By Brendon Bloomfield, a letter to the editor:

One of the biggest concerns among students in today’s generation is going to college and getting accepted. Colleges have added so many levels of stress to students because of the requirements to get in. Before getting accepted to the university of choice, students must go through a long, tedious process of applying. The process of applying can take hours or even days. Because of this, students often get turned away from applying to major schools because of the unnecessary questions and or requirements needed to submit the application. As a result, students end up going to community colleges where they will find the application simplified. Colleges need to change their applications to be simple, easy, and to the point to create an equal advantage to all students.

Getting accepted to a university is often one’s dream, but there are many factors that hinder this process. When one is applying to a university, the questions asked by the university are often unnecessary, leading to a biased decision by the university; for example, some of the questions asked on commonapp.org are based on the applicant’s family, income, current classes, and personal life. All of these questions are completely irrelevant to the potential the student has at the school! There is no reason why the school needs to know in-depth information about each individual member of the family, including if they are still living or not, what their highest level of education is ,and where they live. In addition, the University of Chicago’s admission prompt asks, “What’s so odd about odd numbers?” One would find this prompt to be completely ludicrous because it does not focus on the true value of the student! Instead, it asks a completely idiotic question! It is a shame that universities have the audacity to do something like this to students and not let them write about who they truly are.  Many believe that the college application process for all colleges needs to be revamped to solely focus on the student’s education and what he or she is capable of; this can be achieved by asking applicants only about his or her education and the extracurricular activities in which he or she participate.

Studying a survey taken on surveymonkey.com, 51% of students leave their application unfinished, either because they do not have time to finish or the application stresses them out too much by the questions asked. Researchers find this to be completely absurd and believe that action must be taken to prevent this. Every student should have the opportunity to complete his or her application without added stress and in a sufficient amount of time. In addition, according to the survey, 38% of the students who avoid the long application process of attending a university end up going to a community college. Students who attend a community college receive a education equal to a university. Community colleges’ application process is known to be less stressful and less time- consuming; for example that of St. Petersburg College. Universities need to piggyback off the community-college network to get ideas on how to shape their application process. By doing this, it will allow students a better advantage of pursuing their dreams.

Overall, the college application process needs to change from asking unnecessary questions to what is necessary. If colleges change their applications it will allow students to be stress-free and complete the application in a short amount of time. Major universities will definitely notice a significant difference in the amount of applicants that apply to their school if they change this process. Researchers strongly anticipate with the growing competition of acceptance in colleges that this change will happen later, rather than sooner. However, this change will allow students to pursue their dreams with a more simplified process.

Photo by Aaron Brown (Flickr Creative Commons License)