American data privacy, post Roe

 As we plunge ahead into the post-Roe era, American laws about abortion are going to be very divided. Some states will seek to criminalize not only surgical abortions, but the use of pharmaceuticals as well (and, if Justice Thomas gets his wish, perhaps contraceptives of all sorts, as well as day-after pills).*

Some states may seek to prosecute their residents who seek treatment out of state, or who order mail order pharmaceuticals. Doing so will leave a data trail, in searches on the web, emails, and geo-location data.  How private will those data be?

This is going to be an issue for tech companies, prosecutors, and legislators at both state and federal levels.  E.g. can prosecutors access and use your geo-location data to determine if you visited a clinic?  Your web searches to see if you looked for one? Your emails or pharmacy data to see if you ordered drugs?  Your medical data of other sorts?

*Here is the Supreme Court Opinion, written by Justice Alito followed by the other opinions. Justice Thomas' concurring opinion begins on p. 117 of the pdf, after Appendix A to the majority opinion which ends on numbered page 108 (but the numbering restarts at 1 for Justice Thomas' opinion).  DOBBS, STATE HEALTH OFFICER OF THE MISSISSIPPI DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, ET AL. v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION ET AL. 

Here are some thoughts on various aspects of the emerging situation.

From STAT:

HIPAA won’t protect you if prosecutors want your reproductive health records  by By Eric Boodman , Tara Bannow , Bob Herman  and Casey Ross

"With Roe v. Wade now overturned, patients are wondering whether federal laws will shield their reproductive health data from state law enforcement, or legal action more broadly. The answer, currently, is no.

"If there’s a warrant, court order, or subpoena for the release of those medical records, then a clinic is required to hand them over. 

...

"As far as health records go, the most salient law is HIPAA — the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It’s possible that federal officials could try to tweak it, so records of reproductive care or abortion receive extra protection, but legal experts say that’s unlikely to stand up in the courts in a time when many judges tend to be unfriendly to executive action.

...

"In states that ban abortion, simply the suspicion that a patient had an abortion would be enough to allow law enforcement to poke around in their medical records under the guise of identifying or locating a suspect, said Isabelle Bibet-Kalinyak, a member of Brach Eichler’s health care law practice. “They would still need to have probable cause,” she said."

***

Health tech companies are scrambling to close data privacy gaps after abortion ruling By Katie Palmer  and Casey Ross July 2

"STAT reached out to two dozen companies that interact with user data about menstrual cycles, fertility, pregnancy, and abortion, asking about their current data practices and plans to adapt. The picture that emerged is one of companies scrambling to transform — building out legal teams, racing to design new privacy-protecting products, and aiming to communicate more clearly about how they handle data and provide care in the face of swirling distrust of digital health tools.

"Period-tracking apps have been the target of some of the loudest calls for privacy protections, and the most visible corporate response. At least two period-tracking apps are now developing anonymous versions: Natural Cycles, whose product is cleared by the Food and Drug Administration as a form of birth control, said it’s had calls to trade insights with Flo, which is also building an anonymous version of its app."

********

From the Guardian:

Tech firms under pressure to safeguard user data as abortion prosecutions loom. Private information collected and retained by companies could be weaponized to prosecute abortion seekers and providers by Kari Paul

"Such data has already been used to prosecute people for miscarriages and pregnancy termination in states with strict abortion laws, including one case in which a woman’s online search for abortion pills was brought against her in court. 

...

"Smaller companies are also being targeted with questions over their data practices, as frantic calls to delete period tracking apps went viral following the supreme court decision. Some of those companies, unlike the tech giants, have taken public stands.

“At this fraught moment, we hear the anger and the anxiety coming from our US community,” period tracking app Clue said in a statement. “We remain committed to protecting your reproductive health data.”

"Digital rights advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has advised companies in the tech world to pre-emptively prepare for a future in which they are served with subpoenas and warrants seeking user data to prosecute abortion seekers and providers.

"It recommends companies allow pseudonymous or anonymous access, stop behavioral tracking, and retain as little data as possible. It also advocated for end-to-end encryption by default and refrain from collecting any location information."

**********

From the NYT:

When Brazil Banned Abortion Pills, Women Turned to Drug Traffickers. With Roe v. Wade overturned, states banning abortion are looking to prevent the distribution of abortion medication. Brazil shows the possible consequences.  By Stephanie Nolen

"The trajectory of access to abortion pills in Brazil may offer insight into how medication abortion can become out of reach and what can happen when it does.

"While surgical abortion was the original target of Brazil’s abortion ban, the proscription expanded after medication abortion became more common, leading to the situation today where drug traffickers control most access to the pills. Women who procure them have no guarantee of the safety or authenticity of what they are taking, and if they have complications, they fear seeking help.

