Let’s Skip the College Application Mania

This year's high school seniors are exhausted. During the pandemic, they've woken up every morning to discover what version of school they're going to have that day -- in person, online, both, or neither. The flexibility required to endure this kind of last-minute approach to education -- and let's face it, more of this is likely to come -- can easily bring even the most robust teen to a state of surrender. It's challenging enough for a 16-year-old to find the relevance of the Pythagorean Theorem in their personal life. Asking them to do so when they're staring at a whiteboard on a computer with bad reception requires a kind of focus akin to that of an Olympic archer -- and that's just one class of several they'll have that day.

It should come as no surprise that their adventures through this academic labyrinth has left them with little appetite for college -- or, more specifically, applying for college. While some colleges saw impressive gains in the size of their applicant pools, college applications were down last year in many key populations, most notably among students whose family incomes make them eligible for the Pell Grant offered by the U.S. government. This loss of interest was most keenly felt among state universities and community colleges, and the lack of interest in looking at college is spreading to even more populations, as students from families with substantial incomes, who have spent a healthy part of those resources on college preparatory schools and activities, are looking at the task of completing college applications with an attitude that is best summed up in one word. "Really?"

Given the coverage most of the media annually gives to the college application process, you can't really blame them. Once the media is done covering the angst families will rightly feel over sending their children to in-person instruction in K-12 that school officials and government leaders see as a given, they generally turn their attention to the process students must, in most of the press's eyes, endure in order to go to college, and the press will cast it in the same light they have in past years -- a process portrayed as unfair, unclear, debilitating, and largely out of the student's hands. Since COVID has given students the same feelings about high school, is it any wonder they have no interest in voluntarily adding to the further demise of their own well-being by applying to college?

The fourth estate's overall approach to college application time has never been particularly helpful, in large part because it is generally inaccurate. It's certainly true that young people begin their college application process with an air of uncertainty in mid-September, the time the media dedicates to coverage of this important event.

But that would be just as true if school counselors across the nation handed every high school senior a plumber's wrench (or, alas, a rotary phone) and asked them to demonstrate its proper use. Students would be pretty bad at the task at the beginning, but with research, practice, and commitment, they would gain in both skill and confidence as they went along.

This same thing happens with applying to college, where seniors show incredible talent, and even -- dare I say it -- enthusiasm in early October. But by then, the media has moved on to the annual prediction of the severity of the fall stock market crash, and students are largely left on their own to finish up a task that was once important in the general media's eyes, but is now yesterday's news.

The damage of this gloom-and-doom, hit-and-run approach to covering college applications can't be overstated. Parents anticipate these stories and make their seniors begin college application essays the moment school is out in the spring of their junior year. This not only denies the student of a proper summer for needed rest and restoration, it also leads to some pretty bad essays, since the main reason a college essay is not all it can be is because it is overwritten, not underwritten.

Since mainstream media annually covers the college application scene at the same 25 colleges every year, other parents panic when one of these "good" colleges is not on their child's college list. This leads them to decide that an application to one or two of these schools is a good idea, since it doesn't hurt to "see what happens." This now takes part of the college selection process out of the hands of the student, who doesn't need to apply to know what will happen. Throw in the fact that most of the colleges in The List Of 25 admit under 20 percent of their applicants, and the recipe for college stress is complete, since students and parents are convinced that if that's case at these colleges, it must be true for all colleges.

In reality, none of the doomsday college application narratives presented by the media reflects the experience of a vast majority of seniors, and none of them do anyone much good. Applying to college certainly offers challenges to some students, but the average college admits 66 percent of its applicants, and many of these colleges don't require interviews, essays, or letters of recommendation as part of their application. This means most students can complete a college application in about 25 minutes, provided they can recall information as basic as their name -- something they might not remember, if they read one too many stories about how hard it is to apply to college, and the idea now scares them half to death.

Fall media coverage of the journey high school seniors take in selecting a college has never served students or our society well, as it often leads to students deciding to skip the process altogether, restricting their economic potential and their sense of personal fulfillment. The students of the Class of 2022 have slayed enough academic dragons in their COVID-laden odyssey through high school. The media would do them, and all of us, a huge favor if this year's coverage of college application season featured interviews with first-year college students, most of whom look back on their application experience with a perspective of "it wasn't that bad." Hearing the end of the journey could do wonders to the spirits of those just starting it -- and heaven knows that's something they've more than earned.