At 36, the Common App is getting a face-lift.
In anticipation of a significant increase in traffic, the Common Application, or Common App—the college application website that streamlines applying to multiple schools—is set to build a new online system, which will be launched in summer 2013.
“We are preparing for growth to occur at double or triple volume by the end of the current decade,” Rob Killion, the executive director of the Common Application, said. “That is the sole reason why we’re now building the fourth iteration of the Common App Online.”
Last year, 750,000 students used the Common App to submit approximately 2.5 million applications to over 400 universities and colleges, and those numbers are only expected to rise. Columbia College, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, Barnard College, and the Jewish Theological Seminary all use the system.
Killion said that the organization believes the surge of applications will be due more to an increase in the total number of applicants, rather than growth in applications per student.
The board of the organization conducted an 18-month review that determined that a new online system would be necessary in the coming years.
The new interface, which is still in the process of being designed, will be intended to maximize efficiency, Common Application, Inc. Board President and Secretary Martha Merrill said in a statement when the announcement was made earlier this month.
The exact changes that the new version will include have not been announced, but they may include having fewer questions per page, questions whose answers will determine what subsequent questions appear for students on later pages, a service that enables applicants to pose questions to a team of college counselors, and a solution to the common complaint of “truncation,” when a student’s writing appears complete on the application screen but is cut off on the application that admissions officers receive.
Columbia students said a Common App that enables students to communicate personal information more clearly would have been a welcome change during the application process.
Doug Kronaizl, CC ’15, suggested that the Common App implement a checkpoint system, where a student’s work may be saved automatically while he or she continues to work on a single page.
“My power went out, just as I was typing in Common App, and I lost my work on that page,” he said. “I hope that’s something they fix.”
Students also expressed concern over space limits in the application.
“I found it really annoying when I was doing Common App that for AP testing they only gave you four or five spots to fill out,” Haylin Belay, CC ’15, said. “It would be good if they let you add more tests.”
In addition to the changes to its online system, Common Application, Inc. is also planning a variety of changes to the company’s infrastructure. These changes, effective summer 2014, include the establishment of a physical office in Washington, D.C., and the formal hiring of an information technology staff that will work exclusively for the Common Application, a task previously outsourced to external technology firms.
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