Common App expands integration partnerships
By Emma Steele
June 8, 2020
Arlington, VA- Common App, a non-profit membership organization dedicated to access, equity, and integrity in the college admission process, today announced the expansion of its integration platform. Common App’s integration platform enables third-party software developers to seamlessly integrate their products with the Common App’s free online college application serving more than one million students worldwide when applying to the over 900 member colleges and universities using the Common App.
New partners that will begin piloting the integration service this year include:
Unifrog (Full functionality in the 2021-2022 application season)
These partners join our existing college counseling platforms supported through this integration service, including:
BridgeU
Cialfo
FolderWave
MaiaLearning
Naviance by Hobsons
Parchment
“Core to our mission is the desire to champion those who support students. By providing a flexible and extensible integration service, we can help an even greater number of school counselors to scale their support for students as they navigate the college admission process."
For more than a decade, Hobsons and Common App have collaborated to improve the college application process through Naviance. Together, millions of applicants and counselors have benefitted from this partnership.
“The Naviance and Common App partnership – spanning more than a decade – continues to be strategically important to our respective organizations. We take seriously the privilege of serving 13,000+ schools and 13+ million students, including over 40% of high school students. Together with Common App, Naviance has improved the college application process for millions of applicants, counselors, and educators.”
Enabling integration with a variety of tools that support school counseling professionals is core to Common App’s work in facilitating the college counseling process, and streamlining the college application process for applicants and recommenders.
“We’re thrilled to add an integration with Common App to the Xello experience,” said Matt McQuillen, Co-Founder and CEO of Xello. “A smooth college application process is critical to preparing students for future success. Xello already delivers support for students and counselors during this stage, with application tracking, letters of recommendation, transcripts, financial aid, and scholarships. With this partnership, we’re now able to offer a seamless application journey, with everything our students and counselors need to centralize and organize college applications.”
Xello is an award-winning, K-12 college, career, and future-readiness program that helps gain self-knowledge, learn about post-secondary academic and career options, build real-world skills, and create actionable graduation and long-term plans.
“At SchooLinks, we are constantly looking for new ways to streamline counseling workflows and support students in their pursuit of post-secondary success-- whether they're planning for college, the military, or a career. We know college applications and document flow can be a challenge for students and staff alike. Making sense of all of the forms, steps, and sequences can crowd out conversations about the "why" of college and how important fit is. This presents a particular challenge for first-generation college students and counselors with large caseloads. Our core focus as a company is making access to opportunity ubiquitous. We're delivering on that with our Common App integration by creating a frictionless, intuitive process that works at scale,” said Katie Fang, CEO of Schoolinks.
SchooLinks is a modern, AI-powered college and career readiness platform that supports districts and students through all aspects of post-secondary planning. Career interest inventories, portfolio building, course planning that ensure alignment with students' interests and goals, and a self-paced curriculum that instills ownership are just a few examples of the more than 80 different experiences SchooLinks offers.
“Overgrad works with students from many different socioeconomic backgrounds, but a large portion of our users will be the first in their families to attend college. The partnership with Common App improves postsecondary access for students, and for that we are thrilled,” said Ryan Hoch, Co-Founder & CEO of Overgrad.
Overgrad is a college and career readiness platform with one driving principle: wow our customers. Schools and districts across the United States look to Overgrad to help create, tune, and scale data-driven school counseling initiatives.
"We see the Common App integration as a core part of us building a platform where counselors can manage - with joy - applications to any country. With the help of our wonderful community of counselors across the world, we now have a singular focus - delivering the golden ticket for international schools." Nick Weir, Head of International Sales and Delivery, Unifrog.
With offices in Hong Kong, Copenhagen, New York and London, Unifrog's mission is to level the playing field when it comes to young people finding and applying for the best opportunities for them. The platform has a fundamentally international outlook, and supports students and counselors with every stage of the process - from students exploring their interests via personality tests and careers libraries, to counselors pressing 'submit' on completed applications. Unifrog is currently working on their integration now and will have full functionality for the 2021-2022 application cycle.
Integration with Common App will allow additional third-party services to support such use cases as creating and matching of Common App accounts to third-party college counseling systems, facilitating the exchange of data between the Common App and third-party college counseling systems, and providing status updates to college counselors based on their students’ progress within Common App.
“We’ve been fortunate to support more than one million students a year thanks, in part, to our valued and long-term partnerships. Our goal is to deliver an open service that improves the applicant experience by streamlining the collection and transmission of application data,” added Rickard. "This enables college counselors and advisors to more efficiently leverage Common App while minimizing the frustrations of managing applicant data across systems."
About Common App
Common App is a not-for-profit member organization committed to the pursuit of access, equity, and integrity in the college admission process. Each year, more than one million students, one-third of whom are first-generation, apply to college through the Common App’s online application. In January 2019, the Common App united with Reach Higher, the college access and success campaign started by former First Lady Michelle Obama during her time at the White House. Its core programming, including Better Make Room, UpNext, College Signing Day, Beating the Odds, school counselor support, and current grants continues as part of the Common App’s work with its member institutions, school counselors, and students. Founded in 1975, Common App serves over 900 member colleges and universities worldwide.
To learn more, visit commonapp.org, and follow @CommonApp and #CommonApp on social media.