As the perennial flurry of press releases and news articles has trumpeted, Duke accepted a record-low 8.7 percent of Regular Decision applicants for the Class of 2020. Each of these applicants as well as the more than 26,000 less fortunate applicants used the Common Application to apply. Filled out by hundreds of thousands of students per year for applications to hundreds of universities and colleges, the Common App covers a vast swath of American college campuses, including ours. Despite its dominance, this fixture of admissions to institutions of higher education is in need of reform.
The most common complaint is that socioeconomic status can affect how well a student can respond to measures on the Common App, or that socioeconomic status at least appears to be a limiting factor. One of the primary sections of the App allows respondents to list activities. For some applicants, this is no problem—they put down the clubs they participate in at school, their teams and so on. But for some applicants, those kinds of activities were never within the realm of possibility. Their main activity was taking care of younger siblings because both parents or a single parent were working late. For others, it was working a service job after school so that the family could bring in additional income. These applicants cannot produce long, impressive lists of involvements because their situation was simply different. While achievement in the classroom in spite of a dearth of advanced class offerings is often accounted for in admissions decisions, recognizing the same potential for extracurriculars is much harder to draw parallels to.
A further difficulty is the Common App’s emphasis on written responses. While writing is indispensable in the long-run, the application wants for other ways to express identity, overcoming failure, problem-solving and other characteristics sought by the essay prompts. Without asking for a substitution for the extended responses, submitting publications, videos or media projects alongside these adds windows into the experiences of those students who may express themselves in other ways. Engineers and quantitative students for instance often bemoan writing assignments, and having space for technical knowledge and inspiration can be important.
This does not mean that the Common App is just a wall blocking out some students. In fact, there are some excellent features of the App that have led to its national adoption. Its step-by-step structure is actually helpful for applicants whose parents did not go to college—though navigating the financial components is tricky for high schoolers. It also provides all students with access to a huge range of schools, adding convenience and accessibility for students with different amounts of time to devote to the application process.
We hope most of all that the checklist mentality that manifests in the activities section is revisited. Without dedicated room for students to explain why they loved where they spent their time—or why they did not have time for these engagements—we miss out on an opportunity to separate the genuine and invested students from those who do for the sake of doing. This may in part explain the dearth of authentic volunteering on campus we recently commented on.
The Common App serves college admissions offices as both an gatekeeper and as an essential set of windows into a student’s life and experiences. The stakes cannot get much higher as millions of applications are processed every year with many being largely comprised of the Common App. Adding windows through supplement questions and advocating for change through the Coalition for Access, Affordability and Success are ways universities can continue to improve the filters that facilitate admissions every year.
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