************

From the Guardian

Google will delete location history data for abortion clinic visits. The company said that sensitive places including fertility centers, clinics and addiction treatment facilities will be erased

"Alphabet will delete location data showing when users visit an abortion clinic, the online search company said on Friday, after concern that a digital trail could inform law enforcement if an individual terminates a pregnancy illegally.

...

"Effective in the coming weeks, for those who do use location history, entries showing sensitive places including fertility centers, abortion clinics and addiction treatment facilities will be deleted soon after a visit."

***********

And while we await further developments here, the Times has an article about growing surveillance in China:

‘An Invisible Cage’: How China Is Policing the Future By Paul Mozur, Muyi Xiao and John Liu, June 25, 2022

It begins "The more than 1.4 billion people living in China are constantly watched. They are recorded by police cameras that are everywhere, on street corners and subway ceilings, in hotel lobbies and apartment buildings. Their phones are tracked, their purchases are monitored, and their online chats are censored..."

Is applying to college too hard?

 While there are concerns that electronic application services like the common app have led to an explosion of applications, there are also concerns in the opposite direction, that applying to college remains a barrier particularly to students who don't automatically think of college as an option.

Here's a story from the Chronicle of Higher Ed about an initiative to ease the application process.

Rethinking the Act of Applying to College. A tedious process that puts the onus on students may need an overhaul.  By Eric Hoover

"On Thursday, the Coalition for College, a membership group of 162 institutions with a shared online application, announced a plan to ease the challenge of applying. As part of a new partnership, the organization will embed its application process into Scoir, an online college-advising platform used by students at more than 2,000 high schools nationwide.

"Instead of creating a Coalition application and typing information into a separate website, students with a Scoir account will soon be able to apply to any Coalition college by transmitting an admission form prepopulated with information — demographic data, grades, test scores, and so on — that would already reside under the same virtual roof.

...

"The more complex the application process, the less equitable it becomes."

"That was a key line from a report published in January by the National Association for College Admission Counseling and the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. The report, which imagined what the college-application process would look like if racial equity were the main objective, included findings and recommendations drawn from interviews with a panel of admissions and financial-aid experts, as well as students."

The common app and the growth of applications to selective colleges, by Brian Knight and Nathan Schiff

A pair of papers study the Common App, how it is used disproportionally by selective universities and liberal arts colleges, to which applications have increased over time.  The papers focus on how this has increased student choice. 

There's a parallel set of arguments made elsewhere, particularly in connection with application to medical residencies, that too many applications increase congestion in the admissions process. 

The Common Application and Student Choice, By Brian Knight and Nathan Schiff, AEA Papers and Proceedings 2021, 111: 460–464, https://doi.org/10.1257/pandp.20211042

And here's a longer companion paper:

Reducing Frictions in College Admissions: Evidence from the Common Application by Brian Knight and Nathan Schiff, April 17, 2020

Abstract: College admissions in the U.S. is decentralized, creating frictions that limit student choice. We study the Common Application (CA) platform, under which students submit a single application to member schools, potentially reducing frictions and increasing student choice. The CA increases the number of applications received by schools, reflecting a reduction in frictions, and reduces the yield on accepted students, reflecting increased choice. The CA increases out-of-state enrollment, especially from other CA states, consistent with network effects. CA entry changes the composition of students, with evidence of more racial diversity, more high-income students, and imprecise evidence of increases in SAT scores.

********

For a look at applications through the other end of the telescope, see

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

The surge in exam-optional applications for college admissions

College admissions, exam optional

 The WSJ has a report focusing on post-covid, exam optional college admissions:

College Admission Season Is Crazier Than Ever. That Could Change Who Gets In.  By waiving SATs and ACTs, highly selective schools invited an unprecedented wave of applications, upending the traditional decision process.  By Melissa Korn and Douglas Belkin

"Ivy League schools and a host of other highly selective institutions waived SAT and ACT requirements for the class of 2025, resulting in an unprecedented flood of applications and what may prove the most chaotic selection experiment in American higher education since the end of World War II.

...

"Harvard University received more than 57,000 freshman applications for next fall’s entering class, a 42% year-over-year jump. Yale, Columbia and Stanford universities were so overwhelmed they also pushed back the date to announce admission decisions. The University of Southern California’s applications pool beat the prior record by 7%. And New York University topped 100,000 applications, up 17% from last year.

...

"Testing isn’t the only conundrum admissions officials are confronting. Grade-point averages—normally a key data point—were complicated by last year’s spring semester, when many high schools offered pass-fail options to students who were suddenly finishing junior year online. Sports and other extracurricular activities were canceled in pockets of the country, stripping teens of leadership opportunities to boast about on applications.

"Still, tests are the biggest single X-factor this year. Test administrations for the SAT and ACT across much of the country were canceled because of public-health concerns about crowding teens into auditoriums. More than 1,600 four-year colleges didn’t require that applicants submit standardized test scores this admissions cycle, since so many students couldn’t take the exams as scheduled. The movement behind test-optional policies had gained some high-profile backers over the past decade, but the trickle turned to a tsunami when 600 more joined the roster since last March.

