Has anyone encountered a list anywhere that shows which schools have absolutely no additional work required beyond what you do for every school on the Common App?
This seems like a no-brainer for someone to have compiled. Sure it might change a little from year-to-year, but it would still be a great resource to skim and easier than trying to add every possible school you’d consider to the Common App just to see. For some people they might find schools they were considering but had ruled out just to keep the size of their list small and didn’t realize that they could add it with no additional work and only the application fee.
Do you mean in terms of essays or in terms of everything? I’m sure every school requires a supplement of some sort because the common app does not contain all of the information they need, such as your intended major, residency, scholarships, honors, activities, etc.
However, there are quite a few schools that surprisingly don’t need supplemental essays - a few of which I’m applying to, including Northeastern U, Pace U, Simmons College, and Lesley U. Since there’s such a large number of schools that don’t require supplemental essays, it’d be hard to compile absolutely all of them into a list. However, a good idea would be to create a list of schools with very concise Common App supplements and no supplemental essays.
There are definitely schools that require nothing supplemental on the Common App, essay or otherwise. My son has two of his list right now like that. A lot of liberal arts schools don’t have people enroll Freshman year with majors and there are no honors colleges within them, so they don’t need that info. But, yeah, even if the school did include a few facts like that it would still be useful for the list.
The list in the link above is odd. It’s out of date on some that do require supplemental now but doesn’t include other prominent schools that don’t, and didn’t even when the list is dated to have been formed. But I guess it’s a start.