\n<\/p>\n
Ever since 15 private colleges and universities teamed up to launch the Common App 50 years ago, the college admissions form has shifted practices and technology to meet the changing needs of institutions and students. <\/p>\n
For instance, the latest iteration of the application, which opened Aug.\u00a01 for the 2026\u201327 academic year, has what the organization calls a \u201crefreshed look\u201d and a new question that allows students to share their experiences with working at a paid job or taking care of their siblings. Common App, the nonprofit that runs the portal, piloted the Responsibilities and Circumstances question over the last three years, which showed in part \u201cthe importance of giving students space\u2014beyond the personal essay\u2014to share how these factors have shaped their high school experience,\u201d the organization wrote in its innovation guide. <\/p>\n
Common App is continuing to build out its Direct Admissions program, in which eligible students get an admissions offer before they actually apply. In its second year, 119 institutions have participated in the initiative and more than 700,000 students received offers.<\/p>\n
Nearly 1.5\u00a0million first-time applicants completed the Common App in the 2024\u201325 cycle, submitting more than 10\u00a0million applications, according to a report released this week. That included just over 571,000 first-generation students\u2014a 14\u00a0percent increase compared to the previous cycle. The Common App is aiming to continue to increase the number of applicants who are first-generation and from low- or middle-income households as it seeks to close equity gaps.<\/p>\n
For this current cycle, more than 1,100 institutions are participating in the Common App, which includes 10 community colleges\u2014yet another change for the organization aimed at ensuring students know about the available opportunities.<\/p>\n
As the organization marks its 50th anniversary, CEO Jenny Rickard sat down with Inside Higher Ed<\/em> to talk about how the Common App has changed over the years and what\u2019s next. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.<\/p>\n Q: How has the founding and the history of Common App influenced the organization today?<\/strong><\/p>\n Jenny Rickard has led Common App since 2016.<\/p>\n A:<\/strong> The thing about Common App that is unique is how its mission actually has not changed over the 50 years of history. It still is an organization that is governed by our members. The mission has always been to simplify the admission process to enable more students to gain access to higher education. So the idea of trying to simplify the college application process by collaborating and working with all the different stakeholders in the admission process\u2014that include students, applicants, school counselors and, obviously, admission officers\u2014is how we go about developing this application, and it\u2019s critically important that we listen to all of those different constituencies. Over the 50 years of Common App, what has changed is technology and the demand for higher education has continued to grow over that time. Just as the times have changed, we\u2019ve expanded the types of institutions that we serve. As a result of that, the students and the different high schools or secondary schools that we\u2019re able to reach. <\/p>\n Q: As the demographics of who is attending college have changed, Common App has made an effort to adjust to that, such as working to better serve financially independent students. So what are the biggest demographic shifts happening now and that you see coming in the applicant pool over the next few years? And how are you looking to accommodate and invest in those changes?<\/strong><\/p>\n A:<\/strong> I think one of the main challenges over the past 50 years has actually been reaching different socioeconomic groups. So our moon shot that we launched to close our gap in the income bands of students using Common App shined a light on the access challenges that higher ed has faced. And some of the initiatives that we have launched are to address that gap\u201470\u00a0percent of the students using Common App to apply to college are from above the national median income and 30\u00a0percent are below. And that\u2019s something that has been pretty constant in the college admissions space. We\u2019re working through some of the initiatives that we\u2019ve launched to reach out to more low- and middle-income students who may not think that college is something that\u2019s possible for them, to let them know it is possible and you can go to college, and colleges would love to see you there. <\/p>\n So it\u2019s trying to go beyond addressing some of what I\u2019d call the logistical barriers that students face to apply to college and get to some of the social and economic barriers that students face in applying to college. The main theme of what we\u2019re trying to accomplish these days is expanding access to students who have felt that higher education may not be attainable for them.<\/p>\n Q: One of those initiatives is direct admissions. Why is that something you wanted to invest in and how\u2019s the program going?<\/strong><\/p>\n A: <\/strong>There are students who won\u2019t even create a Common App account because they fear that rejection. And so one of the things that we\u2019re working on is, how do we give students the positive reinforcement that you are going to be able to find a college? There are colleges that would love to enroll you. That can then inspire them to not only perhaps apply to some of the colleges that are reaching out to them, but also maybe think more broadly about where they might want to go to school and understand that they have some agency in this process.<\/p>\n How we went about doing our direct admission work was inspired by the state of Idaho that had launched a program to let high school students know about the state institutions that they could get into. And we looked at that and thought, \u201cWow, what could Common App do nationally to help students in states that may not have a direct admission program, but also be able to expose them to the 1,100 colleges and universities that are members of this nonprofit membership association?