In his article titled “The Common App Fallacy” in 2008, Damon Beres criticizes Common Application and the College Board, the institutions who manage university applications mostly online, for causing excessive applications by making the procedure too easy and public. The author at the same time encourages New York University, in which he was an undergraduate student, to abandon Common Application so as to grant admissions to those who are truly interested in it. However, even though the author’s arguments are valid to some extent, it is not right to only blame the institutions for the problem, because they alone are not responsible for how admission into a university in the United States has become so difficult.
The author claims that college applications have become a crapshoot, saying that the chance to get into a university one desires has been going down due to the continuous increase in the number of applicants for years now. It is reasonable, for the world’s population including the U.S. has been increasing generation after generation, and accordingly the number of applicants to colleges in the United States has been increasing. The increased pressure among applicants has given rise to the increased number of individual applications.
The author suggests that applying to too many colleges in fear of not getting into one would only worsen the chance of taking a proper spot in a university of one’s desire. This is also true. It has become quite common for current high-school students to apply to universities in which they are confident of gaining admission, in case they do not get into more competitive universities they originally aim for. This decreases the overall chances for others to get into universities they desire.
The author attributes the low chance of getting into a university solely to Common Application and the College Board, who have made applications “a simple process of point-and-click”. The author claims that, as they have made it so easy for students to send out test scores and applications to multiple colleges, mass applications are being encouraged. Even though it is right that mass applications have been made possible thanks to such an easy application process, this reason alone is not sufficient enough to reject the whole schemes of Common Application and the College Board. The institutions have actually been helpful for high-school students in gathering information on what universities they may be interested in and promptly applying to universities that best suit them.
The author also discusses the ineffectiveness of Common Application, whose system, including supplemental essays, “can’t make up for a personalized, unique application that shows a serious interest in the school” of an applicant. This argument sounds a bit subjective, as there is no firm evidence that people in general are not sincerely appealing to colleges when using Common Application.
In conclusion, the author’s arguments regarding the negative effects of Common Application and the College Board are sensible and correct to some extent. However, abandoning the institutions would not solve the problem of excessive applications, because they alone are not responsible for the problem. Besides, being user friendly and open to the public, these institutions have borne more positive outcomes than negative outcomes.
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