Does Applying to College Need to Take This Long?

2026-03-08 | 10 min read | 2475 words

Helping my brother apply to college over the last few months made me acutely aware of the immense amount of time and pressure involved in this process. Students collectively submit millions of applications each year, but each student only gets into a subset of the schools they apply to, making the whole matching process pretty inefficient. I started wondering: could we design a system where far less time, effort, and money is wasted?

Before getting into that, a few reflections on undergraduate college applications in the United States:

1. I grew up privileged enough to go to college and to apply to competitive colleges, knowing that within reason I’d be able to attend them if I got in.
2. College applications can bring out substantial negative practices ranging from lying, manufacturing sob stories, and working on extracurriculars solely for the sake of applications (although honestly, as long as some volunteering or some net good comes to the community in the process, I don’t think joining additional extracurriculars to help with applications is purely a bad thing).
3. I got to observe and re-experience constant feelings of stress, competition, comparison, and feeling like you’re not enough throughout the process. On top of that, there’s the constant stress about presenting what’s already supposed to be a mature-for-your-age message or learning in an eye-catchingly narrative fashion.

In retrospect, I wish I could remind my high school self that my worldview at the time was quite limited, despite having gone to extracurricular competitions with students from around the globe and having visited my extended family in India. I still had a relatively limited and linear perspective on what success in high school meant (namely getting great grades and eventually getting into a good college for a desirable major). I’ve since seen people come from very different educational, financial, and ethnic family backgrounds but end up working similar jobs or achieving similar levels of education and financial success.

One interesting aside: I have a constant mental back-and-forth on whether it’s possible to create a healthy mindset that minimizes comparison and encourages only comparing against oneself without decreasing the overall amount of net output in one’s life or the economy, although this opens up lots of philosophical rabbit holes about what the purpose of a life is and how to engage in competition in a mentally healthy fashion.

What the Process Actually Looked Like

Helping my brother through this, the process looked something like:

1. Trying to identify a core guiding thread in all of the classes and extracurriculars he did over the course of high school (even though many of these things were driven by the opportunity presenting itself and out of pure interest, and even though those interests were very diverse as he continued to explore things like Model UN, interning at an ophthalmology clinic, etc.).
2. A lot of self-reflection and soul-searching to understand what it is about these different activities that motivated him, what he wanted to get out of college, and what he wanted to use his education to do in the future.
3. Writing an enormous number of essays back to back to back in a particular narrative style designed to demonstrate his personality, “intellectual vitality,” and maturity of thinking while catching the admissions officer’s eye. This was pretty different from the typical prose that he writes and that I was taught to write during high school.

Reflecting on this gave me an interesting question: how many cumulative hours are spent by students applying to college? And if the number is way higher than it needs to be, could we come up with a structured opportunity for them to spend that time elsewhere?

How Other Countries Handle This

Before trying to answer that, it’s worth understanding that the US holistic admissions model is actually unusual globally. Most developed countries use far more streamlined (if blunt) systems:

• United Kingdom: Students apply to a maximum of 5 universities through UCAS, a centralized platform. They write one personal statement (shared across all five choices), focused on their intellectual engagement with a specific subject. No extracurricular lists, no multiple essays, no American-style recommendation letters. Offers are conditional on predicted exam grades, and the whole cycle runs about 9-10 months.
• India: Admissions are dominated by high-stakes entrance exams. The JEE (for engineering) and NEET (for medicine) are taken by over a million students each year, and exam rank almost entirely determines which college and program you’re placed in. Students typically spend 1-2 years at private coaching centers preparing. No essays, no interviews, no extracurriculars considered. The system is transparent in a narrow sense, but creates extreme pressure around a single test.
• China: The Gaokao, a 2-3 day national exam taken by roughly 10 million students each June, is the near-total determinant of university placement. Students submit ranked lists of universities after scores are released, and a computerized system matches them to seats based on their score and province of origin. Essentially no role for essays, recommendations, or extracurriculars.
• Australia: The ATAR (Australian Tertiary Admission Rank), a percentile ranking from Year 12 exams, is the primary criterion for most programs. Students apply through centralized state admissions centers, listing preferences in ranked order. No personal essays or recommendation letters for standard entry. The cycle from application to enrollment is roughly 4-5 months.

Most countries use a single exam or academic metric as the primary (or sole) admissions criterion. The US is an outlier in asking students to produce extensive personal narratives, curate extracurricular profiles, and write dozens of individualized essays across many schools.

How Much Time Does This Take?

Here’s a rough estimate of the time investment per applicant:

Estimated Time Investment per Applicant (Competitive Track)

There are probably a large number of students doing the bare minimum, applying to a single school or only a couple with minimal essays. The Common Application processed 7 million applications in the 2023-2024 cycle. Because the United States has between 3.5 and 3.8 million high school graduates annually, if even a small fraction of these students spend 50+ hours on applications, the collective time investment is enormous.

The Problems

Mental Health

The admissions process is one of the most commonly cited drivers of adolescent anxiety. Surveys indicate that 76% of students view the application process as a “life-defining moment,” and 52% describe it as the most stressful academic experience they’ve ever faced. I can confirm from watching my brother go through it (and from my own experience years ago) that this stress is very real.

The Paradox of “Holistic Review”

The shift toward holistic review was intended to increase equity by looking beyond grades. But it has inadvertently maximized the time burden. By evaluating “unique experiences” and “personal qualities,” colleges incentivize students to manufacture distinctiveness. The result is that students spend enormous amounts of time crafting narratives, curating extracurriculars, and basically packaging themselves as products for admissions offices to consume.

