A Commentary on the Common App
By Marc Corteguera
Senior Year’s Second Curriculum
Open a high school senior’s laptop in October, and there is a decent chance you will find some combination of the Common App, a college website, a financial aid page, a half-finished essay, a Google search asking whether something is “required” or merely “recommended,” and about fifteen other tabs that were opened for reasons no one remembers.
Somewhere underneath all of them, there's homework there too.
College applications have become a strange second curriculum of senior year. There is no class period for it, no teacher assigning it and no grade at the end. Yet for months, students are expected to research schools, write essays, request recommendations, report grades, compare financial aid offers, look for scholarships and keep track of deadlines that change from one college to the next.
The process has instructions, of course. The problem is that they are scattered everywhere. The answers are on a college admissions page, buried in an FAQ, with scholarship deadlines different from the actual application deadline. An honors program might require another form after a student has already submitted the main application.
For one of the biggest decisions most seniors have made so far, there is a surprising amount of figuring it out as you go.
The Application Race
Students are applying to way more colleges than they used to.
During the 2015–16 admissions cycle, the average Common App applicant submitted 4.66 applications. By 2024–25, that had risen to 6.80 applications per applicant, an increase of roughly 46% in less than a decade. In the 2024–25 cycle alone, almost 1.5 million applicants submitted more than 10.1 million applications through Common App. Applications were up 8% from the year before. (Common App, 2024–25 End-of-Season Report)
There are good reasons for some of that growth. Common App makes it easier to reach more colleges, and applying to several schools can give students more options when decisions and financial aid offers arrive.
It also changes the calculation students make. If friends are applying to ten schools, applying to four can start to feel risky. A student who is unsure about a target school might add another safety. Someone who has already completed the Common App might decide that adding one more reach is worth the extra supplement.
That logic makes sense for each individual student. Taken together, though, it produces larger applicant pools and even more uncertainty about where someone really has a realistic chance of getting in.
Most colleges in the country are not rejecting nearly everyone who applies. NACAC found that four-year nonprofit colleges accepted an average of about 73% of applicants in its national selectivity data.
That number looks very different from the schools that dominate a lot of conversations about admissions.
UCLA received 145,085 first-year applications for fall 2025 and admitted 13,659 students. That works out to an acceptance rate of only 9.4%. Its median admitted student had a 4.00 unweighted GPA. (UCLA First-Year Profile, 2025)
Numbers like those are difficult for students to make sense of. A person can spend four years earning excellent grades, taking difficult classes and building a strong application, then still have no clear idea whether that will be enough at a selective school.
So students spread out their chances by applying to more places. The growing number of applications then makes many schools harder to predict, which gives the next group of students another reason to apply broadly. No one student created that cycle, but seniors are the ones living inside it.
No Assigned Syllabus
Submitting more applications would be less overwhelming if every college wanted roughly the same thing.
They do not.
Some schools have supplemental essays while others have none. Some require separate applications for honors programs or scholarships. At certain colleges, students apply directly to a major or school within the university. Elsewhere, everyone enters more generally.
Testing policies are another source of confusion. One college may let students self-report scores. Another may require an official report later. A student can also run into different deadlines for admission, merit aid and special programs at the same university.
The differences often look small until one of them affects whether a student is considered for something important.
High school counselors see that confusion firsthand. In a NACAC survey, 49% of public-school counselors said completing the FAFSA was a big challenge for their students. 35% pointed to preparing essays, 30% identified completing the application itself and 28% said students struggled with knowing how to get answers from colleges.
Those numbers help explain why a task that sounds simple from the outside can consume so much time.
Sometimes writing the essay is not the problem. The problem is realizing that the essay exists, figuring out where to submit it and finding out whether it is due on the same day as everything else.
Help Exists, but Students Still Have to Navigate It
There is more college information available now than ever before.
Students can talk to counselors and admissions representatives. College websites publish detailed requirements. There are rankings, forums, admissions calculators, videos and entire online communities centered around the application process. Artificial intelligence has added another place to ask questions.
Having that much information is useful, but also messy.
A college can describe itself as test optional while students online argue over whether submitting a score still gives an advantage. One admissions calculator might call a university a target while another labels it a reach. A school can say it practices holistic admissions, which is true, but that does not necessarily help a seventeen-year-old figure out how competitive a particular application is.
What this leads to is the laborious process of students researching the research.
Even school counselors, who are often the most reliable source available to students, have limited time. An EAB survey found that counseling departments at public high schools spent only 22% of their time on postsecondary admission counseling. At private schools, the figure was 51%.
That gap does not mean public-school counselors care less about college admissions. It means their jobs include many other responsibilities, from course scheduling to students’ personal needs.For students, the practical result is that a counselor cannot manage every detail of every application.
By senior year, applicants start picking up an entire vocabulary they probably never needed before. Early Action, Early Decision, Restrictive Early Action, demonstrated interest, need-blind admission, need-aware admission, middle 50 percent, direct admission and yield all become normal terms. Most students would never learn this language and would never need to, but now they are forced to during an extremely small concentrated time period of their life.
Think you're done? Then Comes the Money
The financial side of the application process adds a whole other layer to this already convoluted equation.
Students seeking federal aid complete the FAFSA. Depending on the colleges on their list, they may also need the CSS Profile. The College Board says the CSS Profile is used by participating institutions and programs to help distribute more than $14 billion in nonfederal financial aid each year. Then there are university scholarships, outside scholarships, separate merit deadlines and financial aid portals that students may not even see until after applying.
