The American College Application Process

by Luke Phillips

The American college application process is excruciating. There is no way around it. Unless you are either an incredible athlete or have parents who are willing (and able) to give inordinate amounts of money to the school of your choice, there is no way to avoid the one and a half to two year process that is necessary to applying to college in the United States.

For current juniors, the process began long ago, when Mom and Dad hired an SAT tutor or began bugging you to study for the SATs. By now, most juniors have taken the SAT at least once. Some will endure the five-hour horror several more times.

For seniors, the process is nearly over. Nearly all have gotten into college and now simply are faced with the decision, ‘Where do I want to spend the next four years of my life?’

But the ordeal leading up to this point was much too long and strenuous. And for what? Even if you get into the college of your dreams, after the initial euphoria wears off, the main feeling that remains is relief. And so I’m wondering – were these last two years really worth it, simply to end up relieved?

To some degree, applying for colleges is like buying a lottery ticket. Yes, you can better your odds by doing a variety of things. You can get good grades, play sports, play an instrument, do community service, join various school clubs, and do a thousand other things that I’m failing to mention, but in the end, you are only buying additional lotto tickets. Because not every college looks in depth at every single application that they receive, and even if most colleges do, hundreds of thousands of people applied to American colleges in 2008. Among those people, many of them on paper appear to be exactly the same, perhaps the same as you.

I do not have some brilliant plan to rework the American college system, nor do I believe such a plan exists. Maybe the U.S. should adopt a plan more similar to that of Canada’s, or perhaps the UK’s. In Canada, students usually rank their choice institutions in order of preference and submit their transcript to the institution for evaluation. In almost all of the cases, acceptance is based solely on grades, with in-province applicants receiving more leniency that out of province applicants.

In the UK, students select five courses at higher education institutions in the final year of high school that they wish to study in college, then they either receive a rejection, a conditional offer, or an unconditional offer for each course applied for at each university to which the student has applied. An unconditional offer means that the university is willing to accept you, while a conditional offer means that the university will accept you provided that you get certain scores in your A level exams, which are most similar to AP exams in the U.S.

Neither of those plans is perfect, but each is at least more straightforward and more transparent than our own. There is probably no perfect plan. Still, someone smarter than I should do something, so maybe future applicants can do more than simply buy more lotto tickets.