Applying to College

Application Armageddon

Applying to colleges is stressful every year. In addition to a full load of classes High School seniors must wrestle with devilish testing and putting their best foot forward toward prospective colleges.

While much of the United States has been focused on the error-ridden launch of the HealthCare.gov website as part of the Affordable Care Act, there is a parallel software disaster happening in the college admissions process.

The Common Application is an on-line process designed to simplify the process of applying to college for over 500 college members, but instead this year’s new and improved software is creating stress that is beyond compare to previous years.

The commotion is happening at a time well before the big application push. At the moment only early decision applications are being submitted. In our house alone we’ve struggled with numerous technical issues. We’ve never been sure if it’s us or the on-line software that is having the problem. Issues include:

Inability to preview the application before submission while the system simply implores us to be patient.
The stripping of all formatting including paragraph breaks making a carefully crafted resume look like word vomit.
A teacher’s recommendation that shows completed to the teacher but never arrived in the student’s record.

And that’s just one house. On-line discussion groups suggest much more inciting one headline to cry “Application Armageddon.” With some schools threatening to switch this year to the dreaded paper applications, the headline is anything but an exaggeration.

October 30, 2013