As college deadlines come and go this fall, with the most notable being the November 1st early action deadline (for many but not all schools), it is important to look back on the college application process and how it has changed throughout the years.
College has been a staple of human education over most of the past millennia, with the first European college being founded in 1088 in Italy, however the first American college was founded in 1696, being St. John’s College. College has become the pinnacle of education and a fixture in our academic culture.
However, as technology became more prevalent in our society, the process for getting into those colleges and the idea of college has changed drastically. Cost has gone up. Standards have changed. So much about college application and commitment has changed in the past 20-30 years.
The most notable change to college application in the past 25 years was making the common app fully online in 1998. The common app was introduced in 1975 as a way to make the college application process easier and more streamlined, however for its first 23 years, it was like all other applications of the time, on paper. While this worked fine for hundreds of years, as colleges continued to grow more and more, they were beginning to become overwhelmed with the number of applications sent in through mail, making the process longer. With computers becoming more mainstream and other forms of technology beginning to grow, it was imperative that they make a change.
There have been many other changes not directly a part of actually clicking apply, including an increasing pressure to apply to lots of schools in comparison to just 1 or 2.
College application, expectation and perspective is different for every place on earth, but Mundelein is similar because many of its residents end up on similar paths, with one of the most popular leading through Illinois flagship university, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
Whether you call it UIUC or U of I, it is undoubtedly one of the most popular options for young Illinoisians. Year after year, countless graduates from Mundelein and surrounding schools commit to the school, with some of the top athletic and academic performers choosing U of I. As a resident of Mundelein, UIUC is a great example for comparing how the application has changed.
Among the flurry of Illinois residents who have gone to UIUC, many MHS teachers are graduates from the university, including two, English teacher Madeleine Licata and Math teacher Gregory Dorgan, whose experiences highlight just how much college applications have changed.
The most major difference between the two was shown in how many schools they applied to. Dorgan, a 2002 graduate, applied to only two, whereas Licata, a 2020 graduate, applied to 6, yet felt pressured by her peers over the amount of schools she applied to. “I feel like there was a lot of pressure with my peers for college because it was like a competition. Most people I knew applied to 10+ schools…” she said. That shows a massive difference from Dorgan, who was comfortable applying to only 2 schools. This inflation in schools applied to is one of the biggest changes in the college application process. According to the college board, on average, people are applying to more schools than ever before. In 2023, on the common app alone the average was 5.7 schools, up 8% from just 2019, and way higher than the early 2000’s.
This increase in schools applied to stems from the massive increase in tuition in the past 20 years and the ease of application. Touched on earlier, now that the common app is fully digital, it has become much easier to apply to many different schools. Instead of writing out the same thing over and over for different schools, now all that information is easily copied into one place to be sent to almost any college you could possibly want.
College is an ever changing process, and will continue to change for as long as they are around. Expectations will change along with prices, but the one constant is the students spending long hours of their senior year applying to these many institutions. With their future in their hands, it is important that we understand their perspective as well as our own, as nobody has the same experience when it comes to applying. It is much different now than it was in 2000, and it will be much different in 2040 than it is now.
