On the other hand, there are ways that the internet helps current high school students with respect to college applications:
- Net price calculators to get financial aid estimates before applying (though more necessary now that college costs are higher).
- Ability to find out more about a college's academic offerings and other features.
- Ability to find out about colleges that your high school counselor may not have mentioned to you.
The internet is wonderful for information but the application process is different. After being able to evaluate so many schools one would never have even heard of is it a good thing to apply to all that interest you? What would happen if students once again needed to fill out separate applications for every school? I wonder if most of the same students would be attending the same schools as they would have without internet common applications?
the problem IMO is that when you have a college fair (in person) if their are 150 schools being represented…the elitist schools like HYP are swamped and the flagship state schools too. the majority of schools (that actually maybe a perfect fit for many high school seniors) just sit their with nobody even stopping by for 1 second. the biggest problem is most people never cast a wide net. the internet has just slightly shifted stuff for SOME students and that is not a bad thing.
I think the Common App should be abolished. This is an excellent article that shows the impact of so many applications on students and colleges, the impact of ratings and yield on the whole process, and some of the reasons behind the current craziness. Applying to so many schools ramps up the stress level for everyone.
Maybe colleges should start thinking more about quality and less about rankings, and applicants as well. And the proverbial “fit.”
I think there should be individual applications for each school and a visit should be a required part of an application, with financial help for those who cannot afford to visit.
My kids missed all this: one applied to 4 and one applied to 2, with visits both before applying and after acceptance.
I discovered this problem also when i began to delve into the stats that colleges put out and are available on sites like collegedata and collegefactual. I began noticing that some schools had very low yields. like 10-20%. It made me wonder why 8 out of 10 people who were accepted told the school to jump in the lake. Was it because the school was stingy and just did not give any aid? Is it something we missed when we toured the place? It really causes one to wonder why so many accepted kids said “no”. As you get into the more prestigious colleges, the yields rise as most kids I think gladly take the college up on it. But clearly the biggest driver is the flood of applications. If you got a very well qualified candidate who applies to all of the Ivies and get into a few, he can only attend one school. So by simple math the rejected school has a lower yield.
I told my son he was limited to five schools to apply to. If he cannot figure out which top five schools he likes, then he is too confused to apply to any. He can only attend one so that leaves four others that he will have to reject.
re above- that assumes he is accepted by all of his choices… I agree that there should be limits on schools applied to. Applying to many schools involves far less thinking about the process- just click and charge the credit card instead of really considering choices.
^ this^ If students apply to 5 but are rejected or waitlisted by 3 – there is not much choice, especially if the schools did not come through with viable merit packages.
Those who are applying to more schools usually are in search of the most affordable option.
Also there are kids who are in the gap of selective schools (those with near perfect scores - 34-35 and 3.9-4.0 gpa) - where those lottery reach schools are really a “match” to their stats and ECs and schools recommended as matches or safeties reject them to protect yield. Those average/excellent kids are the ones who need to cast a wide net.
Let’s add that merit aid is such a crap shoot that your kid could apply to 5 and who knows what they’ll get. Five acceptances that are full pay is not what the merit aid kid is looking for.
Agree that a student who needs to be merit-scholarship-seeking may need to apply more widely, since there is typically very little visibility into finding out whether a competitive merit scholarship is a reach or match (of course, automatic-for-stats merit scholarships can be safeties for students who have the stats), unlike the more widely available information on admission selectivity.
Instead of dumping the common app- go to a system like the UK common app which only allows you to apply to 5 schools. Then if you are rejected or reject all 5 of those you add a school that still has spaces, and so on. Force people to decide where they really want to go.
@MassDaD68 , what is your reasoning for this limitation? Is it cost?
I don’t think 5 is necessarily a bad number in and of itself but if the kid is willing to do the work, and the app fees/waivers are acceptable, don’t you fear you will disadvantage your child for an ideological point?
Please note I am firmly in the camp of “each family makes their own choices”, I am not telling you what to do with yours. Just trying to see if there is a position worthy of changing my own.
If you are chasing merit you may need to cast a wide net. I have a friend who needed to find schools for triplets, imagine that college bill. I think each applied to over 20 schools, but they are each in school on big merit scholarships they wouldn’t have found without applying widely.
The internet has not “wrecked” college admissions. It’s just made it more challenging for colleges to maintain their yield rates because of increased competition with other providers. That’s not my problem as a parent or student.
I don’t think the Common Application has done much to make applying to colleges easier for kids looking at the elites. The top schools typically require elaborate supplements with multiple essays and short answer questions. When S applied, there was no topic overlap in any of the supplemental essays either–except for one about your most significant EC, but even then the recommended lengths were different.
Seriously the only common elements are the colleges - they have wrecked college admissions. No one forced them to the Common App.
Or, just require a ~100 word supplement per college. Boston College added a short supplement a few years back and their apps plummeted, while yield (naturally) increased.
Don’t blame the CA, which is free. Its the colleges’ admissions policies that are to blame.
Acceptance rate is all of 1.25% of the USNWR ranking formula. Gaming your acceptance rate is not what’s driving this.
The explosion of applications is due to many other factors – opaque variable tuition pricing by schools, the watering down of the credential of an undergraduate degree (and the related rising importance of rankings and reputation), cheap air travel, and (yes) the internet and the Common App.
The market for admission to college (like most other things) has become flatter. Much less local and regional than before, and much more national and international.
It might not mean that much in terms of USNWR ranking, but the three metrics that are easily used to determine how good a job an admissions department did in the prior year are number of applicants, admission rates and yield rates. You can bet that the people who want to make a career of being a college adcom care about these numbers.
If the purpose of the CA was to help students by streamlining the process, it has failed for the subset of kids applying to very competitive schools. I agree with bluebayou–each college should be allowed to add a short, basic “why this school?” type of supplement and that’s it. That seems like a nice compromise between making applying to multiple schools too easy, and making it onerous like it is now in the case of some schools. No school is so special they need 7 extra essays and various other things like student-created webpages.