The Common App allows students to submit applications to more than 1,100 higher ed institutions. But until now, none of its members were community colleges focused on granting associate degrees.
The organization announced a first-of-its-kind partnership with the Illinois Community College Board last week, adding Sauk Valley Community, Rend Lake, Carl Sandburg and Black Hawk Colleges to its ranks. Three more two-year institutions will join next admissions cycle: Lincoln Land Community, Oakton and Triton Colleges.
When the Common App launched 50 years ago, it offered high school students a streamlined application path to 15 private institutions. Since then, hundreds of others have signed on, most of them fairly selective four-year colleges and universities. The new move raises a question: What do open-access institutions, which accept all students, stand to gain from joining the application platform?
Brian Durham, executive director of the Illinois Community College Board, said most importantly, it boosts their visibility.
Starting this year, the Common App is partnering with the Illinois Board of Higher Education to support its direct admissions program to eight public universities in the state. As a part of the partnership, eligible high school students who apply to any college through the Common App will be notified of their direct admissions offers from these universities. Durham wants those students to receive notice about their local community college choices, too.
“We want to make sure that community colleges are seen as an option on that list”—even “potentially a first choice for students,” Durham said. “It’s ultimately about exposing them to that as an option.” He added that students who gain admission to universities sometimes realize later that “they can’t afford it, or it’s not right choice for them.” This way, if they come to that conclusion after filling out the Common App, they’ll know which community colleges are “right there” and ready to serve them.
Research suggests the move could offer community colleges an enrollment bump. The National Bureau of Economic Research published a paper in 2019 that found that institutions that joined the Common App enjoyed on average a 12 percent increase in admissions compared to the years before they joined, according to an analysis of Common App data from 1990 to 2015.
Durham hopes that eventually all 45 of the state’s public two-year colleges offer a Common App application route in addition to their in-house application systems.
A Decade-Long Effort
Jenny Rickard, president and CEO of the Common App, said that the organization has been working toward representing a broader swath of higher ed institutions for a decade.
In 2014, the organization stopped requiring member colleges to use a “holistic admissions” process—assessing students beyond test scores—in order to open up the platform to more institutions. The Common App also got rid of its requirement that applications include essays and recommendations. Then, in 2018, the organization launched a new application for transfer students applying to four-year universities.
All those moves “opened the door for us to be able to welcome two-year and four-year public institutions into the membership,” Rickard said. She noted that, as of the 2022–23 application cycle, 77 percent of current Common App members admitted over 50 percent of their fall first-year applicants, a sign that the organization has moved away from serving only more selective institutions.
The Common App also set a “moonshot” goal in 2023 to substantially increase its applicants from low- and middle-income communities, Rickard said. The organization aims to bring in 650,000 additional applicants from those backgrounds by 2030.
Rickard said teaming up with community colleges is the organization’s most recent step toward diversifying both its member institutions and its applicant pool.
“Bringing a greater diversity of college and university members into the Common App helps us pursue that mission, and it also helps students from all different backgrounds be able to see the great diversity of institutions in the United States and the world,” she said. “Most students go to more open-access and less selective institutions,” yet too often “we focus on the places that nobody can get into.”
Durham agreed that the move could expand the Common App’s “footprint,” given applicants to community colleges are disproportionately low-income and first-generation students.
“More underserved students are naturally going to go to community college for all the reasons we know: affordability, location,” he said. So, working with community colleges offers the Common App a new “opportunity to reach those students.”
Steps for the Future
As much as Durham would like to see more community colleges join the Common App’s ranks, he believes the platform will need to change to serve community colleges at a larger scale.
Currently the platform is designed for high school students, he said, but many community college applicants are adult learners or attend college part-time. Those types of students are more likely to enroll directly at a college rather than find themselves on the Common App platform like high school seniors applying to multiple institutions with guidance from college counselors.
“How do you get a 34-year-old guy who wants to go into welding to go through that application?” Durham said. For now, he expects participating Illinois community colleges will maintain their own “parallel” application systems “until we can work that out down the road.”
Rickard acknowledged the organization has work to do to optimize its platform for a more diverse set of institutions. She hopes that onboarding this initial cohort of community colleges will help the Common App figure out its blind spots.
“We know that we need to learn more about how our platform can continue to evolve to meet their needs more effectively,” she said.
