By: Max Zaninovich, Opinions Editor

The U.S. college admissions process is universally unpopular, and it’s not hard to see why. Students across the world are scrutinized the moment that they step foot onto a high school campus, or for myself, the moment I launched “Zoom” from my bedroom. It is widely accepted that college admissions are essentially a crapshoot, particularly when it comes to elite universities. So, if you are anything short of an olympic medalist who won a Nobel prize and founded a million-dollar company, you are forced to play the shameless college admissions game. The difference between an acceptance and denial is so minuscule, and many qualified applicants are rejected simply because there are only so many spots. As hard as you may work, or as qualified as you may be, ultimately college admissions boils down to circumstances outside of your control. A college admissions officer may have been in a bad mood while reading your application. Or, merely overworked and exhausted, they skimmed your application and overlooked an important aspect. As a student with the hopes of getting accepted into an elite university, I feel these sentiments more than most. Although college admissions are so largely reliant on luck, there are certain thresholds that you have to meet to simply get your application a second look.

There are 5 main aspects to a college application: extracurricular activities, transcript/GPA, standardized test scores (although they are becoming less important), letters of recommendation, and essays. Once you send your application to a college an admissions officer will read over your application and decide if they thought that you were a good fit for the school. If they believe that you are, they will present your application to the larger admissions committee who will then collectively decide whether or not to accept or deny your admissions. Since there are people physically judging your application, college admissions are subject to human error. With human error comes bias. Thus, college admissions officers can be biased and although they try their best to screen for people without biases, every single person in this world has implicit biases. Whether that bias is something as harmless as disliking an applicant’s favorite book, or something as impactful as disliking someone because of their ethnicity, it is an underlying issue. But moving on from bias, the issue with having a human reading your application is that your application may or may not resonate with a certain admissions officer. For example, if I write my essay about my passion for basketball, and the admissions officer reading my application doesn’t like basketball, then my essay isn’t nearly as impactful. Continuing with that hypothetical, if I write my essay on my passion for painting, and my admissions officer just so happens to love painting as well, I’m in luck. It is not difficult to see why and how this is problematic. This is also why students applying to college nowadays apply to so many different colleges; They want as many chances of a college admissions officer resonating with their essays as possible. 

This ties into another large issue that I have with the college admissions process. In order for your essays to even get due consideration, your GPA and standardized test scores (if submitted) have to be above a certain threshold. For myself I have always been more interested in history and english than I have been in science and math. But, because I want my GPA to be high enough to be considered at a top school, I am planning on taking 5 math or science AP classes simply to boost my GPA. I have no interest in AP Biology, but I’ll suck it up and take it for my GPA alone.  Mills offers many more STEM AP classes than humanities AP which leaves me with little to no choice. Furthermore, as a direct result of Mills being a highly competitive academic school, not taking as many AP classes as many students here would only highlight the fact that I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to take them. However, taking classes that I don’t like is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to doing things that I’m not necessarily interested in to boost my resume. Whenever I am looking to spend my time, I am constantly thinking about productive extracurriculars that I can use to better my profile, rather than just doing the things that I enjoy doing. It isn’t that I dislike the extracurriculars that I end up participating in, it’s simply that I seek opportunities rather than just having fun doing things that I like to do.

College admissions is indeed a twisted game, yet I willingly play for reasons that I can’t even figure out for myself. But until the admissions system changes, or I spontaneously decide that I no longer want to push myself to the brink, I will continue to do all the things that I must do to increase my odds ever so slightly.