\u201d<\/p>\n We did three different pilots to email students. We worked on the language and tried to understand from the student perspective what they were experiencing. We worked with our member colleges to understand the process from their vantage point as well as school counselors to see what might work best for their students and how to support them in this effort. And after the three pilots, we decided we could scale it and also enhance the technology so that we went beyond an email notification. <\/p>\n Once they\u2019re in Common App, they can now have a dashboard to see which schools would already admit them if they just continued in the process with those institutions. Every year, we make enhancements to the process as we learn from all the different stakeholders about which aspects are supporting students the best and which are supporting the institutions the best.<\/p>\n Q:<\/strong> And the number of institutions participating in the direct admissions program is going to increase to more than 200 this fall, correct?<\/strong><\/p>\n A:<\/strong> I found it overwhelming, in a really great way, that we reached out to over 700,000 individual students with direct admission offers last year. Thinking about the scale that we have and being able to provide that positive reinforcement to help encourage students to continue in the admission process and be able to attain higher education is really exciting. <\/p>\n Q: Certain elements of the admissions process are under scrutiny, such as concerns about standardized tests. I recently wrote about a report led by a Common App researcher <\/em>that found letters of reference for some minority groups tend to skew shorter. What do you make of those debates and how do you think college admissions will change over the next several years?<\/strong> <\/p>\n A:<\/strong> As technology changes and institutions look at their own way of doing their admission processes, we will continue to work with our members to understand what they are experiencing and what they are wanting in order to enroll the classes of students that they want and who will thrive on their campuses. We have a common platform, but there is also flexibility by institutional type, as well as a section for colleges to have their own questions beyond what\u2019s on the common form. That format has provided the flexibility for us to be able to have a very diverse group of members, and also in welcoming associate\u2019s degree\u2013granting community colleges to the platform. <\/p>\n We\u2019ve been constantly evolving as the higher education environment has evolved, as technology has evolved. When you look back at Common App 50 years ago, its technology inspiration was the photocopier, and the idea was a really great idea of admissions deans seeing that they were asking some similar questions, maybe they could streamline this process for students. And then floppy disks came along, and admissions officers and college counselors said, \u201cWe need to move into this floppy disk area.\u201d And they quickly pivoted when the internet came out, and in 1998 launched the first online application. So we will continue to evolve. Obviously, with artificial intelligence, we\u2019re looking into how this can assist in the process.<\/p>\n Q: Common App has reams of data about students\u2019 applications, and the organization has worked to make that information more easily available. What do you see as Common App\u2019s role in the world of higher ed research?<\/strong><\/p>\n A:<\/strong> We were very grateful to the Gates Foundation who, over five years ago, awarded us a grant to create a data warehouse so that we could share nationally about trends in the college application process and help shine a light on areas where there are differences across institutions and across students. So you pointed to that research about how recommendations for some populations of students aren\u2019t as strong as others. What does that mean? And is that a reflection of the students? Is it a reflection of the secondary schools that they might attend?<\/p>\n Because when you think about the great diversity of colleges, the diversity of secondary schools is that much more, and the opportunities that students have [are] so different, and being able to really highlight what that means from a student access perspective is critically important for all of us to try to make sure that students have the same level of opportunities. <\/p>\n So investing in that data warehouse\u2014and that investment from the Gates Foundation\u2014is something that has really transformed us, not just only from the research reports that we\u2019re able to do but also during COVID, we were able to see right away that first-generation college students\u2019 applications had really dropped off. And we were able to alert all of our members that COVID was really having an impact on first-generation college students and [look into] what we could all do to try to mitigate that negative impact.<\/p>\n It also has been important for us to be able to understand how students are persisting within the Common App, and to help us enhance the system to try to ensure that students are not only able to start an application but to complete the application. And we\u2019ve been able to collaborate with organizations like the National Student Clearinghouse to see if students are persisting in college. We have been <\/strong>able to add the texture that the admission application provides to the clearinghouse data to understand more about student behavior, not only in Common App but also in college. <\/p>\n I\u00a0see that as all critical in terms of informing our broad community about the kinds of changes we might need to make or things that we might want to stop doing because it\u2019s not helping the situation. The data has really just shined a light on a number of the challenges in the admission process and informed us about ways that we might be able to mitigate those challenges. Direct admission is one of those.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ever since 15 private colleges and universities teamed up to launch the Common App 50 years ago, the college admissions form has shifted practices and technology to meet the changing needs of institutions and students. For instance, the latest iteration of the application, which opened Aug.\u00a01 for the 2026\u201327 academic year, has what the organization<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16145,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[2157,3277,9558,1407,9557,637],"class_list":{"0":"post-16144","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-app","9":"tag-ceo","10":"tag-common","11":"tag-marks","12":"tag-reflects","13":"tag-years"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16144\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}