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Andrew Phillips is a senior at Gibraltar High School and serves as News Editor and Chief Photographer of The Viking Voice, the Gibraltar student newspaper.

It’s that time of year again. No, I’m not talking about the holiday season, and all the shopping it brings. What scares parents and teenagers even more than the costs of the holidays is the process of applying for college.

The author navigates the Common Application on his home computer.

Sitting next to my desk at home is a magazine file, used in many offices to hold extra paperwork. Mine is crammed with countless envelopes, all received in the mail over the last several months from colleges from Missouri to Massachusetts. Most I opened once, skimmed over their contents, and shoved in the file wherever I could find room, only to check my email and find a similar message there. The “College” folder in my Hotmail account currently contains 257 messages, with subjects like “No essay, no fee…apply now” and “November: Beating Stress.” This has been the most overwhelming aspect of the college application process for me: the overload of information from so many colleges that, in their constant efforts to make applying easier, seem to complicate the process even further.

Over the past few weeks, I have applied to six schools, using four different applications and three supplements, and have received four letters of recommendation. After completing coursework every day in four Advanced Placement (AP) classes in hopes of testing out of college courses, and working on Gibraltar’s student newspaper, The Viking Voice, applying for college has been that last item on the to-do list that invariably loses out to sleep in my choice of what to do at 11:30 at night. In a recent conversation with former Gibraltar High School guidance counselor Lynnea Hickey, I was surprised to find out how simple the college application process once was.

“I don’t recall any letters of recommendation,” says Hickey, who graduated from Gibraltar in 1964 and served as a guidance counselor at the school from 1982 – 2008. “There wasn’t a waiting time; it was so streamlined in comparison to now, when you write essays and get letters of reference.” Hickey received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Stout, and says she didn’t submit her application until March of her senior year, after taking the ACT in February.

“It was of course hand-written,” she says. “There wasn’t a lot of information, mainly just [residency] information; it did require an ACT score, but that was it, and you found out in two or three weeks.”

Today, students who meet application deadlines in November and December can expect to find out their results in January or February.

That longer turnaround is not necessarily caused by a more complicated application process, but by the fact that many schools have become much more selective over the past few decades. The University of Wisconsin-Madison once accepted any Wisconsin student in the top 50 percent of their graduating class, and in 1990 had an average undergraduate ACT score of 24.3. Today, 93 percent of Madison freshmen ranked in the top quarter of their high school class, and the middle 50 percent of the freshman class’s ACT scores range from 26 – 30.

“Colleges now have to advertise their completion rates,” Hickey explains. “They needed to become more competitive and kind of tighten up the process. They want to make sure that the school is the right fit for the student; it’s just as important to them as it is to you as a student.”

And while they may have somewhat complicated the process of applying to school, colleges have used technology to their advantage when it comes to submitting and processing applications.

“We kept track of more papers, the application, letters of reference,” Hickey says. “Now, you go on and you fill out your app, the teacher goes online and puts in their reference. The only thing that’s not online is the transcript.”

Web sites like The Common Application (www.commonapp.org) have simplified the application process by consolidating the applications of 391 colleges across the country into one site. I personally used the Common App Web site for three of the six colleges I applied to. Even schools that don’t use the Common App still offer online applications, which reduce many of the annoying errors of the past.

“You go online and do your paperwork, and you can’t move on until it’s correct,” Hickey says.

In the past, Hickey says people in college admissions offices would misplace paperwork.

“I would call and say ‘I know I sent this transcript in,’ and they would tell me ‘We don’t have it…oh wait, here it is,’” Hickey says. With online applications, there’s no paperwork to lose.

The technological revolution has removed at least a bit of the stress and unknown from one of life’s biggest decisions, at least until scholarship deadlines come around.