Students are Using Technology in College Applications Now More than Ever

College applications are a stressful part of a student’s high school career and in the past decade students are using any resource they can to gain an upper hand. Graduating seniors from the class of 2016 are now in the waiting phase of college applications, after toiling all fall to get application essays just right to make colleges want them at their schools. In the modern day and age of technology, now more than ever students are taking advantage of many advanced resources to make it into the multitude of universities and colleges in the United States.

In the past decade, numerous companies and startups focused on helping students during the college application process have appeared around the country. Companies such as Synocate, ZeeMee and Essayedge are changing the way that students are handling the application process.

“We have seen the elite college consulting framework come in because school counselors are being overstretched, here in California the student to high school provided guidance counselor ratio is something like 750 to 1,” Synocate Admissions Expert JP said.

Synocate is a company started in 2009 by Ishaan Puri, author of the Amazon bestseller “The Applicant”. Synocate provides a relatively distinct service that provides students with experienced college counselors to work with them throughout the application process. Since its creation, the company’s students are three times more likely to be accepted into the colleges they want.

“At stanford a school where the acceptance rate is five percent, 25 percent of our students get in,” JP said. “We are most proud of the fact that 100 percent of our students that apply to Cornell get in.”

According to JP, they have had a steep increase in students within the past six months. East senior Kendall Dunbar is one of those students who has used technology to her advantage, specifically ZeeMee. ZeeMee is essentially a Facebook or Instagram page for a college application. The company claims to bring every student’s story to life and connect them beyond the application. Currently colleges such as TCU, Washington University, Tulane and many more recommend using ZeeMee, according to their website.

“[ZeeMee] can’t hurt your chances,” Dunbar said. “It is another way for colleges to get to know you as person and not just an application.”

While there are all of these resources to help with college essays, there are many schools that have academic based admissions such as the University of Missouri. At schools like MU, there are published admission requirements that only look at high school transcripts and ACT/SAT scores, according to assistant director at the office of admissions for MU, Patrick Elmore.

Most students who use Synocate have the intention of going to Ivy league schools or elite schools in the nation. In the U.S. upper level education system, there are approximately 5.25 million more undergraduates in 2016 than there were in 2000, according to the Department of Education.

“Harvard actually has so many qualified applicants for every one of those slots that it could throw out an entire class of freshmen and choose a completely new class of freshmen from the pool of students and they would come out with exactly the same outputs after graduation,” JP said.

The Common Application has had a role in increasing competition between students according to JP. While streamlining the application process, the Common App also makes it easier to apply to many different colleges in a short amount of time, essentially increasing the amount of applications each university has to go through.

The Common Application is another resource that is used by over 700 colleges and universities to simplify the college application process. From 2001 to 2012, the common App an increase in applications of approximately 2.5 million according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“Having one universal essay that links everything together just makes the whole process easier,” senior Carl Young said. “The stress is still there, you’re still applying to colleges.”

The demand for college application help isn’t only from graduating seniors, Synocate has worked with students as early as 7th grade. The Department of Education projects that the number of students in the U.S. will continue to increase, therefore continuing the cycle of competition in college applications meaning that use of these resources can be expected to grow even more.

“[Universities] get more and more picky and selective about the students they are going to accept and that just intensifies the cycle again and again,” JP said.