With the Common App, unless there were additional hoops to jump through, you could just send your app to as many colleges as your parents are willing to pay $80 for. Making you write a para on "why I want to attend this college" and maybe another short essay slows you down.

Also, colleges want to protect their yield, which goes into ranking calcs, so they want to know if an applicant is really committed to going if accepted. Thus the "why I want to attend this college" essay. All other things being equal, are going to accept the kid who writes in detail about how great NYU's film school is, with mentions of profs and courses, over the kid who writes about how cool it would be to live in NYC.

I don't understand why a college requires so many essays. I know they are trying to separate the wheat from the chaff but really! Does the admissions office read all of the essays? When you have 50,000 applications, it doesn't seem there would be enough time. I'm suspect of this practice.