The bright smile on senior Loni Feffer’s face disappeared, and she adopted a gloomy tone as she talked about the college application process.
“[The college process] just seems very superficial to me,” said Feffer. “I feel like just another number.”
Launched in August, the Coalition is a new college application platform that hopes to allow students to express themselves better than they would be able to elsewhere, according to their website. Representatives from the Coalition declined to be interviewed, but their website states that the platform is highly committed to access, affordability and success.
According to John Gaines, Director of Undergraduate Admission at Vanderbilt University, the Coalition furthers these three core values in a manner that the Common Application and other college application platforms currently do not.
“In order for a school to be a member of the Coalition, it has to attain certain markers, certain goals, in each of those value areas,” said Gaines. “For instance, they have to commit to a certain type of financial aid and commit to doing certain types of outreach to underserved and underrepresented communities.”
David Boyle, Glenbrook North’s coordinator for college counseling, said that GBN is encouraging students to stick with the Common Application.
“Right now, GBN is partnered with Naviance/eDocs to send all our supporting materials, [including] letters of recommendation and transcripts [as] the two main documents,” said Boyle. “Right now, the Coalition has not partnered with Naviance like the Common App.”
Boyle said all schools that currently accept the Coalition also accept the Common Application or their own institutional application, making a switch to the Coalition unnecessary. The exception is the University of Florida, which does not accept the Common Application.
According to Stacey Riley Baker, an independent college counselor from Riley Baker Educational Consulting, the Coalition can also help students show their creative side to colleges.
“The primary premise [of the Coalition is] to allow all students to really hone in on who they are and all of the pieces of them, beyond a transcript and a test score,” said Baker. “[The Coalition’s purpose] is to allow [students] to show their creativity and their passions in lots of different ways that the current application process, like the Common application, does not allow.”
Baker said students have the ability to showcase this creativity and passion through a feature specific to the Coalition called the Locker.
“[The Locker] is just an online storage space where students can stash things that they might like to consider later when they’re applying for college,” said Gaines. “[Colleges] won’t have any access to that, it’s just a way to help you organize all the things that you might eventually want to include.”
Baker said the Coalition offers students the opportunity to store essays, art, music or short films in their Locker throughout their high school experience. Students have the option of sending as much or as little of their Locker contents as they want to colleges.
Feffer said she believes that the Locker has the potential to become a great way to showcase a student’s personality to a college if he or she is not a strong writer or has another weakness within his or her application.
Baker said she also believes that the idea of storing work and accomplishments all throughout high school can put too much of an emphasis on college from a young age.
“We need to keep the focus on the high school experience and what students are doing right
now,” Baker said.
Despite seeing benefits and drawbacks in the new application, Baker said she sees the Coalition as a step forward overall.
“There had to be a change in the admissions process,” said Baker. “I think the Coalition application could definitely become the new Common App.”