...

"With the gates to many more selective schools no longer guarded by standardized tests, tens of thousands of additional students applied. In a year when nothing was certain, anything seemed possible—so what the heck, seniors thought, why not apply to Harvard?

...

"Data from the Common App, a standard application used by more than 900 schools, show that applications through March 1 were up 11% nationwide. But the number of applicants rose by just 2.4%, meaning roughly the same number of students are just sending out more applications. The flurry of applications was concentrated at more selective colleges."

Congestion and competition in college admissions (in the WSJ)

Is college admissions ripe for re-design?  (The problems outlined are real, but I'm skeptical that there's the consensus needed for a major overhaul...)

How to Fix College Admissions
Getting into a top school is a stressful, unpredictable process. Here are 10 ways to make it fairer and more transparent.  By Melissa Korn

"We asked college admissions officers, high school and private counselors, parents, students and others for ways to make the system fairer, more transparent and less painful for everyone involved. Here are 10 of their ideas—some easy to implement, others just meant to start a conversation—to reform the status quo.
...
"2. Limit the number of colleges to which students may apply. Thanks in part to the ease of applying online—especially through the Common Application, which allows applicants to use one basic form for hundreds of colleges—36% of students submitted seven or more applications in 2017, up from 10% in 1995. “The number of clicks you can make on the Common App causes congestion in the system,” says Alvin Roth, a Nobel Prize-winning Stanford University economist who helped to design the system that matches new doctors with residency programs.

"Schools pursue aggressive outreach, urging even fairly unqualified applicants to apply, then boast every spring about how many they rejected, as if exclusivity is proof of quality. Ballooning application numbers, combined with stagnant class sizes, cause acceptance rates to slide even lower into the single digits at places like Columbia and Pomona. As a result, high-school seniors apply to more schools just in case, and the vicious cycle continues—creating havoc for schools that can’t predict their yields. The overall yield rate for new freshmen at U.S. colleges fell to 34% in 2017 from 48% in 2007.
...
"Almost nobody needs to submit 20 applications; a reasonable limit would be as low as a half dozen, assuming that students receive meaningful counseling. High schools could enforce the cap by only agreeing to submit a certain number of official transcripts to colleges. The College Board and ACT could also limit distribution of SAT and ACT results, but they have little incentive to do so, since they make money from sending scores.
...
"9. ...Even more radical, schools could try some version of the algorithm used to determine matches for medical residency programs, which involves programs and medical students ranking one another and then being paired up by a computer system. This would be a heavy lift, however, as colleges would need to coordinate their procedures to rank candidates, run the computer program and inform all parties about the outcomes."

Repeal of motorcycle helmet laws increases deceased donor transplants: Dickert-Conlin, Elder and Teltser in AEJ:Applied

I imagine that a law that anyone who dies while riding a motorcycle without a helmet is automatically considered to be registered as a willing deceased organ donor would increase the voluntary use of helmets.  Here's a paper that investigates the relationship between helmet laws and transplants under current laws, which vary by state and over time.

Allocating Scarce Organs: How a Change in Supply Affects Transplant Waiting Lists and Transplant Recipients
By Stacy  Dickert-Conlin, Todd Elder, and Keith Teltser
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 2019, 11(4): 210–239 https://doi.org/10.1257/app.20170476

Abstract: "Vast  organ  shortages  motivated  recent  efforts  to  increase  the  sup-ply  of  transplantable  organs,  but  we  know  little  about  the  demand  side  of  the  market.  We  test  the  implications  of  a  model  of  organ  demand using the universe of US transplant data from 1987 to 2013. Exploiting variation in supply induced by state-level motorcycle helmet  laws,  we  demonstrate  that  each  organ  that  becomes  available  from a deceased donor in a particular region induces five transplant candidates to join that region’s transplant wait list, while crowding out    living-donor  transplants.  Even  with  the  corresponding  demand  increase,  positive  supply  shocks  increase    post-transplant  survival  rates."


