Note: I was away all week, so this newsletter is arriving Saturday. It’ll be back to Friday next week!
The Common Application got started in the 1970s and is now used by about 900 colleges and universities.1 It allows students to submit a single application to many different schools, with some variation for supplemental information requirements. (Students do have to pay each school’s application fee, unless they qualify for fee waivers). Even with some variation, that’s a huge time-saver for students.
But let’s look a little deeper. With vanishingly few exceptions, students can only accept one college or university’s offer of admission. If every student applies to five or eight schools—which was typical when I applied—and accepts one offer, you get a situation that’s complex but manageable. Students fill out and file applications for the schools they’d be reasonably happy to attend based on preferences and probabilities, university admissions staff make projections about how many admitted students are likely to accept, and then they send out admission letters.
Lower marginal costs incentivize more applications
But with common applications, the marginal cost in time of each application goes down. If you can afford the application fees, it may feel like there’s little downside to applying to 20 schools instead of eight, or even 30 schools.
The problem is, you’re not the only person thinking that. As more students apply to more colleges and universities “just in case” or “heck, why not?” (remember: each student can still only accept one offer of admission, even if they apply to 50 schools!), the schools find themselves on the receiving end of a confusing blizzard of applications.
The schools are now operating in somewhat of an information void. Which students truly want to attend, and which students just added the school to the application on a whim since the marginal cost was low? It can be hard to tell. Also, how many students should be admitted, based on the percentage expected to accept the school’s admission offers? This gets tricky.
Let’s talk sub-optimality
A couple of sub-optimal dynamics are at play:
The schools, facing a blizzard of qualified applicants, may end up rejecting candidates who are equally as qualified as those who they admit—and who might want to attend the school much more than some of the admitted candidates.
The schools make efforts to offer admission to candidates they believe will attend, but this is an imperfect process. For example, a hypothetical school might offer admission to a student they believe will attend, but the school actually wasn’t on that student’s “really want” list. Instead, it was a “heck, why not” school. Therefore, that admitted student is less likely to accept; they’re looking for an offer from one of their “really want” schools. Which they may or may not get, because too many people are applying to too many schools, clouding the picture for everyone.
The likely outcome of these dynamics is that more sub-optimal pairings occur.
Subtleties of sub-optimality
Sub-optimality seems likely to be less consequential for top-tier schools and the students they admit. If a top university admits a student, there’s a high likelihood that the student will accept and attend. Top colleges and universities have always attracted the top students, and they continue to do so—admissions officers just have to wade through more applications now, because it’s easier for students to apply to more “reach” schools with a common application, and it’s easier for students to apply to all the top schools rather than just the few they feel most drawn toward2. Despite the added noise, though, top-tier schools are going to get high acceptance rates for their offers of admission, and the students who accept are generally going to get an excellent education and have a satisfactory experience.
Sub-optimality probably becomes more important at second-tier and third-tier schools, aka schools viewed as “safety schools” by some applicants and as desirable choices by other applicants. At these schools, the chance of admitting students who applied as a “heck, why not?”—and rejecting students who viewed the school as their dream school—may be higher.
Stepping back from, “Heck, why not?”
What might a world without common applications look like? With more effort required per application, there would be fewer total applications. In particular, there would be fewer, “Heck, why not?” applications, which are net negative for the system as a whole because:
They tend to reduce student-university match quality
They tend to lower admissions rates because the total volume of applications goes up
They can lower acceptance-of-admission rates because of lower match quality
Also, with fewer students spamming out 30, 40, or 50 college applications if money is no object, students who need to carefully allocate application-fee dollars would find themselves on a more level playing field.
Lastly, if more students applied only to schools they really wanted to attend, each school would have a pool of applicants more likely to accept the school’s admissions offer, which could give the school greater confidence in extending offers and better ability to plan for class size.
Takeaways
I believe common applications for colleges and universities increase noise in the system and decrease optimality of student-university matches. To be clear, that’s because each student can only attend one college or university, no matter how many applications they submit.
For other things like funding, where applicants can accept funding from multiple sources, common applications probably work well for top applicants (though they will almost certainly produce a blizzard of applications for funders, which is great for correcting a prior dearth of applicants but not-great if funders are already struggling with a high volume of applicants). Overall, common applications might work best as occasional, time-limited solutions to a dearth of applicants.
Since the Common Application is currently entrenched for college and university applications, one way for students to differentiate themselves is to visit top-choice college campuses, meet admissions staff, and distinguish themselves as candidates who truly want to attend those schools—but that takes time and money. Another way is to apply early decision, which might be the best way to avoid all this chaos. Early decision often commits a student to accept a college’s offer if the college makes an offer, which conveys that the student is serious about attending that school. But more serious intent and less, “Heck, why not?” are beneficial dynamics in many systems.
There are other common application systems as well, generally with fewer participating schools.
This latter part probably does cause some loss of optimal fit versus the pre-common application days.
Common Applications - A View on Unintended Consequences
I consistently LOVE your Newsletter Stephanie. Each time you do a story like this -- quite unexpected -- you demonstrate some neat concept where risk or system thinking applies! I must admit this is not a topic I have given much thought as my children are done with schooling. At first blush, it would seem that the Universities love it because it ARTIFICIALLY lowers perceived acceptance rates having little do to with school quality! In general, the very best innovations for consumers are those that provide them more options so they can ferret out quality and costs. It seems the relationship between prospective students and institutions is HIGHLY ASYMMETRIC. Almost any business with asymmetric access to information (pre-Google and pre-Amazon) abuse the relationship and price excessively.