More colleges scrapping application process

Write out personal and family history. Share activities and leadership positions. Craft and proofread essays. Pay a fee, if applicable. Repeat.

Those are the traditional steps required for high school students applying to colleges. After a grueling application process that can span hours to days, students then wait weeks or even months to find out if they were admitted.

But now — as some colleges watch their enrollments fall and more high schoolers question the worth of a degree — a growing number of schools are taking a more lax approach to admissions.

In fact, they’re scrapping the application process altogether for some students through direct admissions: a process that allows schools to proactively offer admission to students who meet certain academic or locational criteria.

Using state data or third-party educational platforms, colleges can accept large groups of students who haven’t applied or visited campus — and put their institutions on the radar for those who haven’t considered or even heard of their institutions.

In Western Pennsylvania, Washington & Jefferson College, Robert Morris University, Point Park University and Allegheny College have all begun recruiting and admitting students through this method, using third-party websites.

“It saves students, parents, institutions and counselors time and money,” said Taylor Odle, an education policy professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “When we think about the application as a structural barrier, it reduces that barrier for students who are most likely to fall prey to that barrier… It also is empirically shown to increase enrollments. If you make it easier to get into college, we should expect that more people will enroll in college.”

At W&J, direct admissions have led to increases in both applications and deposits, said Tracey Sheetz, the Washington County college’s vice president of enrollment.

She attributed 42 deposits to the college’s direct admissions efforts over the past two school years.

“One of the problems that we have in higher ed is we think very un-corporate-like. In the corporate world, they’re always reinventing themselves,” Ms. Sheetz said. “[Direct admissions] meet students where they are today. They’re no longer the students who are going to sit and fill out a five-page paper application with pencil. We’ve got to make it a smoother process and more accessible.”

W&J has offered direct admissions through three companies, including Niche, a Pittsburgh-based company that provides details, rankings and reviews of colleges.

Niche first piloted its direct admissions program in 2022 with two schools. The platform has now ballooned to include 91 institutions. Three — W&J, Robert Morris and Point Park — are based in the Pittsburgh region.

Through Niche’s direct admissions platform, schools can seek out and offer admission to students with Niche profiles who meet certain criteria determined by the institution. For instance, at W&J, students must have a 3.0 unweighted GPA to receive an admission offer, Ms. Sheetz said.

When those students receive their offers, they’ll also immediately find out how much scholarship money they would get at an institution.

The entire process “reduces some of the friction” of college admissions, Luke Skurman, Niche’s founder and CEO, told the Post-Gazette. The Niche program has elicited nearly 2,400 deposits at schools across the country.

“This generation — they’re more discerning. They crave greater transparency,” Mr. Skurman said. “They want immediacy. They’re used to pressing that button and getting an Uber right to their door or getting food delivered to their house. They don’t want to wait six months to see if they’ve been admitted to college.

“They want to get that result now, and they deserve that.”

Niche isn’t the only institution trying its hand at direct admissions. The Common App, an undergraduate college admissions application with over 1,000 member colleges, has developed its own program, as well.

And 10 states have created their own direct admissions pathways for students, said Mr. Odle. High schoolers in these states can potentially receive automatic admission to the state’s community colleges and public and private institutions, depending on the state’s policy.

States such as Idaho — where enrollment grew 3.1% the year after it introduced direct admissions — have already reaped the benefits of these programs.

As higher education tackles numerous challenges in 2024, direct admissions could offer one solution for institutions, Mr. Odle believes. Since he authored the first paper on direct admissions in 2021, he’s seen these programs skyrocket in popularity — and thinks they will only continue to grow.

“Direct admissions is not going to be a panacea for all of our problems,” Mr. Odle said. “Going to college is hard for a lot of reasons. There’s a lot of hurdles and barriers, and direct admissions is just helping address one of those, which is getting into college. … But I do think the tenets behind direct admission — around simplification, transparency, individuality — are important things for us to keep in mind.”