How Admissions Competition Brought New Rivalries, Strange Bedfellows, and ‘An Us-Versus-Us Lawsuit’

Nobody wants to discuss the lawsuit looming over college admissions. Except for Jim Wolfston, the guy who started it.

Wolfston, founder and chief executive officer of a technology company called CollegeNET, has the tongue of a competitor. If he thinks rivals aren’t playing fair, he says, “I’m going to go after them.” And he has.

Currently, Wolfston is going after a cornerstone of the admissions process. Four years ago, CollegeNET filed an antitrust lawsuit against the Common Application, the nonprofit membership organization that runs an online admissions form used by more than 750 colleges worldwide.

The lawsuit, still wending its way through the courts, has caused heartburn and hurt feelings in the close-knit admissions field. That’s because the saga involves a third player. A new consortium — the Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success — is pushing an alternative application. And as it turns out, that consortium hired CollegeNET to build its system.

Yes, that’s right. The same company that’s suing the sponsor of one admissions form is powering a competing group’s admissions form. About 100 colleges belong to both groups. Oh, it’s awkward.

Transmitting millions of applications to colleges each year is a big business. Yet this isn’t your typical corporate clash. Admissions officials often describe themselves as colleagues with a shared mission. Now they’re part of a story about branding and disruption, market dominance, and tangled loyalties. There’s bad blood, too.

CollegeNET’s complaint claims that the Common Application used unfair tactics to stomp competitors and monopolize the market. It also claims that participating colleges (though not named as defendants) colluded to limit spending on application-processing services, harming other companies as well as applicants. How? By homogenizing the application process and causing “application churn,” in which students apply to more and more colleges.

Soon things could get stranger. In a recent legal filing, the Common Application’s lawyers argue that if the litigation continues, it would saddle member colleges with “substantial discovery burdens.” The lawsuit, they suggest, threatens to “disrupt the college application process for hundreds of colleges and millions of students.”

Maybe that’s far-fetched, a bit of lawyerly hyperbole. Even so, the case reminds higher education that colleges everywhere depend on vendors and membership organizations to deliver precious documents. Those entities serve paying clients, but they also have a will of their of their own — a will to grow and survive.

A good tale calls for a villain. In one version, he works in a Portland, Ore., office building, up on the 16th floor.

From his desk at CollegeNET’s headquarters, Jim Wolfston can see the Willamette River and the snowy crown of Mount Hood. You don’t get that view — or your very own horse farm, for that matter — by waiting around for good luck.

Wolfston founded his company, first called Universal Algorithms, in 1977. Back then he sold an automated classroom-scheduling program to colleges. Later, as the internet conquered the world, the company’s online application-processing service took off. As a “transparent vendor,” CollegeNET built each interface to blend in with a college’s existing website. So when an applicant clicked through to, say, Clemson University’s official admission application, she saw just that. Through the magic of outsourcing, a tech company three time zones away from the campus processed her application and payment, invisibly.

CollegeNET, current and former clients say, helped bring ease and efficiency to the brave new world of paperless admissions. Yet the online boom attracted competitors. Over time, a company known for innovation and customer service developed a reputation for something else, too — litigiousness. There are two kinds of businesses, some admissions insiders quip: those that have been sued by CollegeNET, and those that will be.

Since 2002, CollegeNET has filed lawsuits against many companies, including Google, the Princeton Review, Embark.com, ApplyYourself, the College Network, and ApplicationsOnline, which built the Common Application’s first web-based system. Some of those lawsuits led to financial settlements. One, filed against a company that had been selling students’ data without their consent, ended in a multimillion-dollar victory in court.

Eventually, Wolfston fixed his gaze on the Common Application. The organization, which once distributed only a paper form, started its online platform in 1998. Then it grew like mad. As a new century began, the group had about 200 members; it surpassed 400 in 2010 and 500 just three years later.

The Common App was no transparent vendor; its appeal was high visibility. As technology changed the way applicants shopped for colleges, the one-stop hub came to exemplify a “network effect,” its value increasing along with the number of users. As more colleges joined, its usefulness to students grew; the more students flocked to it, the greater its appeal to colleges.

