common app application

Answered

The Common App and Coalition App are portals, they have nothing to do with how much colleges charge for applications fees. So if Harvard charges $85, it's the same price on the Common App or Coalition App.

Think of it like Expedia or Kayak or Trivago when you buy an airline ticket or hotel room. If Delta Airlines charges $500 for round trip ticket between LA and NYC for 1/6/22, that's what the price is going to be regardless on which portal you book the flight through.

The MAJOR difference between the Common App and Coalition App are the following:

-COMMON App has over 974 partner colleges versus about 150 for the COALITION app

https://www.commonapp.org/explore/

https://www.coalitionforcollegeaccess.org/our-members

Why is this important? Well some want to One Stop shop for colleges and they do not want to have to apply through 2 portals if the Coalition app doesn't support 1/2 or more of the schools they are applying to.

-COALITION App is more Low Income friendly than the Common App. If you are low income and qualify for any kind of State or Federal subsidies like the Free Lunch Program at your school, you can apply for a FEE waiver on the Coalition app. If you pass the test, you will get a fee waiver for each and every partner school. On the Common App, you have to apply for fee waivers 1 by 1, so if you apply to 20 schools you have to apply to 20 individual fee waivers. The streamlined efficiency reduces the level of stress immensely for low income students. (I'm talking about American low income students, not International low income applicants). There is no fee waiver advantage in that case.

-COALITION App has something called the PERSONAL LOCKER. This Locker is a part of the application where you can upload .pdfs, links, documents, videos, etc that help explain your academic and EC narratives. You can start building your locker on COALITION from 9th grade and just keep adding and tweaking it as you wish. This is a much better feature for high achieving students who want to give their college admissions readers a more comprehensive understanding of who they are. There is no cost for the locker.

-COALITION App is far more collaborative than the COMMON App. So if you have a parent, mentor, college consultant, teacher, friend that you want to have access to your COALITION App files, you can easily permission them to see your essays, videos, documents etc and give you feedback on how your total application looks. They each get their separate login credentials and you can give them select access to certain things you want them to see. They can not edit your application. On the other hand, the COMMON App doesn't have these kinds of controls.

-COMMON App allows you to list 10 ECS and the COALITION app 8 ECS. I think there are other subtle differences but with the "LOCKER" feature, it doesn't really matter so much.

NONE of the US Colleges care which application portal you choose to apply through. Similarly, NONE of the US Colleges care whether you submit an ACT or an SAT test score. They are all agnostic to accepting either portal or test score.

GOOD LUCK.