The Common Application, a platform where students can apply to multiple colleges and universities in one go, once carried the reputation of only serving students interested in private, highly selective schools that used the platform.
Yet new data from the organization assessing applications submitted during the 2023-24 school year highlights a trend researchers and high school and college counselors have seen emerge over the years: The Common App is now a major resource for students seeking to apply to public institutions.
In fact, a new report published in August found that for the first time, applications to public colleges and universities exceeded applications to private schools in 2023–24. Applications to public institutions on the Common App grew by 16 percent since the 2022-23 school year, while applications to private schools grew by 5 percent.
The report also found that growth in applicants from below-median income ZIP codes continued to outpace their peers in more affluent areas—a 12 percent increase since 2022–23, versus 4 percent for those above the median income.
“It’s highlighting the sort of student that the Common App serves and the sort of institutions that students can apply to through the common app is quite different than it has used to be,” said Brian Kim, director of data science, research, and analytics at the Common Application.
Students now have more access to college application resources
In 2014, the Common App opened its membership to all accredited, not-for-profit, undergraduate four-year degree-granting institutions.
“Common App used to have this reputation of being more selective focused, being more focused on these very elite private institutions,” Kim said.
Researchers and educators alike have seen how students have responded to this expansion of options.
About five years ago, school counselor Richard Tench would only see about a handful of students use the Common App at the rural St. Albans High School in West Virginia. Today, anywhere from 25 to 40 percent of students there use the platform.
Tench is grateful to see more students using the tool since it removes the barrier of filling out multiple individual applications to schools.
“To some individuals, that may seem like a very small detail, but for some students, that is a large detail,” Tench said. “If you’re a first-generation student applying to college, that’s a very stressful experience, and having to do that over and over again can really just wear you down.”
The public institutions joining the Common App platform tend to be larger institutions than the more recent additions of private institutions, Kim said, and are drawing in more applications as well.
To further expand access to college—given the growth in applicants from low-income households—the Common App is investing in its affordability initiatives which include outreach to students, letting them know about FAFSA deadlines, or informing them about specific opportunities such as private scholarships that they could apply for, Kim added.
Last year, the Common App also launched a direct admissions program wherein eligible students get a guaranteed spot at participating state institutions.
The landscape of enrollment data remains uncertain
While the latest Common App data, along with data published earlier this year, showcases the application landscape for the first cohort of students attending college since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the practice of affirmative action in college admissions last summer, the impact of the ruling on enrollment data remains to be seen.
The Common App organization itself does not systematically obtain enrollment data, Kim said. And Tench believes it is too early to make a call on the ruling’s impact without substantial national data.
However, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released demographic data for the undergraduate class of 2028 and found that fewer students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups enrolled this year.
The school’s dean of admissions, Stu Schmill, wrote that in recent years about a quarter of enrolling undergraduate students identified as Black, Hispanic, and/or Native American and Pacific Islander. That fell to about 16 percent for the class of 2028.
“I want to be clear that it does not bring any aggregate change in the quantifiable characteristics we use to predict academic success at MIT, such as performance in high school or scores on standardized tests,” Schmill said. “By these measures, this cohort is no more or less prepared to excel in our curriculum than other recent classes that were more broadly diverse.”
“We did not solicit race or ethnicity information from applicants this year, so we don’t have data on the applicant pool,” he added.
“But I have no doubt that we left out many well-qualified, well-matched applicants from historically under-represented backgrounds who in the past we would have admitted—and who would have excelled” as a result of the court decision limiting how the school could use race in admissions, Schmill said.
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