Zahraa Rahal
Mrs. Nina Shalhoub
English 204
1 October 2015

A Critique of “The common App Fallacy” by Damon Beres

Damon Beres, a columnist for New York University’s Washington Square News, professes his point view on the Common College Application and lists what he believes to be wrong with it. Beres presents the main bulk of his argument in a conversational tone, which has emphasis over conciseness and logic rather than fact. It is clear from the beginning that Beres’ target audience is: college students, roughly his age, who read the NYU school journal.

In his article “The Common App Fallacy,” Damon Beres blasts the Common College Application, citing how the one-size-fits-all application is ruining the college application process. With students just pointing, clicking and applying, colleges are reaping in a new application tithe, leading Beres to postulate that, “it’s a cheap, money making scheme that homogenizes applicants and schools alike.” This rapid fire, mass spamming of applications is what he believes to be pauperizing the college application process. By not engaging in a personalized search for the right college, Beres reflects that students are misappropriating collegiate stock and saturating colleges’ application slots, preventing more invested students from making the cut--shockingly to him, something Beres reasons that the College Board and colleges are indisputably extorting.

Beres’ article is most certainly intriguing, if not informative. He illustrates his points clearly and concisely, suggesting that what once was a problem a reader may have had no prior knowledge of, is now something he may wholly agree on. However, the fallacy with “The Common App Fallacy” is that the reader is left with insubstantial factual evidence. Instead, Beres relies on two “claims” and two writing flaws to educate his reader. His two claims are: 1) American colleges are universally difficult to get into, and 2) That students’ spamming of college applications is actually encouraged by the College Board. While his claims are not terrible by themselves, his two flaws of: 1) Indulging in the logical fallacies of oversimplification, he has constructed a sound enough argument to carry his premises upon, and 2) That his knowledge of the matter is ubiquitous enough that he must find citation unnecessary —make the paper academically questionable. While potentially withstanding in leisurely journalistic writing, his arguments have trouble holding weight with an academic audience.

From the style used by Beres and through the use of emotionally charged terms like “Antidepressants” and phrases like “extracurricular that make Jimmy Carter look like a lazy old coot…” in relation to his anecdote about his friends’ problems finding colleges, it is immediately seen that Beres wants readers to abandon notions of opposing views and embrace his. Emotional charging like this does not aid him; whereas a strong scholarly article would at least acknowledge and perhaps attempt to answer some critics’ responses, Beres stridently leaps past any potential criticisms and immediately vaults into his argument--a theme present not just in the beginning, but throughout his article.

Beres was quick in generating assumptions. He generates a fair assumption about American Colleges and how difficult college acceptance can be; but however, without factual evidence, it is just an assumption. His conclusion that more students going to college means more students being shut out of desired colleges is logical; however, Beres does not provide any documented statistics, reports or journals to justify this assumption. Throughout his entire article, there is not a single notation, citation, footnote, or indication that any of his claims have factual evidence.

The most ingenious of his insubstantial claims is the one he levies against the College Board. The author asserts that the College Board has ceased to care about students and only cares about money. He attributes the low chance of getting into a university solely to Common Application and the College Board, who have made applications “a simple process of point-and-click”. The author claims that, as they have made it so easy for students to send out test scores and applications to multiple colleges, mass applications are being encouraged. Even though it is right that mass applications have been made possible thanks to such an easy application process, this reason alone is not sufficient enough to reject the whole schemes of Common Application and the College Board. The institutions have actually been helpful for high-school students in gathering information on what universities they may be interested in and promptly applying to universities that best suit them. Instead of delving into how colleges may or may not be price-gouging students as he had inferred, Beres moves onto the oversimplified solution of simply abandoning the Common College Application and therefore solving the problem.

Beres raises great points about the state of our colleges and the application process. Traditionally, colleges have not been easy to get into but a claim to collect money off of students and deny students college acceptance en-masse is most alarming. However, due to this being one’s first exposure to such a problem and Beres’ lack of citation, one must approach the problem of the Common College Application (and all it entails) skeptically. More factual information is supposed to be provided, as one may agree with Beres, but find it hard to address a problem without fully fathoming the scope of it. In total, Beres’ article “The Common App Fallacy” to be a great journalism article that provokes more questions than it answers; something journal articles should do. The points and questions he instigates would be highly relevant to his target audience of college students whom enjoy his paper; but still one cannot deny, that the article lacks the expected credible information.

Works Cited

Beres, Damon. “The Common App Fallacy.” Washington Square News. Jan 22, 2008. Print.