Who Am I? A Hard Look at the Soul-Killing College Application Process

Many seniors experience a feeling of pending doom at the thought of college applications, and it’s not without reason. They have become monsters that consume every aspect of a senior’s life.

Before diving into the realm of what college applications are now, let’s look at what they used to be. Let’s take a typical mom of a high school senior; we’ll call her Jane.

When Jane was a senior in high school, she filled out her college applications by hand—with a pen and in one draft. Jane attended Dartmouth College and went on to Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Today, to get into Dartmouth or any other prestigious college, seniors go through hours of laborious editing of college essays, filling in countless boxes of “field required” and constructing the perfect response to the ultimate question: Who am I? What makes me different?

According to the New York Times, in 1960, 45 percent of high school graduates enrolled in college, compared to 65.9 percent of high school graduates who enroll today. By just looking at the numbers, it is obvious that college applicants now compete against a much larger pool of candidates, partly because a college education is more necessary in securing a job than it was in the past.

But when our parents were applying to college, they didn’t have to advertise the absurd number of hours they spent working for charities, the seven different indigenous languages they spoke and the 300 reasons why they should get into the college of their dreams.

In his article “The Evolution of College Admission Requirements,” Andrew V. Beale explains how throughout the 20th century, the college admission process has changed to look at more aspects of the applicant.

Beale states, “Studies conducted during the 1900’s revealed that changes in admission requirements were in the direction of greater insistence upon the completion of a four-year high school course and greater flexibility in admission standards. The trend during the 1930’s and 1940’s was for colleges to accept secondary school graduates on the basis of ability rather than subjects studied. The decade 1949-1959 witnessed an increased interest in standardized examinations sponsored by regional or national associations.”

Our parents did have to take the ACT and SAT, but they had a different scoring scale, and they were only scored on math and verbal skills, not writing and subject tests.

According to Beale, as these other sources of academic measurement were established, colleges started to incorporate them into their standard assessment of how well an applicant would fit into that college’s academic environment.

“The most apparent development in college admissions during the decade of the ‘60s was the growing emphasis placed upon environmental and non-intellective factors in the admission process,” Beale writes.

According to collegexpress.com, a website geared toward helping students meet their college needs, today, the top four qualities that colleges look for in applicants are “a challenging high school curriculum, grades that represent strong effort and an upward trend, a score on the SAT or ACT consistent with high school grades, and passionate involvement in activities, demonstrating leadership, initiative, impact and an angle.”

In short, colleges are looking for well-rounded students who also display academic excellence. But while they used to consider these as individual factors in the past, now they expect to see all of them.

Jane stated, “I wasn’t extraordinary. I was just a student who did well academically. I didn’t have to make myself do things just so they would look good on my college applications. I barely even knew what a college application was until I was filling one out.” Despite this, she attended Dartmouth for her undergraduate degree, which today takes seniors agonizing hours to apply to because of its competitiveness.

Students compete to make themselves stand out on paper by doing activities that they wouldn’t normally do or by saying things that they wouldn’t normally say. The essential questions being asked are, “Who are you, what are you passionate about, what do you want to do?” But if the student feels forced to answer those questions untruthfully, then neither the student nor the college benefits.

So, why is there now such an emphasis on students pushing themselves and presenting themselves as someone they are not just to get into college? Because the application process puts students under a microscope, making them feel insecure about every aspect of their lives.

Riley Griffin, a student contributor for the Huffington Post states, “More so than ever, there is an implicit obligation to grow up early and have accomplished something significant before leaving for college.”

Oftentimes when students look at their lives on paper and see a blank document that is supposed to define them, they will make things up to make their lives seem more interesting and full of accomplishments. But the truth is that the high school seniors applying to college still have to ask to go to the bathroom during class; very few have accomplished something extraordinary like providing clean water to rural African communities or climbing the world’s highest peaks.

Because of the rising impact of social media and technological communication, people see what others are achieving and often aim to do the same. This isn’t a bad thing. With progressive technology comes progressive thinking and thus more intellectual correspondence. However, technology and social media more or less erase age. Students now find themselves wanting to accomplish the great things they see happening, whether or not they are willing to take the steps necessary to get there.

To get accepted to a college that is right for the student, the student should be able to be completely honest in the application process. If the student has traveled to every continent and helped those in need, so be it! That student should flaunt it. But if the student has never left their home state and has done little more than attend church every Sunday—but has a great desire to learn—then so be that as well! It shouldn’t be necessary to make up activities when the student can just tell that college that they are passionate about learning and the said college is where they want to broaden their knowledge.

When our parents were applying for college, their applications were honest (for the most part), to the point where even their real handwriting was included. Today, applications are faked by students who only really did five hours of community service, but put 20 because it was easy to type into the box flashing at them from the Common App website, and the bigger the number the better, right?

The expectations students have of themselves, the comparison of themselves to other people worldwide, the daunting “only 2 out of 10 activities filled” message that makes students lament “Shoot, I should have joined that club,” and the fretting over whether their ACT scores are going to be good enough this time, creates an environment where students morph into a 2-D version of themselves, resembling the flat screens and pieces of paper of the applications that now define them.

But students—people—aren’t 2-D. Applications should be about showing the whole person—the whole truthful person. Then it wouldn’t matter if an application were stacked between one of an applicant with three years experience in the Peace Corps or one who went to a different high school every semester. Both college and applying to college shouldn’t be about counting the endless painful hours of the clubs students attended but hated because that’s what they think colleges want to see, or about pulling out clumps of hair in anticipation of deadlines.

Though the intensity of college applications isn’t likely to change anytime soon, current college applicants and future applicants alike need to take a step back, reflect on the ease their parents faced compared to now, and ask themselves truthfully the one essential question: “Who am I?”