Applying to college: students discuss what’s new and what’s not

My college application process has been both underwhelming and stressful.”

Sumaiya Chowdhury, Senior, East Meadow High School

The college application process can be one of the most stressful tasks for high school seniors.

Whether it’s deciding on a college, a major, or navigating the financial aid process, it can seem like a never-ending decision.

According to the Education Data Initiative, a team of researchers who collect statistics about the country’s education system, 73.7 percent of seniors survived the ever-changing and often painful process of enrolling in colleges and universities last year.

“My college application process has been both underwhelming and stressful,” East Meadow High School senior Sumaiya Chowdhury said. Chowdhury said she’s applied to 15 colleges, but her top choice would be Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania.

The stress and fear that seniors feel is universal. A 2022 study conducted by the Princeton Review reported that 74 percent of those surveyed said that applying to colleges created “high” or “very high” stress, a substantial increase from 56 percent in 2003.

“The application process has been pretty stressful for me so far,” said East Meadow senior Lesly Barahona, who hopes to go to CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “A lot of people have gotten responses back from their colleges already, but I haven’t heard anything back.”

Location, campus size and range of majors are just three factors that students consider, but more often than not, the decision comes down to cost.

“The cost of the school plays a huge role in my decision,” Chowdhury said, “because school is so expensive, and spending a lot of money over the course of four, maybe six years is too much for me and my family.”

The drastic rise in the cost of college contributes to skyrocketing stress. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Center for Education Statistics, the cost of higher education increased by 169 percent between 1980 and 2019, while wages for workers between ages 22 and 27 increased by only 19 percent during the same period of time. 

Nicole Leibowitz, an East Meadow High guidance counselor, said the application process changed over the years, becoming more tech-centric, which can be good or bad, depending on how tech-savvy a student is.

“I think in years past it was simpler,” she said. “Now it’s become so much, with all of the digital aspects of the application. But in some ways, it has become much easier because it’s online.

“Students shouldn’t worry about college applications to the point where the anxiety affects them. I think the only way to lessen the anxiety is to break the process up into manageable parts. The idea is to break it up mentally so a student can feel like they can accomplish things instead of cramming it all in at one time and feeling extremely stressed and anxious.”

Senior Zehra Jafri said that she has benefited from working with the high school’s guidance department. “The … process was much easier than I thought it would be,” she said. “The guidance counselors provided a lot of resources, such as Naviance and Common App, which helped with the application process.”

Naviance is a college and career readiness software provider that partners with high schools and other learning institutions to help students plan for college and careers. Common App is an admission application that allows students to apply to more than one college at a time.

East Meadow High offers college-bound students other services. On Jan. 31, Richard Gatteau, student affairs vice president at Stony Brook University, came to speak to juniors and their parents about the college planning process during the Junior College Planning Night.

Junior Sevi Ozgur said that the discussion was helpful. “It calmed me down, actually,” she said. “It ended up making (the college application process) seem less scary than it initially was.”

Ozgur’s classmate Jakub Brachowski agreed. “Everything Dr. Gatteau said was very informative,” Brachowski said. “He knew what he was talking about, and it made me confident about my eventual time in college.”

Leibowitz, who also spoke at the event, emphasized that students shouldn’t feel alone in the college application process.

“The college application is a collaborative process,” she said. “It’s not just the student, and I think it’s important to involve all of the players, including the parents, the counselor, and anyone else who is needed to help the student.”