As a junior with a sibling who just went through the college admissions process, I’m scared. The college application process has changed drastically in the last 20-or-so years. Most of us have heard our parents talk about how college was much easier to get into when they were our age. This could be for a variety of reasons, like the growing opinion that you need a college degree if you want to be successful. However, I think the increasing competitiveness of top schools in the country primarily stems from one issue: the Common Application. This online service has made applying to college simpler and more efficient, only requiring the click of a few buttons to send applications to an outrageous number of schools. In recent years, students have been applying to more and more colleges, which is enabled by the ease of the Common Application. Students are now encouraged by the idea of “the more the merrier” simply because applying to more schools doesn’t mean more work. This might not even seem to be a problem at first glance, but acceptance rates are taking a hit due to the record-high number of applicants, leading to a higher number of people being put on waiting lists or getting straight-up rejected. This pressure is becoming too much for many high school students to handle. Being a straight-A student with good test scores and essay-writing skills no longer seems like enough to get into your top-choice school, and it’s difficult to set yourself apart from thousands of other applicants. The uncertainty created by this inability to feel like you measure up to other applicants can also fuel the fire, as students are applying to more schools “just in case.” It’s now much more difficult to get into schools that you are genuinely interested in because admissions are now crowded with lots of people who applied because of its simplicity. However, this trend of dropping acceptances doesn’t hurt everyone. Colleges are incentivized by this because a lower acceptance rate makes them look like better schools, which leads to more applications, a dropping acceptance rate and a cycle with no end in sight. So, while this may seem inevitable, and applying to a million schools might seem necessary just to get in somewhere you like, please don’t apply to all 800 colleges that accept the Common Application just because you can.