‘Coalition’ Leader Wants New Application to Serve the Underdog in Admissions

Three months ago, Annie Reznik agreed to help lead a college-admissions experiment. Since then, the first executive director of the Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success has overseen the rollout of a new college-application platform shared by dozens of private and public colleges. Now that it’s up and running, a big question looms: Will the group’s controversial online system help more students, especially those from low-income families, get to college?

If Ms. Reznik didn’t think it could, she says, she wouldn’t have taken the job. In a telephone interview this week with The Chronicle, she discussed the coalition’s plans, some criticisms of the group, and what drew her to the admissions field in the first place.

It all stems from the gridiron. Ms. Reznik’s father, Tony DeMeo, has a knack for building football programs. He has coached at a dozen colleges during his long career, moving his family from college town to college town. At each stop, Ms. Reznik watched her father mentor young men who, like him, were the first in their family to attend college. And she saw him perfect an offensive scheme that could neutralize the advantage of stronger, faster teams.

“It’s a little bit in my blood,” she says, “to be a champion of the underdogs.”

Ms. Reznik, 36, saw elements of coaching in admissions work. After graduating from Mercyhurst College, in 2002, she got a job at the University of Maryland at College Park. As an admissions counselor, she says, she liked standing up for applicants, especially underrepresented students, who had demonstrated their potential in unconventional ways.

Later, she oversaw the admissions committee, led a race-blind admissions study, and worked with campus TRIO programs, which help disadvantaged students prepare for college. Those experiences deepened her understanding of access, she says, and what it means to be an underdog in the college-admissions process.

Year after year, the big winners in that process are wealthy applicants, the ones who know all the rules of the game. Nearly 75 percent of students at the nation’s most selective colleges come from families in top income quartile, and just 3 percent come from the bottom one.

That disparity has many causes. One is that many low-income students lack knowledgeable guides like Ms. Reznik, who, after leaving Maryland, worked as a secondary-school counselor and an independent college counselor. Students who attend underserved high schools often don’t know how to prepare — or pay — for college, not to mention how or where to apply.

Avoiding Angst

Those are the problems the coalition’s founders say they want to confront. Its platform allows high-school students to start profiles as early as ninth grade, which, the thinking goes, will encourage them to plan for college, familiarize themselves with the process, and invite a cast of supporters to help them along the way.

“It’s a good thing — early exposure,” Ms. Reznik says. “This way, the college application isn’t this gigantic, scary thing you experience for the first time in your senior year.”

Some college counselors hate the idea. One started a petition calling the coalition’s application “unjustified, needlessly complex, and overly intrusive in the secondary-school world.” It was signed by 167 people.

Melissa A. Kotacka wasn’t one of them. Like many of those who work with high-school students, she has a nuanced opinion of the venture and its potential to engage students early on. “The thing about it that I appreciate is reaching kids before their senior year, giving them a chance to reflect and explore,” says Ms. Kotacka, a college counselor at Carolina Friends School, in Durham, N.C.

Still, Ms. Kotacka understands why so many counselors have expressed concerns about the new system. “There’s a lot of angst around this process, and the coalition brought a little bit more into it,” she says. “Certainly, teaching kids how to use it, that’s going to require time and resources, something that a lot of folks who are already stretched with their caseloads don’t have.” At her small school, she has only 35 or so seniors to advise; some college counselors have 10 times as many.

Coalition supporters have said they wanted an intuitive, easy-to-use application. Still, there’s a learning curve for almost any new product. At least one company has a free online course on “mastering” the new application. And it should surprise no one that some consultants are offering to help students cultivate their coalition application, for a fee.

‘Greater Access Is the Ideal’

Since the coalition was founded, its members have talked up access. Yet the group — led by private colleges with minuscule acceptance rates and public flagships that recruit nationally — also projects an air of exclusivity. Membership requirements restrict participation to colleges that meet specific criteria, such as a six-year graduate rate of at least 70 percent.

That may soon change, though. Last fall the coalition created a task force to evaluate its membership criteria, and how, or if, the group should include a broader array of institutions. Members will vote on the task force’s recommendations in September, Ms. Reznik says. “The organization as a whole has recognized that there are not enough options. A large group of schools that represents greater access is the ideal, especially when you think about geography and distance.”