"We find that transplant candidates respond strongly to local supply shocks, along two  dimensions.  First,  for  each  new  organ  that  becomes  available  in  a  market,  roughly five new candidates join the local wait list. With detailed zip code data, we demonstrate that candidates listed in multiple locations and candidates living out-side of the local market disproportionately drive demand responses. Second, kidney transplant recipients substitute away from  living-donor transplants. We estimate the largest crowd out of potential transplants from living donors who are neither blood relatives  nor  spouses,  suggesting  that  these  are  the  marginal  cases  in  which  the  relative  costs  of  living-donor  and    deceased-donor  transplants  are  most  influential.  Taken together, these findings show that increases in the supply of organs generate demand behavior that at least partially offsets a shock’s direct effects. Presumably as  a  result  of  this  offset,  the  average  waiting  time  for  an  organ  does  not  measurably  decrease  in  response  to  a  positive  supply  shock.  However,  for  livers,  hearts,  lungs, and pancreases, we find evidence that an increase in the supply of deceased organs increases the probability that a transplant is successful, defined as graft survival. Among kidney transplant recipients, we hypothesize that living donor crowd out mitigates any health outcome gains resulting from increases in  deceased-donor transplants.
...
"The  SRTR  data  show  that  multi-listing  is  not  common,  with  only  6  percent  of  all  candidates  choosing  to  do  so  at  a  point  in  time  (online Appendix A describes how we identify multi-listed candidates and spells in the data). However, those who multi-list are systematically different from those who do not, with higher probabili-ties of having attended some college (46 percent versus 36 percent), higher rates of employment (44 percent versus 33 percent), and lower rates of insurance coverage via Medicaid (5 percent versus 11.5 percent). Not surprisingly, they are also more likely to register outside their own or a bordering DSA (12 percent) than candidates with a single listing (4 percent).
...
"the  percentage  of  liver candidates who receive a transplant within 5 years of listing ranged from 30.5 percent in New York to 86.1 percent in Arkansas (Israni, et al. 2012, 70). Similarly, “a striking (but not new) observation is the tremendous difference ... in the percent-age  of    wait-listed  patients  who  undergo  deceased  donor  kidney  transplant  within  5  years,”  varying  from  roughly  25  percent  in  California  DSAs  to  67  percent  in  Wisconsin (Israni, et al. 2012, 13).
...
"in  the  early  1970s  most  states  had  universal  helmet  laws  because  the  federal  government  tied  state  highway  construction  funds  to  such  laws  (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) 2018). By the  mid-1970s, states successfully lob-bied  Congress  to  break  that  link,  and  states  began  repealing  their  universal  helmet  laws (IIHS 2018).
...
"Using    state-level  OPTN  data  from  1994  to  2007,    Dickert-Conlin,  Elder  and  Moore (2011)—henceforth, DCEM—uses 6  state-level repeals and 1 enactment of a universal helmet law to estimate that repealing universal helmet laws increases the supply of organ donors who die in motor vehicle accidents by roughly 10 percent."
*********
This paper is part of an exciting line of work that I've blogged about earlier:

Thursday, August 1, 2019  How much do Kidney Exchanges Improve Patient Outcomes? Keith Teltser in AEJ-Policy

The common app: reduced friction and increased congestion by Knight and Schiff

Reducing Frictions in College Admissions: Evidence from the Common Application

Brian G. Knight, Nathan M. Schiff

NBER Working Paper No. 26151
Issued in August 2019

Abstract: "College admissions in the U.S. is decentralized, with students applying separately to each school. This creates frictions in the college admissions process and, if substantial, might ultimately limit student choice. In this paper, we study the introduction of the Common Application (CA) platform, under which students submit a single application to all member schools, potentially reducing frictions and increasing student choice. We first document that joining the CA increases the number of applications received by schools, consistent with reduced frictions. Joining the CA also reduces the yield on accepted students, consistent with increased student choice, and institutions respond to the reduced yield by admitting more students. In line with these findings, we document that the CA has accelerated geographic integration: upon joining, schools attract more foreign students and more out-of-state students, especially from other states with significant CA membership, consistent with network effects. Finally, we find some evidence that joining the CA increases freshmen SAT scores. If so, and given that CA members tend to be more selective institutions, the CA has contributed to stratification, the widening gap between more selective and less selective schools."

"The CA began with just 15 colleges in 1975 but grew rapidly thereafter, with increases in member-ship in every year since 1975 and a significant acceleration of membership starting around 2000(Figure 1). It currently includes over 700 institutions, which, taken together, receive approximately4 million applications from 1 million students annually."

Privacy and dating apps

As internet and app-driven dating becomes increasingly common, so has the tension between dating and privacy, i.e. between indicating to potential partners who you are and what you want, and keeping some privacy about these things in the rest of your life.  The NY Times has an article by NY Law School prof Ari Ezra Waldman that focuses on the design of dating apps with respect to privacy:

 Queer Dating Apps Are Unsafe by Design
Privacy is particularly important for L.G.B.T.Q. people. By Ari Ezra Waldman.

"Pete Buttigieg met his husband on a dating app called Hinge. And although that’s unique among presidential candidates, it’s not unique for Mr. Buttigieg’s generation — he’s 37 — or other members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community.

In 2016, the Pew Research Center found that use of online dating apps among young adults had tripled in three years, and nearly six in 10 adults of all ages thought apps were a good way to meet someone. The rates are higher among queer people, many of whom turn to digital spaces when stigma, discrimination and long distances make face-to-face interaction difficult. One study reported that in 2013 more than one million gay and bisexual men logged in to a dating app every day and sent more than seven million messages and two million photos over all.

