I have made no secret of the fact that White Whale would jump at the chance to develop a customized college admission application.
More and more of our clients are moving to the Common Application— in most cases that’s because homegrown applications tend to be unwieldy and hard to manage, and it’s easy to see how tempting it’d be to outsource that whole process— information gathering, account creation, payment collection, reporting, security, etc.— to a third party. I don’t know if the Common App is a publicly held company, but I wouldn’t say no to a gift of stock options if they were.
However. Although the Common App is certainly a convenient way to manage the process of college admission, doesn’t it feel like a missed opportunity?
The process of applying to college is an anxious, scary time, as anyone who’s ever done it can attest. With a very few exceptions, nobody’s going to be accepted everywhere they apply. So in applying, you know you’ll be rejected somewhere, and the kind of self-revelation required in a good college application adds a fear of exposure to the process. (At least that’s what it was like for me.)
If that’s the case, it seems that a college or university could do a great deal to alleviate this anxiety— and build a relationship with the prospective student— by presenting her with a thoughtful, friendly, easy to use, customized, streamlined and responsive, online application.
The first step in applying using the Common App looks like this:
Wouldn’t it be better if the first page started like this?
Hi.
It’s great that you’re applying to Middlebury. Our applicant pool always includes an incredibly diverse group of interesting and thoughtful young people from around the country and around the world. The students that join Middlebury next fall will become part of a close-knit academic community; we expect a lot from our students, and we give a lot in return. In other words, we aren’t just looking for the best students, we’re looking for the best neighbors.
We’re looking forward to reading your application. If you have any questions at all about the process, e-mail John Doe, our online application support counselor, at JohnDoe@middlebury.edu.
To get started, enter your first and last name below.
We know from experience that students choose colleges based on direct connections. Sometimes it’s a friend they made touring campus; sometimes it’s a favorite book by an alumni author; sometimes it’s a discussion on Facebook. Sometimes university Web sites include tools that encourage connections as well— for example, Haverford will occasionally let a select group of admits or top prospects create student profiles, and we’re working on a project for Lewis & Clark that will let prospective students create customized portal pages just like faculty, staff and current students.
The question is, why can’t that sense of personal contact extend to the application itself? I’ve suggested some of the most typical reasons why colleges go to the Common App— convenience, security, stability, etc. These are all fine reasons to outsource the application; there are other reasons too. It is undeniably more convenient for the *applicant* to only enter their information one time and apply to multiple colleges at once. Web database development projects done in-house are notoriously hard to maintain over time; this is one reason why schools’ own online applications are often a little clunky. And there aren’t many companies that offer customized application development.
(The reason for this last case are clear. The perfect online application would be the better mousetrap, and it’s hard to even think about how you’d build a college application without seeing visions of how the world of higher ed would beat a path to your door.)
But it’s my belief that when the right school— unsatisfied with the Common App, wanting to create personal contact with applicants, and without the staff or the time to develop an application in house— meets the right Web development vendor, a few steps might be taken toward an online application that will itself do some of the work of recruiting great applicants.
Consider this blog post a want ad; I think we’re the right company for that job, and if anybody’s interested in talking about it, let me know. Over the next several days I’ll be posting a few more thoughts on this topic— how an application might reach out and speak directly to students, building connections in the process. If anyone else has any ideas about what the ideal application might do, please drop me a line.
