Pandemic’s toll shows up on students’ college applications

In a college application season like no other, students who have seen every aspect of their lives disrupted by the coronavirus are grappling with how to show their potential.

High school seniors around the U.S. are facing January and February college application deadlines without SAT and ACT entrance exam scores, community service records and resumes flush with extracurricular activities — all casualties of an era of social distancing and remote learning that has carried over from their junior year.

The pandemic has prompted colleges to make tests optional and find new ways to evaluate students, including student-athletes, such as southern California high school senior Anthony Correra. The pandemic canceled his last football season, shortening the highlight tapes that he hoped to share with college recruiters.

“Colleges and universities don’t have the same tools that they did to evaluate students before,” said Angel Perez, chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, or NACAC. “The experience that students are going through right now is drastically different from many others.”

For the first time, the Common Application that allows students to apply to multiple institutions at the same time added an optional space so students can explain in 250 words or less the pandemic’s impacts.

“My parents losing their jobs made it very hard financially and we struggled to get by,” a student wrote. “It was already hard before the pandemic but with the low amount of money flowing in as a result of Covid19’s safe to say our situations got even worse.”

Others wrote of struggling to focus alongside siblings and parents in noisy households disrupted by work and school Zoom calls, or of money and technology challenges.

Colleges have been eager to work with applicants amid concerns about enrollment declines and an alarming drop in the number of potential students, particularly low-income students.

Very competitive colleges, though, have had the opposite problem of trying to juggle large numbers of students who deferred acceptance last year on top of increasing applications for the coming year. Harvard College marked its most competitive early admissions cycle ever, the Harvard Crimson reported. The college invited 747 of 10,086 early applicants to join its Class of 2025.