...

"But for queer people, privacy is uniquely important. Because employers in 29 states can fire workers simply for being gay or transgender, privacy with respect to our sexual orientations and gender identities protects our livelihoods. 

...

"All digital dating platforms require significant disclosure. Selfies and other personal information are the currencies on which someone decides whether to swipe right or left, or click a heart, or send a message. 

...

" Hinge made a commitment to privacy by designing in automatic deletion of all communications the moment users delete their accounts. Scruff, another gay-oriented app, makes it easy to flag offending accounts within the app and claims to respond to all complaints within 24 hours. Grindr, on the other hand, ignored 100 complaints from Mr. Herrick about his harassment. If, as scholars have argued, Section 230 had a good-faith threshold, broad immunity would be granted only to those digital platforms that deserve it.

Privacy isn’t anathematic to online dating. Users want it, and they try hard to maintain it. The problem isn’t sharing intimate selfies, no matter what victim-blamers would have us believe. The problem is the law permits the development of apps that are unsafe by design."

Battle over college admission application platforms

CollegeNET, a software vendor to colleges, is suing the Common App., and also providing software support for it's newer competitor, the  Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success.

 The Chronicle of Higher Ed has the (gated) story:

How Admissions Competition Brought New Rivalries, Strange Bedfellows, and ‘An Us-Versus-Us Lawsuit’  By Eric Hoover JUNE 03, 2018

"CollegeNET’s complaint claims that the Common Application used unfair tactics to stomp competitors and monopolize the market. It also claims that participating colleges (though not named as defendants) colluded to limit spending on application-processing services, harming other companies as well as applicants. How? By homogenizing the application process and causing "application churn," in which students apply to more and more colleges."


See earlier post:

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

A new college admissions coalition

School choice in Indianapolis, and elsewhere

The Indy Star has the story on the imminent rollout of centralized school choice in Indianapolis:
Major changes await those wanting to enroll at IPS and charters, but no wait lists

"Wait lists for a spot in Indianapolis' most-desired schools are about to be a thing of the past.

Nearly all of the city's charter schools and all Indianapolis Public Schools programs will have a common application through the a new unified enrollment system called Enroll Indy. Starting next month, families can apply for a spot in up to 10 schools for the 2018-19 school year with just one application. "
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Earlier posts on school choice in Indianapolis here. Indianapolis has a full school choice system that elicits a rank order preference list of schools from each family and assigns each student to the single most preferred available.  This is the kind of school choice system that has been promoted by  IIPSC.

This is not to be confused with school systems that offer a common application, without centralized admissions. These remove the congestion involved in making multiple applications, but don't do anything about the congestion involved in some students receiving multiple offers which must be resolved before other students can be assigned to a school. (This raises a number of potential problems.)

For a school district that has just adopted a common application without a centralized school assignment, see e.g. Houston:
50 Houston Charter Schools Accept New Common Application, whose common app is here: Welcome to ApplyHouston!, organized by Schoolmint

Has the internet "wrecked" college admissions?

That's what the headline writers at the Washington Monthly think:
How the Internet Wrecked College Admissions: Colleges are drowning in online applications, which is bad news for both schools and students.  by Anne Kim

Here are the opening paragraphs:
"Over the last decade, the internet has made it much easier for students to apply to college, especially thanks to services like the “Common App.” For the nearly 700 schools now part of the Common Application—the nation’s leading standardized online college application portal—students can browse by name, state, or region, by the type of institution (public or private), and by whether it’s co-ed or single-sex. Clicking on a college takes students to a brief profile of the school and then an invitation: “Ready to apply?”

And now that students can apply to more colleges with the click of a few buttons, they are doing exactly that. In 2013, according to the National Association of College Admissions Counselors (NACAC), 32 percent of college freshmen applied to seven or more colleges—up 10 percentage points from 2008. Almost all of this growth has been online. In the 2015–16 admissions cycle, over 920,000 students used the Common App, more than double the number in 2008–09."

A new college admissions coalition

Inside Higher Ed has the story: (the url is as informative as the headline--
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/09/27/80-colleges-and-universities-announce-plan-new-application-and-new-approach

Admissions Revolution

September 27, 2015

By

Scott Jaschik

Eighty leading colleges and universities are today announcing a plan to reverse a decades-long process by which colleges have -- largely through the Common Application -- made their applications increasingly similar.

Further, the colleges and universities are creating new online portfolios for high school students, designed to have ninth graders begin thinking more deeply about what they are learning or accomplishing in high school, to create new ways for college admissions officers, community organizations and others to coach them, and to emerge in their senior years with a body of work that could be used to help identify appropriate colleges and apply to them. Organizers of the new effort hope it will minimize some of the disadvantages faced by high school students without access to well-staffed guidance offices or private counselors.

