application, he estimates, came to some 30 pages – from counselor recommenda­tion forms to short-an­swer questions to graded high school papers.

Every school seemed to have a different deadline. Some wanted supplements to be turned in with the application; others wanted them separately. (Near­ly all wanted money, too: He coughed up more than $400 in application fees.) Oh yeah, did Jake mention he was also trying to go to high school? "There are days when you go online [with friends] just to scream," he says. "Basically, you have to just become a machine—you become numb to the process."

As application season hits its peak and students scramble to meet the early January deadlines set by many elite schools, Jake is far from the only stressed-out high school senior – or high school parent, for that matter. But he's one of the lucky ones; he's done. For many of his classmates still wading through essay drafts and supplements to the supple­ments, yet another admissions question continues to loom: Why does applying to college have to be so complicated?

Swamped. Part of the answer, admis­sions gums say, lies in the sheer numbers of students striving to get into college. There are over 600,000 more 17-year-olds than there were 10 years ago, and more kids than ever have their eyes on college—3 of eveiy 4 schools reported a jump in apps last year. As elite colleges become more selective, seniors are applying to more schools to cover their bases: In 1983, only 10 percent of undergrade at four-year schools had ap­plied to six or more colleges; by last year the fig­ure had jumped to nearly 25 percent. With applica­tions flooding the system, the difficulty colleges have sorting through them has been com­pounded by grade infla­tion. In 1973, just 20 percent of students earned A averages in high school; 30 years later, fully 4? percent did. For many colleges, the best way to differentiate a mass of applicants whose stats look awfully similar is to require as much extra information as possible.

Yet as recently as three decades ago, there were high hopes for a simpler era. When the Common Application was in­troduced in 1975, many in admissions thought it would streamline and standardize what was already a chaotic process. Only 15 schools, most of them northeast­ern liberal arts colleges, used it in its first year, recognizing that they shared the same pool of would-be students. Applicants soon grew to love the simple four-page document, with its standardized personal and education information, short-answer question, and choice of one of six essays. So did a lot of schools. After that first year, the Common App saw a steady rise in popularity. Today, 255 schools use it, including, as of this year, five Ivies. "The process has become too com­plex," says Karl Furstenberg, Dartmouth's dean of admissions, explaining why his school, along with Harvard, was among the first of the Ivies to switch over. "I don't think you need to ask kids to write essay after essay after essay after essay."

Problem is, in recent years more and more of the schools that signed on to the Common App couldn't resist adding questions of their own. A decade ago just 33 percent of schools using the Common App required supplements—now the fig­ure is 63 percent. Some felt they had to do so because they were being barraged by Common Apps apparently fired off (often online) without a second thought. And others use supplements only to ask a handful of questions about whether the applicant is the child of an alum or has ever gotten into trouble with the law. But many contain extra queries that require a hefty commitment of time and effort. The result? Apply to a school like Kenyon Col­lege with the Common App, and after you've done your statement of purpose and short-answer question, you still have five more short-answer questions and es­says to get through before you're done.

To say students and parents are frus­trated is an understatement. "The sup­plements sort of ruined the general purpose of the Common Application," says Nicole Nash, a senior at St. Agnes Acad­emy in Memphis. "The only time you're saving is filling out your name more than once." Laments Katherine Lonsdorf, a senior at Verona Area High School in Verona, Wis., who is applying to seven colleges: "I thought I'd be able to write the same essay for everything." Susan Marrs, a veteran college counselor at the Seven Hills School in Cincinnati, used to reassure her students that they'd be able to recycle at least some of their essays. Then one of her counselees had to write 15 separate essays for 10 schools last year – none of which could be submitted twice. "As time has gone by," Marrs says, "I realized I'd better stop saying that."

Of course, the majority of schools don't take the Common Application in the first place, preferring to ask their own questions in their own way. And most are unapologetic about how difficult their applications make students' lives. "I've never been convinced this is supposed to be an easy process," says Ted O'Neill, dean of admissions at the University of Chicago, which pointedly calls its own form the Uncommon Appli­cation. "This is an important thing in life. It's like looking for a job or doing anything that has consequences. There's no reason to make it standard or uniform to make it easy."

The match game. Even some exasperated counselors admit that a complicated application process can be good for kids – up to a point. It forces seniors to think long and hard about where to apply, for one thing, and to be sure that the school where they're applying is a good match. Take Chicago's Uncommon Applica­tion: The school is famous for its off-the-wall essay questions, which this year include asking stu­dents what they would do with a superhuge jar of mustard. "When I tell students about this question and they wrinkle their noses and go 'yuck' or look at me like I had just spoken an unknown language, then I tell them that U. of Chicago would probably not be a good fit for them," says Karin Botica, an independent college consultant.

Ultimately, even the most vocal critics of colleges' myriad applications understand that the system is unlikely to change. "What do they want? They want to know how you think," says Jon Reider, director of college counseling at San Francisco University High School. "I'm not going to criticize it. But when they do these things, they don't realize the effect they have on kids." The bottom line may be simple: Ambitious students, already buried by schoolwork, could use a sim­pler process. Selective schools, on the other hand, continue to require ever more sophisticated ways to tell applicants apart. What's good for universities may not always be good for their students, and vice versa. But for the foreseeable future, at least, it looks like a seller's market. Which means, no matter how many relatives are in town for the holidays this year, it may be time for teens to get back to those unsent applications.

 

 

STRESSED. Michigan high school senior Jake Levy-Pollans spent months slaving over 12 different essays for 11 college applications.