Every year, thousands of seniors apply to colleges online. Today, the largest online resources that students can use is Common Application, also known as Common App. This application tool makes it easy for students to provide all the information necessary to apply for a college like coursework, grades, honors and distinctions, activities, and many others. For many colleges, this is the end all be all resource for students to apply. Personally, all but my University of Washington applications were completed using Common App. 

Despite the overwhelming popularity of Common App, University of Washington does not use Common App; rather, Coalition. University of Washington used to use their own portal until recently. In order to entice more students to apply, they switched over to Coalition to their own convenience, since Coalition allowed them to merely integrate their own portal. 

This made the application process much more tedious than all of my other colleges. Some of my classmates, despite being Washington residents chose not to apply to the University of Washington because of its process. 

I wanted to create this petition to encourage the University of Washington to consider changing their application tool from Coalition to Common App.

This proposal, however, is not merely a convenience to the applicants, it will also benefit the University of Washington as well. Common App has 900 colleges part of its system, where Coalition only has a little over 150. Also, many of the colleges listed on Coalition allow students to apply using either Coalition or Common App. Only 9 schools accept only Coalition and not Common App, one of which being University of Washington. 

If University of Washington decides to switch over, or perhaps even create the option to apply using Common App, I believe that they can significantly increase their outreach to rising college freshmen, and make the application process less laborious, ultimately benefitting both student applicants and the University of Washington.

I hope this message reaches those it may concern. Please consider signing this petition.