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With the beginning of the 2023-24 school year comes college applications for the Class of ’24. Amiss the anxiety that plagues every senior during application season, it really begs the question, how many colleges is too much?
It has become a trend more recently to apply to a large amount of universities. The Knight Writers staff conducted a poll on how many colleges students were applying to. The 39% of people who responded to this poll, claimed to be applying to 10+ schools. Other scaling includes zero – five , six – 10 and 15+.
“I understand wanting to play it safe, but anything above [15] is just way too much, especially since so many schools require recommendations, supplemental materials and other extra work,” Cereza Perez (’24) said. “I just think it isn’t worth the hassle.”
So why are people applying to so many of these schools in the first place?
Many people see applying to all these schools as a definite way to get accepted into one school. An example of this is applying to schools that the individual may not even really want to go to and using it as a “safety.”
“I want to major in computer engineering and it’s pretty selective so applying to more schools will boost my chances of getting into at least one of my top picks,” Aiden Nguyen (’24) said.
Not only are majors themselves getting more and more selective, the percentage of people getting accepted to universities keep decreasing each year. For instance, Duke University “reported its lowest Early Decision admission rate ever: 16.5%, down 21.3% from the previous admission cycle.”
One of the main reasons for these acceptance rates dropping is the sheer number of applicants each school is receiving each year. The Common Application was crafted to make applying to colleges easier than before but, perhaps, made it too easy. The increasing number of actual applicants to these high ranked schools, may be what’s making these admissions rates plummet so rapidly.
“As more colleges have adopted the Common App, as it’s known, students have increasingly submitted more applications. Those who applied to more than three schools jumped from 61% in 1995 to 82% in 2016,” CNN Reporters Michelle Lou and Brandon Griggs said in an article on the topic.
The college application process is already difficult enough without the thought of plummeting acceptance rates and application fees, why should one person be subjected to limiting or increasing their number of applications?
“For the majority of people applying to more than [15] is not reasonable because you’ll just be wasting time and application fees when getting into schools you don’t even want to attend,” Nguyen added.
