This one goes out to all the seniors.
I don’t think I need to be the one to tell you that if you plan on attending college you should already be applying. Now this will not be some high and mighty piece on the importance of college applications because I guarantee that that is already drilled into your heads as it is. This is a piece about how needlessly complicated and frankly, anxiety- inducing a college application can be.
We’ll start with the most jarring issue. which is the complete lack of a uniform layout across institutions.
One cannot simply go into a college application and know exactly what they’ll need or what they’ll be asked. That combined with many schools completely forgoing certain aspects of one’s high school career can completely ruin someone’s chances of acceptance.
Take for example someone whose grade point average is really nothing to write home about, however they do many extracurricular activities and are the president of a club. Those look very enticing to colleges and could very easily make the difference between being accepted or rejected.
But if that person applies to a school like Ball State University, extracurricular activities are never mentioned in their application process, which to this hypothetical student could be a death sentence through no fault of their own. And that is just one drop in a sea of examples.
College applications cause so much needless stress that you’d imagine at a certain point that someone, anyone really, would go to the schools in question and ask for them to be improved. However. either that has never happened, which I find bafflingly unlikely, or academic institutions simply do not care about the effectiveness of the thing that determines what their students will look like in the fall.
It can feel at times like it’s, in fact, the opposite and that they seek to make the process as needlessly complicated and overwhelming as possible just to mess with the applicant on a fundamental level. And then after all of that, they have the gall to slap a $60 application fee on top as “collateral,” which is a whole other can of worms in the bait shop of for-profit academia. You’re not buying a house, you shouldn’t have to give a down payment to apply to some community college in the middle of nowhere.
All in all, college applications are needlessly overcomplicated and built to the detriment of the applicant. So why? My answer is simple; apply to colleges soon before they get harder to get into and don’t fall for any scams in the application process.
Good luck.