While the goals of the effort are ambitious, so are the resources and clout of the colleges today announcing this campaign. These colleges include every Ivy League university, Stanford University and the University of Chicago; liberal arts colleges such as Amherst, Swarthmore and Williams Colleges; and leading public institutions such as the Universities of Michigan, North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Virginia. The 80 members expect more institutions to join.

While they aim to create a new way for students to apply, they also hope that the portfolio system they create prods changes in high school education that could have an impact beyond those who apply to these institutions.

The new group is called the Coalition for Access, Affordability and Success. It will be open to public institutions with “affordable tuition along with need-based financial aid for in-state residents,” according to an outline provided by the coalition.

Private colleges may join if they “provide sufficient financial aid to meet the full, demonstrated financial need of every domestic student they admit.” That means colleges need not be need blind (in which admissions offers are made without regard to financial need) to participate. And indeed a number of colleges that have joined are “need aware” for some students, meaning that, for some of their slots, they consider only those students who do not have financial need. But colleges that engage in “gapping,” in which some admitted students are not provided enough aid to attend, will not be allowed to join. Gapping is common among private colleges that do not have substantial endowments.

To participate, colleges also must have a six-year federal graduation rate of 70 percent, a threshold that will exclude many public institutions.

...

A new application system. The coalition will introduce a new online application. Like the Common Application, there will be some factual information that students would need to enter only once (name, high school, etc.). But once an applicant hits short answers or essay or other sections, each college would prepare its own questions. The idea is to link many of the questions to material that applicants would have put in their portfolios, so applicants are not scrambling for ideas on essays but are relying on work they did in high school. (Standardized test scores and high school transcripts would continue to be provided to colleges.)

The goal of these three features is to change the way students, colleges and society think about the admissions process. “The idea isn't about how you should pad your résumé, but about how you should have significant experiences as part of your education,” said Horne.

Stephen M. Farmer, vice president for enrollment and undergraduate admissions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said UNC was joining because of the opportunity in this new approach to interact with low-income students much earlier, and to help them prepare for admission. “We’ve got to broaden our thinking about what constitutes talent,” he said, adding that this approach will lead universities to focus on developing the talent of high school students, not just picking already talented high school seniors.

...

A Challenge to the Common App?

One big question about the new system is how much of a challenge it will represent to the Common Application, which has more than 600 members, including most if not all of the new coalition's members. Over its 40-year history, the Common Application has grown from a small group of small liberal arts colleges to a dominant player in college admissions, attracting all kinds of colleges with competitive admissions, many of which have reported boosts to application numbers after joining the Common App.

All of the coalition members contacted for this article said that they plan to offer, but not require, the coalition application, and that they expect to continue having a majority of applicants (certainly in the coalition's early years) apply through the Common App.

...

The Universal College Application -- now up to 44 colleges -- gained ground in the wake of the Common App’s technical failures in 2013, but Universal has never had the critical mass or recognition among high school students of the Common App.

College applications and college apps

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has the story: Elite Colleges Explore Alternative to Common App

"Admissions officials at some of the nation’s most-selective colleges seek to create a new online application system, according to documents obtained by The Chronicle. Although the platform would rival the Common Application, its members apparently would include only private colleges with robust financial-aid budgets, and public institutions with high graduation rates.

Earlier this year, an "exploratory committee" comprising representatives of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale Universities, among several other institutions, sent out a request for proposals describing their interest in "an application solution to ensure that students can apply when another application mode experiences difficulties or system failure," according to a May 12 draft of the RFP. "There is also interest," the document says, "in establishing a new collaborative option for individual higher-education institutions as they work in their own ways to enroll the very best and most diverse freshman classes they can." If built, the system could go live as early as next year.

The plans mark the latest chapter in the unfolding saga of the Common App, which was plagued by various technical difficulties at the height of last year’s admissions cycle. Following months of glitches, admissions leaders at colleges that had used the Common App exclusively said they worried about placing all of their eggs in one basket."

Some history of the Common App

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a long, informative article on the Common App and the recent troubles with its computer systems, from which I excerpt below:

The Uncommon Rise of the Common App

Although the Common Application is now a vast, bustling highway, it was once just a shortcut. Its founding purpose: to make applying to college easier.

Back before the computer, applicants and counselors had to write or type answers to the same questions on every college's application. Each year the nation's hands cramped up. Then, in 1975, Colgate University, Vassar College, and a handful of other private institutions with similar admissions requirements created a common form that students could photocopy and mail in.

This modest stand against redundancy was infused with a high-minded mission: increasing access by going beyond grades and test scores to conduct robust evaluations of each applicant. "It was a time for reaffirming what was important in admissions," says Mary F. Hill, a former dean of admissions at Colgate who served on the Common Application's board of directors from 1996 to 2005.

...

