The Widespread App permits college students to submit purposes to greater than 1,100 increased ed establishments. However till now, none of its members have been group faculties centered on granting affiliate levels.
The group introduced a first-of-its-kind partnership with the Illinois Neighborhood School Board final week, including Sauk Valley Neighborhood, Rend Lake, Carl Sandburg and Black Hawk Faculties to its ranks. Three extra two-year establishments will be part of subsequent admissions cycle: Lincoln Land Neighborhood, Oakton and Triton Faculties.
When the Widespread App launched 50 years in the past, it supplied highschool college students a streamlined utility path to fifteen non-public establishments. Since then, lots of of others have signed on, most of them pretty selective four-year faculties and universities. The brand new transfer raises a query: What do open-access establishments, which settle for all college students, stand to achieve from becoming a member of the applying platform?
Brian Durham, government director of the Illinois Neighborhood School Board, mentioned most significantly, it boosts their visibility.
Beginning this yr, the Widespread App is partnering with the Illinois Board of Larger Schooling to help its direct admissions program to eight public universities within the state. As part of the partnership, eligible highschool college students who apply to any school by means of the Widespread App will likely be notified of their direct admissions affords from these universities. Durham desires these college students to obtain discover about their area people school selections, too.
“We need to be sure that group faculties are seen as an choice on that record”—even “doubtlessly a primary selection for college students,” Durham mentioned. “It’s finally about exposing them to that as an choice.” He added that college students who acquire admission to universities typically notice later that “they will’t afford it, or it’s not proper selection for them.” This manner, if they arrive to that conclusion after filling out the Widespread App, they’ll know which group faculties are “proper there” and able to serve them.
Analysis suggests the transfer might supply group faculties an enrollment bump. The Nationwide Bureau of Financial Analysis printed a paper in 2019 that discovered that establishments that joined the Widespread App loved on common a 12 p.c enhance in admissions in comparison with the years earlier than they joined, in accordance with an evaluation of Widespread App information from 1990 to 2015.
Durham hopes that ultimately all 45 of the state’s public two-year faculties supply a Widespread App utility route along with their in-house utility methods.
A Decade-Lengthy Effort
Jenny Rickard, president and CEO of the Widespread App, mentioned that the group has been working towards representing a broader swath of upper ed establishments for a decade.
In 2014, the group stopped requiring member faculties to make use of a “holistic admissions” course of—assessing college students past take a look at scores—so as to open up the platform to extra establishments. The Widespread App additionally removed its requirement that purposes embrace essays and proposals. Then, in 2018, the group launched a brand new utility for switch college students making use of to four-year universities.
All these strikes “opened the door for us to have the ability to welcome two-year and four-year public establishments into the membership,” Rickard mentioned. She famous that, as of the 2022–23 utility cycle, 77 p.c of present Widespread App members admitted over 50 p.c of their fall first-year candidates, an indication that the group has moved away from serving solely extra selective establishments.
The Widespread App additionally set a “moonshot” aim in 2023 to considerably enhance its candidates from low- and middle-income communities, Rickard mentioned. The group goals to herald 650,000 extra candidates from these backgrounds by 2030.
Rickard mentioned teaming up with group faculties is the group’s most up-to-date step towards diversifying each its member establishments and its applicant pool.
“Bringing a higher variety of school and college members into the Widespread App helps us pursue that mission, and it additionally helps college students from all completely different backgrounds have the ability to see the nice variety of establishments in america and the world,” she mentioned. “Most college students go to extra open-access and fewer selective establishments,” but too usually “we deal with the locations that no person can get into.”
Durham agreed that the transfer might increase the Widespread App’s “footprint,” given candidates to group faculties are disproportionately low-income and first-generation college students.
“Extra underserved college students are naturally going to go to group school for all the explanations we all know: affordability, location,” he mentioned. So, working with group faculties affords the Widespread App a brand new “alternative to achieve these college students.”
Steps for the Future
As a lot as Durham want to see extra group faculties be part of the Widespread App’s ranks, he believes the platform might want to change to serve group faculties at a bigger scale.
At present the platform is designed for highschool college students, he mentioned, however many group school candidates are grownup learners or attend school part-time. These forms of college students usually tend to enroll immediately at a university quite than discover themselves on the Widespread App platform like highschool seniors making use of to a number of establishments with steering from school counselors.
“How do you get a 34-year-old man who desires to enter welding to undergo that utility?” Durham mentioned. For now, he expects taking part Illinois group faculties will keep their very own “parallel” utility methods “till we will work that out down the highway.”
Rickard acknowledged the group has work to do to optimize its platform for a extra various set of establishments. She hopes that onboarding this preliminary cohort of group faculties will assist the Widespread App work out its blind spots.
“We all know that we have to be taught extra about how our platform can proceed to evolve to fulfill their wants extra successfully,” she mentioned.