The rewards of association included exposure, which means more applicants. And the club had cachet. The Common App accepted only colleges that conduct holistic reviews of applicants, requiring an essay and recommendation, as the most-selective institutions did. Over time, many colleges discontinued their own applications. After all, the Common App charged lower fees to colleges using its form exclusively.

That wasn’t fair, Wolfston thought. In May 2014, CollegeNET filed its antitrust suit, challenging several of the Common Application’s policies and practices. The company claimed it had lost 200 college customers because of the group’s “anticompetitive and exclusionary conduct.” As more colleges joined, the lawsuit said, the Common App was “poised to eliminate competition in the broader market within a few short years.”

Wolfston, a tech-head who quotes Stephen Hawking, has always been an outsider in the industry his company serves. He’s fond of the term “BS,” which he applies to colleges’ displays of vanity. In one speech, he described the relentless pursuit of higher rankings in U.S. News & World Report as “empty, vacuous … a very poor example to the next generation about self-aggrandizement.” In an email to The Chronicle years ago, he likened his company’s product to a Cadillac and the Common Application to a Yugo.

CollegeNET’s lawsuit echoed Wolfston’s colorful language. The Common App, it said, had turned a “once vibrant, diverse, and highly competitive market into a straitjacketed ward of uniformity.” Maybe he was a wronged businessman. Maybe he was a sore loser with good lawyers.

Whatever the case, Wolfston certainly had a keen sense of timing. He struck his competitor while it was down.

There’s never a good day to get sued. Yet the lawsuit hit the Common Application during an especially difficult crisis.

The rollout of the group’s new online system the previous summer proved disastrous. Malfunctions kept students from logging in and submitting applications. Essays got garbled. Recommendations disappeared. Some admissions offices couldn’t import all of their applications for weeks. Dozens of colleges pushed back their early-admission deadlines. Angry presidents chewed out their enrollment leaders.

Something had to give. By the next spring, the Common Application’s board had ousted the executive director, vowed to fix the system’s technical problems, and reconsidered the organization’s purpose. The board was weighing a longstanding question: How universal should its membership become?

An answer came that fall: Colleges that didn’t require an admissions essay or recommendation, the group announced, would be allowed to join. The new policy expanded the roster of potential members — more large public universities, more not-so-selective colleges. It also expanded the organization’s potential for revenue growth, not that anyone said that aloud. Widening the tent, the group’s interim leader told The Chronicle, would reduce barriers, enabling students to apply to an even broader array of institutions through the same portal. “Holistic” was out; “access” was in.

The A-word appeared — once, twice, four times — in a news release announcing the hiring of Jenny Rickard, the Common Application’s new executive director, in 2016. For her, though, access wasn’t just a slogan.

Rickard still carried the memory of her first recruitment trip, 27 years earlier. An admissions officer at Swarthmore College at the time, she flew to the Southwest, where a single day in Tucson revealed stark disparities. She visited a brand-new school in the suburbs. A cozy independent school with 25 seniors. And a downtown public school with metal detectors, armed security guards, and a harried counselor who advised 300 students, not one of whom showed up to hear about Swarthmore.

As Rickard climbed the admissions ladder, she sought to change a process that has, she says, privileged the privileged. As the top enrollment official at the University of Puget Sound, she led the switch to a test-optional admissions policy, reduced the role of ACT and SAT scores in merit scholarships, and expanded recruitment of low-income and first-generation students.

Unlike many admissions officials, Rickard had spent quality time outside the higher-ed bubble. She had worked on Wall Street, at J.P. Morgan & Co., and been vice president for higher-education strategy at PeopleSoft, an education-technology company. That mix of admissions, business, and tech experience made her an especially qualified candidate to lead an organization with global reach. Colleagues have described her as attentive, focused, and, as one put it, “quietly competitive.” And she wasn’t afraid of Wolfston, who, it was widely believed, wanted to bury her organization.

