Community Colleges Are on the Common App Now. The Question Is Whether Anyone Notices.
Community colleges are no longer just a four-college pilot on the Common App. The first Illinois institutions began joining in 2025; Common App’s July 31, 2026 launch announcement reports 23 new Illinois community-college members for the 2026–27 season. Wake Technical Community College in North Carolina also opened a Common App route for fall 2026 admission.
So the origin of the experiment is not new, but its expansion is. The interesting question is not only how many colleges have joined. It is whether joining changes where students enroll, and whether application volume is the right evidence to use when judging that result.
A new entrance
The citation is a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Brian Knight of Brown and Nathan Schiff, later published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. Coverage of the community college partnership described it as finding a 12 percent increase in admissions at institutions after they joined the Common App. The paper found a roughly 10 percent increase in applications, which is a different variable and a different number.
That distinction is the whole argument. At a selective college, applications and admissions are separated by a reading process, and more applications mean a deeper pool to choose from. At an open-access institution, they are barely separated at all. A community college admits essentially everyone who applies. Additional applications do not improve the class; they add processing.
The Knight and Schiff paper reports two other findings that sit uncomfortably next to the enrollment case. Joining the platform reduces yield on accepted students, because students who can apply to more places accept fewer of the offers they receive. And because Common App members skew selective, the authors conclude the platform has contributed to stratification, widening the distance between more and less selective institutions, with evidence that entry shifts a college's incoming class toward higher-income students.
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Applications are not enrollment
For an open-access college, converting an application into enrollment can matter more than growing the pile of forms. The research raises a question about yield, not a verdict on this partnership: findings about earlier Common App members cannot establish what will happen at today’s community colleges.
Then there is the population question, which is the harder one.
The Common App is an architecture. It assumes a high school senior with a counselor, a list of institutions, a fall calendar of deadlines, and a reason to submit the same information to several places at once. American Association of Community Colleges data describes a different student. The average community college student is 27, with a median age of 23. More than two-thirds enroll less than full time. About 22 percent of full-year unduplicated headcount are high school students taking college courses, which is dual enrollment rather than admission. Community college students make up 39 percent of all U.S. undergraduates, and very few of them are choosing among eight institutions.
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Who uses the route?
Brian Durham, executive director of the Illinois Community College Board, named the mismatch himself when the partnership was announced. He asked how you get a 34-year-old headed into a welding program to sit down and complete a Common App. His answer for now is that participating Illinois colleges keep their own applications running in parallel, and Jenny Rickard, Common App's chief executive, acknowledged the platform has work to do before it fits these institutions well.
Parallel systems matter more than they sound. If a college maintains its own application alongside the Common App, the platform is an added channel rather than a replacement. It may reach students already using the platform or bring new students into it. The relevant test is whether either route produces enrollment that would not otherwise have occurred.
Common App has been partnering with the Illinois Board of Higher Education on direct admissions to eight public universities in the state, notifying eligible students of offers they did not apply for. Durham's stated goal is to get community colleges into that notification stream. A student who fills out a Common App aimed at four-year universities, and who then learns in the same interface that her local community college is available, has encountered something that could change a decision. That is a recruitment product, not an application, and it is a fair test of the theory.
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Visibility becomes a decision
The case for the whole project is stronger than the roster suggests, and Rickard makes it directly. The organization dropped its requirement that member colleges review applicants beyond test scores in 2014, along with its insistence that member applications include essays and recommendations, which is what made public and open-access membership possible at all. As of 2022-23, 77 percent of Common App members admitted more than half their first-year applicants. In 2023 the organization set a target of 650,000 additional applicants from low- and middle-income communities by 2030. Rickard's framing is that most students attend open-access institutions while attention stays fixed on the places nobody can get into.
Wake Tech's stated reason for joining was narrower and probably more honest about what the tool does. Brian Gann, its vice president for enrollment and student services, pointed to "the enhanced visibility for the college in our service area." Visibility is a real benefit. It is not the same as rerouting a student who would otherwise have enrolled somewhere else, or nowhere.
The number that would settle the question is not the count of two-year members, which is a press release, or application volume by itself. It is additional enrollment and persistence. Compare early participating colleges with their own prior trends and with comparable nonparticipants, while accounting for other changes. The research cited here does not establish that causal effect. Community colleges on the Common App remains a distribution experiment whose enrollment consequences deserve direct measurement.
For the broader writing context, read our analysis of why disappearing essays can complicate an application.
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Sources, scope and editorial notes
- Common App · 2026–27 launch
- Knight and Schiff · Common App research
- NBER · applications and enrollment effects
This is analysis based on the supplied article and linked sources, not firsthand reporting or legal advice. Factual corrections and qualifications were made before publication. Illustrations and worksheet mechanics are explanatory; they do not represent official application screens or predict outcomes. Policies can change: verify the current college, program or platform instructions before acting.