By the mid-1990s, more than 150 colleges—all private, all relatively selective—were using the Common Application, run by a network of volunteers. In 1996 the National Association of Secondary School Principals dedicated a staff member to handle logistics and the increasing volume of paperwork. The application then was a booklet of perforated forms with maroon type; the masthead listed participating colleges in small print. Each year, as more names were added, the letters shrank.

The Common App first went online in 1998. To keep up with growth, the board hired a staff and incorporated as a nonprofit organization. It also agreed to admit public universities, the first six of which joined in 2001.

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At least until this fall, ease of use has made the Common App a success by any measure. According to its tax return for 2011, the organization, based in Arlington, Va., generated $13-million in revenue. Of the group's 517 members, 178 offer no other way to apply. The fee structure rewards exclusivity. Nonexclusive members pay $4.75 per application; exclusive members pay $4. Colleges that further "streamline" their policies—by having no more than two early-admission plans, for instance—pay only $3.75. All nine admissions officials on the organization's board represent exclusive users.

The Common Application now has nine employees, but it expects to grow to 65. Next summer, as part of a long-term acquisition plan, the organization will hire about 30 employees who now work for a company called Hobsons, which designed and developed the new online system. (Hobsons also owns Naviance, which high schools use to send documents to colleges, and the website College Confidential.)

In the admissions profession, the Common App is ubiquitous. This year it was the lone platinum sponsor of the National Association for College Admission Counseling's annual conference, for which it paid $50,000. (The Chronicle was also a sponsor of the event.) Recently the Common App gave the association $80,000 to send 80 college counselors to a professional-development workshop. Each year it mails a poster to every high school in the nation, listing its ever longer roster of colleges.

With visibility comes cachet. Joining the Common Application in 1990 was an important move for Ursinus College, says Richard G. DiFeliciantonio, vice president for enrollment. "There was status associated with that membership," he says. "It confirmed our position in the marketplace."

Now he believes the benefits have less to do with prestige than with scale. The wider a college's recruitment net, the more applicants of every kind it can attract. He credits the Common App with helping Ursinus double its enrollment of both nonwhite students and those eligible for federal Pell Grants.

Mr. DiFeliciantonio also sees trade-offs. With more applications, "yield"—the percentage of accepted students who enroll—declines and becomes harder to predict. (A law of recruitment: More applicants doesn't necessarily mean more serious applicants.) And member colleges must relinquish some authority over the questions they can and cannot ask. "We were willing to put up with a loss of control," he says, "to get with the herd."

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The Common Application is not without competitors. College­NET, an Oregon-based technology company, builds customized application-processing systems for some 500 colleges worldwide. After creating an account through, say, Washington State University, a student can automatically transfer basic information to another member college that has signed on to that service.

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Joshua J. Reiter, who helped build the Common Application's first online system, went on to start the Universal College Application in 2007. The for-profit company is a small rival, for sure: Membership peaked at about 80 colleges a few years ago, then dwindled to 32, in part because those that also belonged to the Common App decided it was simpler to manage just one system. But since problems with the Common Application arose, Princeton University and seven other colleges have joined or rejoined the Universal College Application, which admissions deans say charges $1,000 annually, plus $4.50 per application.

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Timeline: The Common Application, 1975-2013

1975: The Common Application begins a pilot program with 15 member institutions, primarily selective liberal-arts colleges.

1980: Passes 100 members.

1994: Harvard U. becomes the first Ivy League member; Dartmouth College follows the next year.

1998: First online application system launches.

2000: The Common Application incorporates as a nonprofit; passes 200 members.

2001: The Universities of Delaware, Vermont, and Maine are among the first public institutions to join.

2004: Binghamton University becomes the first State University of New York campus to join; by 2011, 18 other SUNY campuses will have joined.

2007: Passes 300 members.

2010: First international institutions join; passes 400 members; number of unique applicants exceeds 500,000.

2013: Paper application is retired; passes 500 member institutions; fourth generation of the online application faces technical difficulties and criticism.

Is the Common App still doing what it was designed to do?

The letters to the editor of the NY Times, following a recent article on the Common App and its troubles, include one (the second letter) from one of the founders of the Common App. It says in part:

"The unavoidable standardization of the Common Application, not to mention the online debacle for students trying to use it this year, causes serious questions regarding its service to both the candidate and the college.

As co-founder of the Common Application some 40 years ago (with Jack Osander of Princeton and Fred Jewett of Harvard), I sense that the Common App’s time is up. The sole original goal of the Common Application was to make applying to highly selective colleges easier for nontraditional, less advantaged but deserving students. Clearly, it worked early on.

Now it seems that the ease of applying via the Common App has transferred from the poorest to the most affluent students, whose families have no problem paying a dozen or more application fees — the more apps, the better the chance of admission somewhere special. This phenomenon also creates thousands more “ghost applications” (from students unlikely to enroll) for the colleges."

HT: Eric Budish

Earlier posts on the common app.

