The Common Application Apologizes

The Common Application emailed the lengthy letter below to the counseling community on Friday, which college consultants, high school counselors and anyone with a high school senior might like to see. In the email, the nonprofit apologized for its continuing problems and for being too slow to respond. Let’s hope all the problems are fixed soon!

If you missed it, here is my previous post about the Common App difficulties:

Common Application Pandemonium

 I couldn’t figure out what photo to use to illustrate this post so I popped in one to celebrate the St. Louis Cardinals heading to the World Series. I feel lucky to have grown up in St. Louis where four generations of my family – and counting – have cheered for the Cardinals.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy

Common Application’s Apology

The last few days have comprised the most difficult period in The Common Application’s nearly 40 years of service to the education community. You have no doubt read news stories and social media conversations about the challenges facing applicants, recommenders, and member colleges.

As an organization, we have been too slow to respond. That ends today. We have written this communication to highlight three core values of our mission, explain how we have fallen short in realizing them, and provide details about how we pledge to do better. 

Reliability

For many users, the new Common Application has not been a reliable service. We have tried to be transparent in other communications regarding the various issues users have experienced since the August 1 launch. Many have been solved for all users, and others have been solved for most users. Nonetheless, individual applicants and recommenders are still encountering problems related to account logins, application submission, and document uploads.

In some instances, our support team can easily solve these problems for users who contact us through the Help Center. In others, we continue to research patterns among the individuals affected to ascertain where the root cause lies. Further details about support volume and response efforts appear below.

Beginning next week, we will be using our School Officials newsletter list to send daily updates to the counseling community, and we encourage you to subscribe if you have not already done so.

Counselors, we ask for your help in sharing these updates with your students and families. As much as we would like to communicate this same information directly to applicants, messaging 800,000 registered users would create too big a strain on the system, exacerbating the very problems we are trying to solve.

Our member colleges have faced similar disruptions in reliability, which have adversely impacted their internal processes. Members rely on us for the transmission of the documents and data needed to evaluate candidates, and each college has its own unique process and needs. We are in constant communication with these colleges to ensure they are prepared to receive and process applications and school forms, and we are confident that members will be able to do so successfully as major deadlines approach. To help you understand the complete landscape, we want to reinforce the following points:

1. Students are successfully submitting applications in record numbers.
2. Counselors and teachers using the Common App Recommender System are successfully submitting all school forms.
3. Counselors and teachers using Naviance are successfully submitting School Reports, Teacher Evaluations, and Early Decision Agreements. Implementation of Fee Waiver forms and Optional Reports is imminent for this group.
4. Final integration for Parchment users is imminent.
5. All member colleges have access to every single application document that has been submitted to them, though some are not yet able to import application data into their internal information systems, which is a critical processing step.

By highlighting these successful processes, we do not wish to minimize the challenges and frustrations of individual users and colleges, nor do we wish to paint a picture of a flawless system. Rather, we hope to convey in a responsible manner how the Common Application is functioning for the majority of users.

Service.

Our online Help Center for applicants and recommenders has been operating 24/7 since October 1. Historically, our average response time has been well under one hour. In the past few weeks, our response time for many users has exceeded this average by an unacceptable level. This increase is due to the complexity of some of the issues mentioned above. The time-intensive research required to investigate certain payment and login problems has created a backlog that has extended to all users seeking assistance.

In the past 48 hours, we have released fixes that have resolved two of our most complex issues involving payment and the Chrome browser. The payment problem required intense collaboration with our third-party vendor.  The browser challenges, which resulted from the unexpected release of a new version, prompted immediate collaboration with Chrome support.

The solutions we implemented to address these issues resulted in a steep and immediate decline in new support requests. From Tuesday to Wednesday, applicant requests declined 73%, and recommender requests declined 43%. Also, prior to the payment fix, we were researching and reconciling thousands of payment records on a daily basis. On Thursday, that number was 6. This significant progress will assist us in addressing the backlog and return us to a more normal response time.

Many applicants, parents, counselors, and teachers continue to call for phone support, and we understand why. Speaking directly to a support representative is an assurance that one’s problems and frustrations are being heard and addressed. Unfortunately, given the volume of users who interact with our system, phone support would immediately become unsustainable. In addition, the system information that is transmitted when a user submits a request through our Help Center is often critical in helping us identify and solve the problem.

We assure you that every message submitted through our Help Center is evaluated by an individual member of our support team. These professionals work diligently to provide the most accurate and efficient assistance possible. There are times when the complexity of issues prevents them from responding as quickly as they or you would like, but they strive to provide the timeliest responses possible.

Accuracy is also a central component of service. To that end, our member services team will work closely with any colleges who wish to adjust their deadlines to ensure that the new dates are reflected within our system.

Integrity

If we lose sight of this value, the others cease to matter. Despite all the challenges we have faced, we have not forgotten the principles that guide us, even as we have struggled to attain them. We are unshakably committed to the mission of this association, and we pledge transparency and diligence as we work to fulfill it.

Many of you have grown weary of our continued pleas for patience and our assurances that we are working as quickly as we can to resolve outstanding issues. Your requests for precise timelines are understandable, and we would provide such details if we could. To do so, however, would be to make commitments that we might not be able to honor.

With that in mind, we pledge to communicate as openly as possible regarding the challenges we face and our progress in addressing them. Moving forward, should we observe a widespread problem, we will inform you immediately using social media, even if the only information we can provide is an acknowledgement of the issue and a promise to share updates as they become available. For those of you who do not regularly follow social media, you can view our live Facebook and Twitter feeds directly on our website.

All of us who work with and for The Common Application–from the Board of Directors to the staff to our technology partners at Hobsons–understand the significance of this moment, both for the college application process and for the reputation of the association itself.

To those of you who have offered words of support and encouragement, we thank you. To those of you who have lost faith in our ability to adequately meet the needs of you and your students, we understand. We need to regain your trust, and we know that the burden is on us to make that happen. We are confident that we will.