A senior may have spent years thinking about where they want to go to college. Now they have to think about what their family can actually pay.
That can mean comparing two schools with very different price tags, deciding whether taking on loans is worth it, or questioning whether an Early Decision application makes sense when it limits the ability to compare financial aid offers.
The Princeton Review’s 2026 College Hopes & Worries Survey included 9,446 college applicants and parents. Among them, 93% said they were applying for financial aid. When asked what contributed most to their application stress, 37% chose “sticker shock,” compared with 29% who chose admission expectations. Another 19% pointed to deadlines and decisions, while 15% chose information overload.
That is an important distinction. A student can get into a college and still be unable to attend it. For many families, the financial decision is every bit as consequential as the admissions decision.
Senior Year Does Not Stop
Now it’s ok, because all of this would be very easy if senior received dedicated time and room for this. Unfortunately, they don’t though.
Students still have classes, tests, practices, jobs, clubs and responsibilities at home. Seniors shoulder these responsibilities and more all in preparation for their application experience, and in addition to the fray of these responsibilities they must deal with this complex process. Teachers still assign work during application season, as they should. A November 1 deadline does not cancel whatever is due in school on October 31.
College applications get the time remaining. A student might forced to work on an essay after practice, make changes during lunch, research scholarships on the weekend and spend part of the night jumping between an application portal and the homework that still has to be finished. There is something odd about that arrangement. The college process can affect the next four years of a student’s life, yet there is rarely a dedicated block of time for actually doing it.
The stress reflects that. In The Princeton Review’s 2026 survey, 73% of respondents described their stress about college applications as “high” or “very high.” When the organization first asked that question in 2003, the figure was 56%.
That is a 17-percentage-point increase over a little more than two decades.
The writing itself adds to the pressure. The Common App personal statement gives students up to 650 words to explain something meaningful about themselves. Then individual colleges may ask for more writing about academic interests, community, activities or why the student wants to attend.
Those essays matter, which means students naturally revise them over and over. The result can be a strange experience: spending hours trying to make your own voice sound effortless.
When “Enough” Gets Hard to Define
One of the stranger parts of the application process is that there is rarely a clear point where the work feels finished. In school, there usually is. You submit the assignment, take the test or turn in the project, and for better or worse, it is done.
College applications do not really work that way. An essay can always be revised again. There may be another scholarship worth looking into, another college worth adding or another requirement hiding somewhere in an applicant portal. Even after submitting, students are still checking for missing documents, financial aid updates and whatever comes next.
Part of that uncertainty comes from how many different things colleges consider at once. In NACAC’s survey of four-year colleges, 76.8% gave “considerable importance” to grades in college-preparatory courses, while 63.8% said the same about the strength of a student’s curriculum. Outside academics, 28.3% gave considerable importance to positive character attributes, and 18.9% did so for the essay or writing sample.
Then there are recommendations, activities, jobs, demonstrated interest and other factors that vary from school to school.
For students, it becomes difficult to tell what deserves the most attention. Grades clearly matter, but so does taking harder classes. Activities might help, but only if they seem meaningful. Essays are supposed to reveal something personal, yet students know they are still being judged as part of an application.
After a while, it becomes very easy to look back at high school and wonder how every choice will be interpreted by an admissions office. A club is no longer just a club. A class is not only a class. Even something a student genuinely enjoys can start to feel like another line being weighed somewhere in the process.
That is where the pressure starts to extend far beyond the application itself.
What the Process Does Teach
There are parts of the process that are genuinely useful. Most students have never had to keep track of this many deadlines on their own or make decisions involving this much money. They have to contact counselors and teachers, compare schools they may have only visited once, read through financial aid information and make choices without knowing exactly how everything will turn out.
That kind of responsibility is probably good practice for what comes later.
The decisions are also more complicated than most of what students are used to making in high school. A student might like one college more but receive a much better financial offer from another. Someone else might have to decide whether the reputation of a school is worth taking on more debt. Another student may spend years working toward a highly selective college and still have to accept that a strong application does not guarantee anything.
There is value in learning how to deal with that. At the same time, I do not think every difficult part of the process becomes justified simply because students learn from it. Colleges obviously need enough information to make admissions decisions, and financial aid offices need detailed information from families. Students should also have to put real thought into where they are going to spend the next several years.
The problem is how much extra knowledge students are expected to pick up just to navigate the system itself. By the time applications are due, many seniors know far more about admissions terminology, score-reporting policies, financial aid forms and deadline structures than they ever expected to know. Some of that information is useful. A lot of it is simply necessary because every school seems to handle the process a little differently.
A Second Education
That is why applying to college can take over so much of senior year.
For months, students are moving between schoolwork and an application process that has its own deadlines, writing assignments, research and paperwork. The work does not end when the Common App is submitted either. There are still portals to check, scholarships to consider, financial aid forms to finish and eventually decisions to compare. By then, applying to college can feel less like one important task and more like something running constantly in the background.
There are lessons in that experience. Students become more independent because they have to. They learn to ask questions, keep track of important information and make decisions that have actual consequences. I just do not think those lessons require the process to be as difficult to navigate as it has become.
College applications should take effort. Students are making a major decision, and colleges are making one too. It makes sense that both sides would take the process seriously.
What feels excessive is everything students have to learn around the application itself. By the end of senior year, many students have practically taught themselves how an entire admissions system works while still trying to finish high school.
For something meant to be the next step after graduation, it can feel like another course students were never told they had signed up for.
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