Eliminating essays would cause many schools to have an increase in apps. Do you have a source for your statement that essays are ‘often not written by applicants’?
1 Like
That’s a good point. It’s just an observation. I helped review my son’s essays but I know several kids whose parents had the means to hire counselors who facilitated the essay writing to an extent that seemed at minimum disingenuous.
1 Like
Georgia Tech accepted the Common App but didn’t look at the Common App essay. Instead there were 3 (?) short essays. I’m sure it was done to cut the time needed to read the app, but it also ignored the essay most likely to be ghost written.
Slightly off topic, but, one way to decrease applications is to require that the supplemental essays be handwritten.
When we had to review some private scholarship applications, we required the “why” question and the students were asked to hand-write their essays and were limited to ~100 words. The scholarship committee acknowledged that the cut/paste options were just too prevalent. It threw some kids for a loop, but the handwritten essays were amazing because of the impromptu ideas and kid mistakes that were endearing.
Yes, some parents wrote the essays for their children, but those were immediately recognizable!
6 Likes
That’s a good idea! Except for now so many schools don’t teach cursive (at least those that follow common core)…so the students would have to print! 
I like it!
1 Like
We took both cursive and print. It didn’t matter because you could see, through the writing, how they were communicating with us to get their message across. The five of us, on the panel, thought that it was very effective. We almost always had a consensus on the recipient. Some of the “sloppiest” writers were some of the best candidates!
2 Likes
I agree with more education for guidance counselors. Every school should be talking to families about colleges and costs. Ours actually did. They helped families locate schools that gave merit /financial aid /scholarships.
Also I think colleges to need to be compared with job market outcomes and then the families will see the real stories. I think CV made families aware that maybe we should go to school locally and more affordable. Alabama showed everyone that a choice of school might not matter that much as long as it’s affordable and you have good job outcomes.
Take just about any fields in engineering (give me some leeway here). Regardless where you went to school if company X is hiring 10 first years right out of college you are all getting paid the same. So the Michigan, Berkeley and Georgia Tech graduates and working side by side with Penn State, Illinois Institute of technology, and some school in Sweden… (real example BTW 
).
Yes, each school has their thing or advantage but… It’s not worth it if you can’t afford it. So if kids went local more often this could decrease their OOS applications and save them from major debt and of course depending on the state.
2 Likes
A “short” 100 word essay supplement. (very hard to complete in 100 words, btw).
1 Like
My first kid applied to college before the common ap was a happening. He applied to seven colleges…completing seven different applications and their essays was enough. He was a music major so also had to audition. There just wasn’t enough time in his senior year to make more than 7 auditions happen.
Our second kid applied to college when students had the choice to use either the common ap or the school’s application form. She chose the school specific forms because she felt that they showed she was interested in each school better. And she also wrote all different essays. She only applied initially to 3 schools…then added a reach and a parent choice for a total of five.
Our kids vetted their college application choices before sending off applications. They both felt confident that the number of applications they sent were fine, and their choices good.
It was after our youngest went to college that we started seeing a huge increase in applications and a much larger usage of the common application…which frankly makes it very easy to apply to 20 different colleges with the tap of a few keys.
I really think school specific essays, and more than one, will help reduce the number of applications sent.
4 Likes
Or you could go real old school and have applications all handwritten. A good friend who applied to Dartmouth in the dark ages, did the app plus all the essays (there were quite a few more than currently required) by hand. It makes you think twice because you’re not just cutting and pasting and pushing a button to submit.
2 Likes
Canada universities do not require external standardized tests for domestic applicants (although standardized tests make up a portion of high school grades in some subjects, depending on province).
But the big distinction between “prestigious” universities in Canada and “prestigious” universities in the US is relative size compared to the population.
About 1 out of 700 people in Canada (about 38 million population) is a University of Toronto domestic undergraduate (about 54k domestic undergraduates). For comparison, about 1 out of 55,000 people in the US (about 332 million population) is a Harvard domestic undergraduate (about 6k domestic undergraduates).
Unlike Harvard, University of Toronto does not have an oversupply of applicants pressed up against the ceiling of high school academic stats that it need to find some other way of admission some, but not all, of them. Even if Harvard wanted to build a class purely on academic merit (we know that it does so only for a portion of its class, since it uses other priorities for much of the class), it needs to go beyond high school academic stats (including typical US college admission test scores) that so many of its applicants are at the ceiling of.
1 Like
There is College Scorecard, although it only covered pay levels of graduates who received federal financial aid.
However, looking at College Scorecard, or college career surveys that break down the results by major, should help people realize that the notion that “STEM major = good pay after graduation” is not true for all STEM majors.
1 Like
Again, we’re not talking about a real problem here. The colleges which are drowning in applications have been spending decades on trying to increase their number of applications. They may complain about them, but they do not really want to reduce their number of applications.
I mean, seriously. Every single one of them had a press release trumpeting the fact that they have increased the number of applicants as something positive, something to celebrate. They all had press releases with headlines like “The Most Competitive Year Yet!! Applications Increase by 30%!!”
I am sorry, but I do not, for one moment, believe that there is a single college out there that is looking for ways to DECREASE the number of applications that they receive. They want to be high on the list of “colleges which have the most difficult admissions”. The PR people at Harvard will break out a $5,000 bottle of champagne if (or when) they manage to reach 100,000 applications one year. Then they will send the information to the Yale admissions office.
What they want are ways to look through all of those applications much more cheaply.
9 Likes
Isn’t this problem going to resolve itself in a few years when the population of college-age students plummets?
Didn’t the SAT try to do a handwritten essay once like 20 years ago? It got axed pretty quickly. Don’t remember why.
1 Like
Possibly a cap on how many applications can be submitted, is in order. Idk the number - maybe 10 for non-limited majors - maybe 15 for competitive majors (nursing, engineering, CS).
My D had a list of 7. We added 2 more “panic choices” after her first decision back was a surprising deferral. At the end of all this she has 7 acceptances to choose from. The deferral would normally be a match for her - on any given year only a small handful of kids from her HS apply there. This year, over 75 high stat kids from her HS applied, citing this school as their “safety”. Many of them were deferred as well (this college deferred a huge number of EA applications - like many, their app numbers had a big increase). To date, D is only aware of 1 or 2 who will actually enroll at this college. She would have enrolled in a heartbeat.
Competitive majors excepted, a well-thought out list can be made with less than 15 schools. Do research on merit before applying (if I had a dollar for ever “deer-in-the-headlights” post on FB surprised by no merit received from schools that notoriously don’t give merit…), don’t apply to schools you can’t or won’t pay for, if you live on the east coast and realistically can’t get to the west coast to tour a college, don’t apply there. And while I think it’s ok to have one or two schools on the list that your child may never see themselves at, even safeties should be schools that your child could see themselves at.
AFAIK, Caltech never issued such a press release. Nor does it conduct mass mailing campaigns to solicit more applications.
2 Likes
My DS20 got a mass mailing from Cal Tech last year. It had a bunch of science inspired drawings and may equations on the envelope.
Maybe it does now because students can’t visit? When my S was applying a few years ago, I don’t remember seeing any. The most he received were from UChicago. Even the tinier HMC sent lots of them (including some really fancy ones that I recall).
1 Like
No, that was pre pandemic.
The problem for merit scholarships is that there is much less information on how competitive they are. So those which are not automatic for stats the student has must be considered reaches.
1 Like