After taking the Common Application’s helm, Rickard drew praise from deans who had publicly slammed the group months earlier. Soon after she arrived, the organization unveiled several well-received innovations, such as a partnership with Strive for College, an organization that would provide free virtual mentoring to thousands of Common App users who qualified for fee waivers. Eventually the Common App got its credibility back, and then some.

Yet the landscape was changing. The admissions profession, some people said, had a new bad guy.

Amid the chaos of 2014, a thoughtful enrollment official shared a prediction with The Chronicle: A group of elite colleges, frustrated by the Common App’s glitches and worried about its unbridled growth, would join forces to build “their own ‘retro Common App’ with the panache of the original.” As it turned out, he was right.

For months, admissions leaders at a handful of highly selective institutions had quietly planned to start a new membership organization. Its application would, they hoped, help students prepare for college, expose them to institutions that give substantial aid, and maybe give them new ways to show their potential. Also, the platform would grant members more freedom to customize, something the Common Application’s policies had long worked against.

Before the fledgling group could unveil plans for the new application, however, it had to choose a vendor to build it. Wolfston’s company emerged as a strong contender.

CollegeNET’s lawsuit was no secret. It bothered some of the new consortium’s founding members whose colleges also belonged to the Common Application, according to two participants in early discussions of the group’s plans. In the end, they said, the company’s strong reputation outweighed concerns about the litigation. Wolfston’s company won the contract.

“Coming off a year when the Common App failed spectacularly,” one admissions dean recalls, “we felt like we needed to go with a vendor with a track record of success.”

First known just as “the Coalition,” the group later chose three words to convey its mission. It led with a familiar one — access.

The Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success announced its intentions at a national admissions conference in the fall of 2015, to a room packed with skeptics. The world didn’t need another application system, they complained, the admissions process was already complicated enough. And the membership requirements, they said, made the new group far too exclusive.

At first, two of the Coalition’s supporters recall, some members had wanted to invite only private colleges that met the full financial need of accepted students. Later the group decided to seek support from a more diverse array of institutions, including public flagships. An early planning document obtained by The Chronicle said reaching out to “a broader mix of schools will be critical in supporting our messaging and avoid[ing] any appearance of elitism.”

As it gained momentum, the Coalition grappled with membership requirements, just as the Common App had done. First, only colleges with a six-year graduation rate of at least 70 percent could join the Coalition, factoring out many institutions enrolling large numbers of low-income students.

Then, in 2016, the group expanded its terms of eligibility. After that, a graduation rate of at least 60 percent was among the “minimum qualifying criteria,” and a graduation rate of at least 70 percent was listed under “membership eligibility.” A college that graduated fewer than 70 percent of students could still become eligible for membership if it met other benchmarks for access and affordability.

In short, the new rules allowed for greater flexibility, permitting colleges to join if they met the standards in just two of three categories (access, affordability, success). The changes have allowed the Coalition to expand its geographic diversity. The changes have also expanded CollegeNET’s potential for revenue growth. The company would receive $3.75, plus 3 percent of the application fee, for each application it processed.

From the start, the Coalition’s founders insisted that they did not want to replace the Common App or become its döppelganger. “The desire is to give some sort of definition to the group,” Jeremiah Quinlan, Yale’s dean of undergraduate admissions, told The Chronicle. Definition, some members believed, was what the Common App had lost, by growing so big, by ditching its commitment to holistic review.

Still, to put itself in a position to succeed, to reap the benefits of network effects, the exclusive club had to grow. It had to become more … common.

And here they are, at the end of another admissions cycle. Forty-eight months after the lawsuit was filed, CollegeNET, the Common Application, and the Coalition remain uncomfortably entwined, and they might stay that way for a while.

It could have ended in 2015, when a U.S. District Court judge dismissed CollegeNET’s complaint, having found no “sufficient factual allegations of harm to either group of consumers.” As for the proliferation of applications that the Common Application had enabled, the judge found it “equally probable that the ‘application churn’ is precisely what colleges and applicants desire — a system that facilitates increased applications in an efficient way.”

