It's easy for us to turn up our noses at the college process. After all, while I certainly remember agonizing over every detail of my applications, I almost have to laugh at the high-school students currently panicking. Don't they know it works out for the best?
But that's easy for me to say -- I'm at the No. 4 school in the country. For all of us, it worked out about as well as it could.
There is a whole world of people out there for which the process has just begun, and there is no shortage of tools to help them survive the process. This past year saw a tremendous boom in a new aid device for the college application process: the online forum.
On these sites, anyone can post questions for current college students, other applicants or any other site members, sometimes seeming just slightly obsessive. One Penn hopeful on CollegeConfidential.com, one of the most popular sites, has the username "Whartonorbust." Another user, Brocollie, got information about the new Vagelos Program In Life Sciences and Management.
"We did not feel that there was ... a Web site that really dealt with college admissions in a helpful way and provided a lot of the info people needed," said Roger Dooley, managing director at CollegeConfidential.com.
"I get a comforting feeling from people that are going through the same thing," said April McLeod, a current freshman at Texas Lutheran University who has used several online forums.
But are these forums at all accurate?
CollegeConfidential has done its best to provide reliable admissions information, including having university representatives on the message boards and an "Ask the Dean" section staffed by a senior college counselor.
After all, anyone can post anything they want on these boards. Any non-professional that offers advice in CollegeConfidential's "What are my chances?" forum is operating mostly on hearsay and personal experience, which, while providing an interesting perspective, are hardly reliable. Even current college students can make inaccurate statements to potential applicants.
"You have to look at individual members' comments," Dooley said. "Some members are very knowledgeable; ... [they] have the most credibility."
Colleges could simply hope that their potential applicants don't get too much bad information and assume that the majority of information will give students a realistic perspective. But some schools, like Dickinson College, have chosen to take part in the trend.
The Dickinson admissions office hosts a series of student blogs that are designed to give prospective applicants a realistic perspective on campus life. They don't exist for high school seniors to frantically post SAT scores in hopes of receiving assurances of admission, but perhaps if students don't feel so kept in the dark by admissions offices, they will be less inclined to accept bad advice from anonymous people in cyberspace.
Dickinson admissions counselor Laura Rheinauer said the blogs have been very helpful and popular with prospective students because current students are the ones they truly want to talk to.
Why shouldn't Penn get involved? The Ivy League is one of the most agonized-over groups of colleges in the admissions process. In fact, Dooley said that one of the primary motivations behind CollegeConfidential was the lack of accurate information about top schools.
We could even expand the idea by creating admissions message boards staffed by admissions and University personnel. They could even include student life sections, staffed by authorized students. The number of questions CollegeConfidential users had about Penn is mind-boggling: Can outside scholarships be put toward tuition? How easy it is to transfer between our undergraduate schools? Is gym membership is included in tuition? It would be wonderful if these students could find a trustworthy place to talk to University officials and current students so they can get accurate, honest answers to their questions.
These sorts of efforts wouldn't exist as an open forum for applicants to panic and ask the inevitable "Will I get in?" Those questions must wait until December and April. But the college applicant community has already proven its desire for quick answers about the confusing college process, and Penn should help them out.
Liz Hoffman is a sophomore political science major from New York, N.Y. New York Minute appears on Mondays.
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