So far the coalition has nearly 100 members, only about half of which plan to accept applications through the platform this fall. Maryland, one of three institutions that had announced plans to use the coalition’s application exclusively this fall, decided to hold off a year. Dozens of other colleges have also decided to sit out the first round.

Why? For logistical reasons, mainly, Ms. Reznik says: “Some members need more time to get their institutional technology needs aligned with the application.” She expects that all members will start using the system in the 2017-18 admissions cycle.

For now, Ms. Reznik plans to spend a lot of her time talking up the application — and clearing up misconceptions. For months, there has been confusion about “the locker,” a feature that allows students to virtually store anything they find meaningful (such as notes, recommendations, and essay drafts) as they move through high school. The locker is not part of the student’s application, Ms. Reznik says, and users decide who, if anyone, may see its contents.

High and Low Tech

For better or worse, the application was designed to give students greater ownership of their applications, including the transmission of documents. Using other online platforms, high-school counselors now share transcripts and recommendation letters with colleges on behalf of each student. With the coalition’s application, schools will share a confidential set of those documents (“electronically sealed”) with students, who then must submit them to colleges.

That change has perplexed some high-school counselors. “A lot of us are a little bit concerned that the coalition puts documents in the control of the students,” says Ralph Figueroa, dean of the college-guidance team at the Albuquerque Academy. “For the population they purport to be targeting — those who need more help — making them responsible for more of the process seems questionable.”

Ms. Reznik sees it differently. In a world of beleaguered counselors with large caseloads, she says, empowering students makes sense. “If you don’t put the right information right into the hands of the student, they might not get it.” (The coalition’s application also allows students to request application-fee waivers without a counselor’s permission.)

In the end, though, the coalition’s application can’t compel any college to admit any underrepresented student who ends up using it. Attracting more applicants is one thing; admitting them is another. Increasing the representation isn’t only a matter of increasing the supply of contenders.

As one enrollment official observes, highly selective colleges unintentionally skew the odds against disadvantaged applicants through “a reliance on traditional means of evaluating students coming out of high school, and our own belief about what will make a student successful.”

Moreover, even the spiffiest electronic platform, with a slew of well-meaning technological innovations, probably won’t help students who lack meaningful low-tech support from parents, counselors, or teachers. Ms. Reznik acknowledges as much. “A trusted adviser is absolutely the best resource a student could have in creating pathways to college,” she says. “This is going to need human power behind it.”

A Gauge of Effectiveness

To that end, Ms. Reznik has written, the coalition is identifying 500 high schools that lack strong college-preparation resources. It plans to send representatives from member institutions to lead workshops, on applying to college and the value of a degree, at those schools.

The coalition has also received an initial grant from the Spencer Foundation, Ms. Reznik says. The purpose: to enlist researchers who can help the group assess its effectiveness in increasing the number of low-income and first-generation students who apply and enroll over time.

Another way to gauge the coalition’s impact may be to ask what its members are doing differently as a result of the collaboration. Traveling together, for one thing, says James G. Nondorf, vice president for enrollment and student advancement at the University of Chicago. At a roundtable discussion in Washington on Tuesday, Mr. Nondorf described a recent trip for high-school outreach he had taken with his counterparts from a mix of public universities and small, liberal-arts colleges belonging to the coalition.

“We’re sharing more, we’re learning from each other, and that has real value,” he said. “And for students and parents, who were only thinking about one end of the higher-education spectrum, it’s enlightening to hear from different kinds of colleges all together.”

Still, skepticism about the group seems unlikely to abate anytime soon. Although Mr. Figueroa, a former admissions officer, thinks the coalition has hit upon important problems, he doesn’t think that its application is necessary. After all, there’s already the Common Application, used by more than 600 colleges, and the Universal College Application, which serves a much smaller number of institutions.

“The big question out there is: Why do we need this?” he says. “Nobody has come up with any good reasons.”

Ms. Reznik believes the group has done just that. She sees herself as the steward of an idea — finding new ways to help the underdog. And not just talking about it.

Eric Hoover writes about admissions trends, enrollment-management challenges, and the meaning of Animal House, among other issues. He’s on Twitter @erichoov, and his email address is eric.hoover@chronicle.com.