An opinion piece on this new application from an enrollment manager at Depaul (who’s also known for his obsession with admission/enrollment data) just appeared in the Washington Post. The author is not impressed with the supposed intent of the application to boost enrollment from under-served low-socioeconomic students
Here the old adage seems true: Things that look, walk and quack like ducks are ducks…while the wrapper the coalition puts on this initiative attempts to make it look like it’s about access, it doesn’t walk and it doesn’t quack like a duck. What makes more sense is that a group of America’s most high-profile private colleges, already obsessed with prestige, are attempting to grab more. They are doing so by joining with some of America’s most prominent public universities, and by making hollow promises to low-income kids they could already serve if they really wanted to.
and anecdotes from a conference of admission professionals:
Several guidance counselors from the high school side indicated that they had already heard from the wealthy, driven, successful and college-educated parents of their ninth graders, who want to get an early start on the process and have asked how to start a portfolio. No one suggested they’d heard similar things from the target audience of low-income parents or students. In fact, when someone asked, “Why don’t you make this application and suite of tools available only to low-income students?” the response was effectively, “we’d never even considered that before.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/10/05/the-new-college-admissions-coalition-is-it-really-about-access/