This idea is not necessarily new, but it is both evolving and growing in popularity. The Common Application, a not-for-profit member organization, is committed to the pursuit of access, equity and integrity in the college admission process. It began in 1975 with 15 institutions, all of which were private, liberal arts colleges, and has since grown to about 700 member institutions, which include large public institutions, small colleges, art and design schools, and historically black universities, to name a few.
“We are innovators,” said Aba Blankson, director of communications at The Common Application. “We started the process. We’ve been here for a long time. We care about students, and we care about connecting students with the schools where they are going to thrive and be supported.”
Forty years after its launch, there are other organizations and state-supported organizations offering similar options to students.
For example, the University of California campuses have followed common admissions policies since 1985. Since 1996, its nine institutions have shared a centralized online application system.
“The primary goals of the centralized application are to offer an easy way for applicants to apply to multiple UC campuses and to enable campuses to receive applications in a timely and cost-effective manner,” said Claire Doan, a UC spokesperson.
During the fall 2016 application process, the University of California received more than 206,000 unique applications, and each applicant applies to about four campuses. During the same period, The Common Application received about 4 million applications, submitted by 947,000 unique applicants.
Blankson noted that while the process is streamlined, applying to colleges is still a thoughtful process. Many institutions require additional essays and questions.
“It’s not the case that you fill out one application and send it to 30 schools,” she said.
Although The Common Application and the UC portal have shown increasing numbers of applicants and applications since their launch, the process can be slow to start. Last year, the Iowa Board of Regents launched the Iowa Public Universities Application Portal to receive applications on behalf of Iowa State University, the University of Iowa and the University of Northern Iowa. For the fall 2015 admission process, the three institutions received 50,779 new freshman applications, of which 104 prospective students made use of the new portal.
In its launch, the board, along with representatives from each of the three universities, developed a set of FAQs that was shared with all high school principals and counselors in the state. Then, interested applicants could gather more information about the portal on the board’s website. Currently the board is restrategizing how it will market and make the portal visible to more applicants.
“The team is discussing possible opportunities to communicate information about the portal to prospective students,” said Diana Gonzalez, the board’s chief academic officer. “This service was not developed with regard to achieving a specific number of applicants. It was done to simplify the process for those students who desire to apply to more than one of the public universities.”
Joining this mix of collective college applications is a group called the Coalition for Access, Affordability and Success, which plans to launch an application similar to the model used by The Common Application. On its website, the coalition states that it has signed up more than 90 institutions; however other sources say that some member institutions will not launch the coalition’s application this year. The coalition was not available for comment.
While the application innovators continue to navigate different technologies and upcoming trends in order to streamline the process for applicants, at its heart, applications are still about providing information about oneself.
One UC applicant said it this way: “A lot of people put a lot of emphasis on applications being so hard and so rigorous to complete, but it just seems straightforward — entering information about yourself that you should already know.”