Early admissions glitches on the Common App

As the Common App becomes more common, it creates some stress as it struggles with congestion: Common App Says 2 Causes of Admissions Lags Fixed

"After a rocky roll-out of a new online computer program, the Common Application said it fixed two big snags that had left students across the country struggling to file applications before early admission deadlines.

The Common Application allows students to apply to multiple schools at once; more than 500 colleges and universities accept it, and it is run by a nonprofit with the same name."

The Common App has some struggling competitors like the Universal College Application; maybe this will be good for them, and will encourage universities to diversify the portals through which they accept admissions.

The Common App and college admissions

An article on updated software to be used for college admissions by the Common Application process reflects how the process of applying to colleges, once entirely decentralized, has changed: Common App 4.0

"The Common App, the all-purpose form accepted by 456 colleges and universities, is getting a digital makeover, down to the most fundamental swatches of code, with the end result intended to be a smoother, faster, more intuitive application. (The application itself will still be a rigorous exercise, complete with 250- to 500-word essays.)
"The new electronic form, now on the drawing board, is scheduled to make its debut in 2013.
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"In the application season beginning to wind down this month, an estimated 750,000 students will have submitted three million online applications. That represents an increase of about 25 percent in only the last year. Meanwhile, teachers, counselors and school administrators are expected to submit 10 million transcripts, recommendations and other school forms through the Common Application’s electronic pipeline this year.

"For that matter, it has only been in the last decade that most students began to apply to college by pushing the “send” button instead of walking their applications to the post office. The Common App itself — which made it possible, for the first time, for a student to type up one form and photocopy it for multiple submissions — is only 36 years old.
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"The number of applications filed through the Common Application portal by the end of this decade could exceed 10 million — and the number of schools accepting it could grow to 1,000 or more. That workload is well beyond what the latest Common Application is built to withstand."

HT: Neil Dorosin

Marketing colleges: Two paths to more applications, the common app, and fast-track

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed sheds some light on two different ways that colleges try to market themselves to a larger pool of applicants. One is the Common Application (which allows applicants to fill out one application online and then send it to many places, sometimes with supplements required by colleges that don't want too many casual applications). Another is "fast track" applications, which are mailed to high school students with invitations to fill in a shorter application, maybe without any essays at all.
The Curious Case of ‘Catnip’ and the Common Application

"Many high-school counselors offer colorful descriptions of “fast-track” applications, an increasingly popular recruitment tool among colleges. Such applications come with students’ names and other information already filled in. Typically, these solicitations also provide other incentives, like waived essay requirements, and promise quick admissions decisions...

"But there’s growing concern in high schools about how such applications are coexisting with another fixture of the admissions realm—the Common Application, the free admissions form accepted by 414 colleges.

"At the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s annual conference last month, several counselors discussed what they described as an increasingly common scenario: students using a fast-track application to apply to a college that’s a member of the Common Application. In such cases, high schools cannot electronically submit students’ supporting documents—transcripts, secondary-school reports, and letters of recommendation—to colleges.

"Why not? Because a member college isn’t able to download those documents until (or unless) a student submits his or her application through the Common Application’s Web site. In other words, a student can bypass the Common Application’s system by submitting a fast-track app, but that student’s counselor cannot do the same.
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"Mr. Graf and other counselors have criticized Royall & Company, a direct-marketing firm that has pioneered the use of fast-track applications. Some of Royall’s clients package them as “V.I.P.” applications. The irony: Some colleges send such apps to thousands—even tens of thousands—of prospective students each year...

"The company’s leaders, who did not immediately return a telephone message on Wednesday, have previously described fast-track applications as a time-saving means of simplifying the application process, helping colleges reach more prospective students. They’re also good for business: Most colleges that use them report significant increases in applications.

"In recent years, Robert Killion, the Common Application’s executive director, has heard numerous complaints about the challenges raised by fast-track applicants applying to Common App colleges. Some counselors have asked why the nonprofit association does not transmit supporting documents for students who choose that option.

"Money is one answer, Mr. Killion concedes. For each application filed through the Common Application, the association gets a $4 fee from member colleges who use the Common App exclusively (institutions that also accept other applications pay $4.75 per applicant). “We’ve built a system for students who want to follow the Common App model,” says Mr. Killion. “If a student wants to pursue an alternative path, that’s their prerogative, but I’m not sure why we, for free, should have to subsidize someone else’s system.”
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"Willamette is a member of the Common Application, and it offers a fast-track application. “Colleges that use both are put in a squeeze,” says Ms. Rhyneer, a former chairwoman of the Common Application’s steering committee.

"Although Ms. Rhyneer seconds the concerns expressed by Mr. Graf and other counselors, she disagrees with negative characterizations of fast-track apps. Willamette sends such an app to about half of its inquiry pool and uses it to encourage particularly promising applicants to apply. “Counselors tend to paint everybody using it with the same brush, but we’re not trying to get a zillion apps,” she says."