Acceptances Concentrate Among the Same Students

A lot of the acceptances at Ivies and similarly selective schools concentrate among the same set of applicants. A student who gets into Harvard is probably also getting into Yale and Princeton. This means the system generates enormous redundancy: many students are writing dozens of essays for schools where the same small group of top applicants is collecting most of the offers.

The colleges’ response to shotgun applications is “yield rejection,” where schools reject or waitlist applicants they suspect will choose a more prestigious school. This adds another layer of game theory to a process that’s already pretty opaque.

The Real Winners

The real profit in this system goes to the gatekeepers of data and testing:

• The College Board: A non-profit that reported over $1 billion in revenue in 2023, holding over $1.7 billion in cash and investments. A significant portion of this revenue comes from AP exams ($98 per test) and SAT fees, costs that are effectively mandatory for students aiming for selective colleges.
• Executive Compensation: The CEO of the College Board received compensation exceeding $2 million in 2024.
• Private Consulting: Admissions consulting can run $10,000 to $100,000 per client, creating a market that overwhelmingly favors wealthy families.
• Application Fees: Universities collectively generate an estimated $500 million per year in application fees.

The Pipeline

To think about alternatives, it helps to understand the baseline flow of students through the US education system:

• High school graduates: The US produces approximately 3.5 to 3.8 million per year.
• Non-graduates: The status dropout rate is roughly 5.3%.
• 2-year college enrollment: About 30-40% of college-goers start at a 2-year institution. The vast majority attend public community colleges (roughly 4.7 million enrolled).
• Completion rates: This is probably the system’s greatest failure point. Fewer than 40% of community college students earn a certificate or degree within six years. Among those who intend to transfer to a 4-year university (81%), only 33% successfully transfer, and only 14% of the original cohort eventually earn a bachelor’s degree within six years.

That last number really stuck out to me: 14% of community college students who intended to get a bachelor’s degree actually get one within six years.

Is the Application Process Useful?

Beyond the outcome though, is the process itself valuable?

The “resilience” argument: Proponents argue that the process teaches resilience, self-reflection, and how to handle failure. Developing a narrative for the Common App can force a 17-year-old to synthesize their identity. There’s also something to be said for learning to collect resources, present yourself, and apply for things (skills that translate to employment, graduate school, and other contexts).

I’ll also say this (and I think many of my friends would agree): being accepted to a highly ranked college was something many of us fixated on through high school. In retrospect, it was quite rare to meet someone who was genuinely unsatisfied with their college experience, particularly in terms of which university they attended. A very small number of people actually transferred colleges, excluding those who went to community colleges and then transferred to four-year programs since that was typically their plan from the start.

Could We Design Something Better?

How else could students spend this time? I think there’s an opportunity for some sort of structured program, either by opening up more community service contributions through high schools or by allowing students to volunteer in health clinics, in agriculture, or in education, giving them a structured path that guarantees acceptance to colleges.

Some programs like this already exist:

Existing Guaranteed Admission Programs

And then there are national service programs like AmeriCorps and the GI Bill that tie service to education benefits. The Service Year Alliance is working to expand these models.

Comparing the Models

The service-for-admission model obviously requires a much larger time commitment (a full year), but the time is spent doing something directly valuable to the community rather than writing essays about yourself. And the outcome certainty is way higher.

I know this is a simplistic comparison. A service year isn’t for everyone, and it doesn’t address the core matching problem of getting students into schools that are the right fit. But the question I keep coming back to is: if we’re going to ask 17-year-olds to spend hundreds of hours on something, shouldn’t that something produce more value than polished application essays?

Some Open Questions

I’m still thinking through a few things:

• How much revenue do colleges net from the application fees of unaccepted students, and how much is left over after paying the admissions team? Another way to think about this: do colleges have a financial incentive to keep acceptance rates low (and therefore application volumes high)?
• Are there other examples of programs that guarantee admission in exchange for structured service or achievement? California’s TAG program is the closest I know of, but it’s limited to community college transfers.
• Could you disincentivize shotgun applications specifically, maybe through tiered application fees or by limiting the number of schools a student can apply to (like the UK’s 5-school cap through UCAS)?

I don’t have great answers to these yet. But I think the conversation is worth having, especially as the process continues to become more time-consuming, more expensive, and more stressful, with unclear benefits for the students going through it.

Resources & Further Reading

• End-of-Season Report, 2023-2024: First-Year Application Trends - Common App
• Report on the Condition of Education 2024 - National Center for Education Statistics
• College Application Stress Is Real: Here’s Why and What to Do About It - Pathlight
• The Urgency of Fair and Equitable Holistic Review of College Applicants - College Campaign
• College Board Finances - Total Registration
• College Board - Nonprofit Explorer - ProPublica
• Improving Community College Completion Rates - Brookings Institution
• Which U.S. Colleges Make the Most Revenue From Applications? - LendEDU
• Ivy League Acceptance Rates 2024 - Admittedly
• Transfer Admission Guarantee (TAG) - El Camino College
• Washington Guaranteed Admissions Program (WAGAP)
• Service Year Alliance
• Post-9/11 GI Bill (Chapter 33) - Veterans Affairs
• College Enrollment Trends and Statistics: 2024-2025 - BestColleges
• How Time Consuming is the College Application Process? - Global Academics
• I Applied to 23 Colleges and Wrote 50 Essays. Here’s What I Learned. - Chalkbeat