Join us for “The Numbers You Need to Know,” a professional development event for counselors and advisors on Friday, September 18th at 1 PM ET/12 PM CT/11 AM MT/10 AM PT.
The Common App has grown year-over-year. Perhaps you’ve heard that one before. In fact, you would have heard it for the past ten years. If there is a simple, overall narrative about college admissions in the past decade, it’s that the Common App has become nearly ubiquitous.
The Common App’s growth is news, in its own way, because the organization released its annual end-of-season report, “DEADLINE UPDATES First-year Application Trends 2025-26 cуcle,” last week. (That awkward naming comes from the Common App. The news release says “End-of-season report,” and the PDF has the multi-layered name.) So now it’s easy to say that for the 2025-2026 application cycle, the Common App facilitated 1,527,328 individual students submit 10,786,782 applications to 1,146 member colleges. That is a 2% year-over-year increase in students, a 6% jump in applications, and a 4% rise in member colleges. This is sort of what the Common App’s annual updates have been for a while. Significant but not overwhelming growth year-over-year on any possible metrics for the portal.
The real story is what’s happened over the last ten years. During the 2016-2017 cycle, the Common App had 896,619 students submit 4,248,780 applications to 701 members. For everyone who is not quick with math, that’s a 70% increase in applications, a 154% increase in applications, and a 63% increase in members. The Common App has exploded in an extremely short amount of time for college admissions. When I talk with parents, I have often liked the line “Your child’s college application process will be completely different than yours.” I’ve chronicled the transformation of college admissions over the last 25 years, but a decade is a short enough timespan to mean even the youngest teachers in high schools had different college application processes than their students.
The Common App is not a monopoly. The University of California System, California State University System, and MIT are not on it. Yet the Common App has 1,097 members in the United States, and the Federal Government’s IPEDS Data Center shows there are just less than 1,700 colleges with a selective admissions process. About 2 million students are first-time freshman at 4-year colleges each year. Over 1.5 million students using the Common App means most students have to be on the platform. As the Common App goes now, so goes the whole of college admissions.
Two numbers from the Common App’s most recent report show why things have changed so much, and they are both due to the Common App’s efforts. The first is the growth in Public Institutions on the Common App. In 2016-2017, there were only 117 Public Institutions on the portal. There are now 363. The number of public schools on the Common App has tripled in a decade. Since state-controlled institutions typically have larger enrollments, they have helped boost the number of students on the Common App. Texas is the state with the largest growth on the platform, and not coincidentally the University of Texas and Texas A&M University recently joined the Common App.
But switching from a school’s own portal–or something like ApplyTexas that serves multiple schools in the state–to the Common App isn’t a big change for students. Anyone in Lubbock or El Paso or Plano who wants to attend UT will first care about how to apply to UT and follow how the schools say to do it. A high schooler won’t care about what portal it’s on.
Yet once someone is on the Common App, they have a world of options open to them. And students are clearly taking advantage of those options. In 2016-2017, the average student on the Common App submitted 4.73 applications. Last year, the average was 7.06 applications per student. A number of students would submit just one application, either because they submit a single Early Decision application or apply quite late to one school just to make it to any college. Students are also limited to 20 applications in one cycle by the Common App, so there also are not true outliers to drag the average upwards.
Despite continued worries about a looming “demographic cliff” for college enrollment, selective colleges are receiving more and more applications. Even if the overall number of 18 year olds keep declining, a larger percentage of 18 year olds will be applying to selective, four-year colleges. The Common App has made it easier than ever to apply to colleges all over the country. With Direct Admissions, the Common App has also made getting into college easier.
Applying to college in 2026-2027 will be defined by more and more students applying to more and more colleges. That will happen because it keeps happening, and all because of what the Common App has been doing for the last decade.
The Admissions Abstract College Guide 2026-2027 is available on Amazon now for Pre-Order. It will be released on August 31. Make sure you reserve your copy now, and you will be able to look up the information for all 506 schools in the guide in a week. Paid Subscribers will receive an EPUB file when it is officially released.
How to Get Into College is a college admissions guide built from our Substack posts, detailing the ins-and-outs of the college application process. Get a year’s worth of our posts in one place. It’s not a step-by-step guide, but a working out of what happens in college admissions. You can get it below, and please share it with anyone you think would like it.
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