Whether you’re a high school senior, a transfer student or merely going back to school, applying for colleges is an immensely stressful ordeal. If you plan on applying to prestigious universities, then your college application anxiety might be justified. According to The Wall Street Journal, specific colleges have adopted a new admissions process, where they spend an average of 8 minutes or less reviewing an application. Now, we’re stressed about being stressed.
The college admission process is an intense procedure. First, you have to actually figure out which colleges you want to go to, and a series of campus tours typically follow that. Once you finally narrow down your college choices, you have to scramble to finish college essays, endure hours of standardized tests, convince your teachers to write you letters of recommendations, and figure out a way to make your four years of high school seem substantially more interesting than any other high schooler’s experience.
However, The Journal reports that you can waste all that effort if you don’t captivate admissions officers’ within the first eight or so minutes of your application material. After speaking with staff members at a variety of universities, including Georgia Institute of Technology, Rice University and Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, admissions officers revealed to The Journal that admissions officers often split up portions of specific applications. Meaning, certain staff members might not even read the same portions of an individual’s application. (Which seems like it might counterproductive, when all the staffers inevitably meet to discuss an applicant’s potential and merit—and this could inherently create skewed reviews of individual applicants.)
THE COLLEGE APPLICATION PROCESS IS 10000X MORE STRESSFUL THAN ACTUALLY GOING TO COLLEGE AND IM SCREAMING
— FUNMOM (@BriannaSings216) March 5, 2018
The Journal reports that as many as “30 elite schools” have taken incorporated the mold of this committee-based review. While certain admissions officers and admissions directors have told The Journal that this helps cut down on time, as reviewing college applications is an intrinsically lengthy process, not everyone agrees with this dismissive process.
Chris Reeves, a school counselor at Beechwood High School In Fort Mitchell, Kentucky and a director at the National Association for College Admission Counseling, told The Journal, “If they’re splitting it up, it’s not holistic. Nobody has a full feeling.” After all, this process puts prospective students’ futures on the line because admissions officers haven’t gotten the opportunity to read (or skim) the same portions of the applicant’s material.
Nevertheless, The Journal reports that these relatively new, albeit brief, application reviews could make the process more efficient for admissions officers, as the number of college applicants (especially those using the Common Application) is on the rise. “Nearly 902,000 students used [the Common Application] last year. As of Jan. 15 this year, the number was already 898,000 students submitting to an average of 4.8 schools. Applications to Georgia Tech jumped by 13% for the coming academic year,” The Journal explains.
I love this whole college application thing like I LOVE ALLOWING YOUR ENTIRE FURTUE TO BE IN ONE PERSONS HANDS HAHAHAHAH
— teema (@whenugocrazy) March 5, 2018
Inside Higher ED explains that these new committee-based reviews help cut precious time from the traditional process, which used to take about 25 to 30 minutes. While this new 8 minutes or less process might unnerve some applicants, Yvonne Romero DaSilva, vice dean and director of admissions at The University of Pennsylvania wants to reassure applicants that admission officers still strive to admit the best students. DaSilva expands to Inside Higher ED that Penn’s admissions officers still focus on “academic and non-academic factors” in specific applications.
According to The Journal, admissions officers don’t revisit approximately 85 percent of applications. While this process shifts the strain from overworked admissions officers to overstressed college applicants (who really need to perfect their self-marketing skills now), some college hopefuls agree with these elite colleges.
In a Reddit thread under the ApplyingToCollege subreddit, one Reddit user explains, “It doesn’t mean they don’t review the good ones and the borderline ones more carefully. The close calls get a lot of attention. But if you have grades and SATs well below the average for a school that accepts less than 15 percent of its applicants, let’s be realistic. They are going to skim the application to see if you have some other really obvious and significant reason to draw their interest. If you don’t, it’s on to the next one.”
With the rapidly increasing number of prospective college students, especially those pursuing elite colleges, this expedited processes could help flush out applicants who didn’t dedicate enough time to their application. Nevertheless, this new process adds another stressor on every prospective college student’s admission checklist.