The Eighth Page

Features — Phillipian Satire: Ivy League: Whopping 30 Secs an App

Indicating a notable increase from previous seasons, admissions departments from the nation’s top colleges and universities recently announced that the average amount of time spent on reading the transcripts, scores, and papers of prospective students was 30 seconds.

A spokesperson for the Ivy League Alliance attributed the new number, up from 15 seconds in 2015, to newly focused hiring processes and a crop of application readers who “are kind of slow readers.”

In a separate statement, the world’s high-school seniors revealed the minimum time spent on writing those same transcripts, scores, and papers was “about 40 hours, plus a couple hours we spent thinking about them in the shower and an hour for that one dinner our dads told us we should rewrite our entire supplemental essays.”

“Yeah, we don’t really get a chance to read those,” said the school’s spokesperson, responding to a question about such supplements.

“The baseline goal is usually to get their name, like a G.P.A. or an S.A.T. score, and then check whether they have a legacy or whatever. If we’re super crunched for time, then we’ll drop the name part. Scores and legacies are a must, though.”

At press time, the country’s college counseling offices reported that their advice to all those applying to a university would remain unchanged. “The best guidance we can give is this: start early, work hard, and revise, revise, revise!

“Build a story – colleges are listening, and they’re going to read everything you write more closely than you could ever believe.”