The Complexity of College Applications

When I practiced law in a large Washington, DC firm in the 1990s, I worked with a brilliant tax attorney who solved intricate tax issues for large international corporations. Yet, he hired someone to do his own taxes. “Too complicated,” he said, half-seriously because we both knew he could figure out how to do his taxes. What he really meant was that it took too much time to do correctly. “I let the guys who do this for a living take care of it, “ he continued. “I would take 20 hours and then suffer about whether I did it right.”

So it is with college applications. Filling out college applications is not nearly as challenging as filling out taxes. But it does require a great deal of specific knowledge and since the consequences are significant, a significant amount of suffering.

As crazy as this sounds, one of College Counseling Connecticut’s clients was a college admissions official from an elite college in Connecticut. But she noted that she was so steeped in the nuances of her particular college that she was worried that she would mess up the applications for her son’s other college applications.

She felt embarrassed. Then I told her my tax attorney story and she laughed.