CollegeNET appealed that ruling, which the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed late last year. Then the Common Application filed its own appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. In mid-May the court declined to hear the case, sending it back to the U.S. District Court, in Portland, Ore. Eventually that court will either dismiss the case or let a trial go forward.

Some policies that CollegeNET is challenging have changed since the lawsuit was filed. The Common Application no longer charges lower rates to colleges that use its application exclusively, for instance. Yet the “equal treatment” policy remains: It requires member colleges to promote all application options equally, charging the same fee for each one. That, CollegeNET argues, unfairly ties a college’s hands.

In a recent email to members, Rickard, the Common App’s president and chief executive, described the company’s claims as frivolous: “We believe strongly … that CollegeNET’s lawsuit is intended solely to advance its own economic well-being.” In a written statement to The Chronicle, Rickard says: “It’s certainly unfortunate when a lawsuit is used to try and avoid the normal give and take of competition.” Although she declines to say how the litigation has affected the Common App, she recently told The Daily Pennsylvanian that the organization had spent “several million dollars” defending itself.

Wolfston rejects the prevalent narrative in which his mean ol’ for-profit company is bullying a noble nonprofit group. “That’s BS,” he says. “There’s this vestigial mentality that for-profit equals ‘bad.’ " He says he has expressed a willingness to settle the case, a claim that Rickard and the organization’s lawyer decline to comment on.

And Wolfston rebuffs what he describes as the Common Application’s attempts to conflate his company with the Coalition. “The Coalition is not responsible for the litigation,” he says. “They’ve got nothing to do with it.”

The first part of that statement is true; the second is debatable. Yes, CollegeNET filed its lawsuit months before the Coalition was formed; no, the Coalition isn’t suing anyone.

But it did choose CollegeNET as a bedfellow, a move that still bothers some admissions officials. “To have one partner work with a vendor that’s suing another partner,” says the vice president for enrollment at a public university that belongs to the Coalition, “that doesn’t sit well with people.”

An admissions dean at a prominent college accepting both applications thinks of it as absurd: His institution pays thousands of dollars a year to both the plaintiff and the defendant in a costly antitrust case. “It’s an us-versus-us lawsuit,” he says.

That’s one way to look at it. Here’s another: Plenty of the Common Application’s member colleges that don’t belong to the Coalition do pay CollegeNET for some other service. And Annie Reznik, the Coalition’s executive director, offers a reminder about her group’s diversity. “Our membership,” she says, “has to make decisions on the part of the entire membership, some of whom are not, and have never been, part of the Common Application.”

Still, the most prominent figures in this escalating competition do, in fact, wear two hats. Some of the Coalition’s champions have been eagerly recruiting new members even as their own colleges receive tens of thousands of applications a year through the Common App. Is that weird?

In January, James G. Nondorf, vice president for enrollment at the University of Chicago, sent an email to eligible colleges describing the Coalition’s progress. “At the risk of becoming a ‘nudge,’ " he wrote, “I wanted to reach out to you one more time about the Coalition!”

In the email, Nondorf reported that about two-fifths of members saw their Coalition volume double this year, and that a fifth of applications were from students who qualify for a fee waiver. He mentioned “potential on the horizon,” in the form of more than 20,000 high-school juniors who had already created accounts. He invited the email’s recipients to schedule a chat or a demo: “I hope you will consider signing on!!”

Now in its second go-round, the new application was used by nearly 140,000 seniors during the 2017-18 admissions cycle, up from 40,000 a year ago. Those students filed just under 250,000 applications to participating colleges. Yet many of those institutions have received relatively few apps through the Coalition portal. A handful of private colleges that have used the system for two years report that it accounted for 1 to 3 percent of their applications this year.

The Common Application’s footprint is much bigger. As of early May, well over one million applicants had submitted a total of five million applications to member colleges. (The Common App says it charges about $4 per application, on average.)

At Minnetonka High School, in Minnesota, 823 seniors in this cycle filed a total of 3,600 applications. Fewer than 100 were transmitted through the Coalition’s platform. Nearly all of those were sent to the University of Florida, the University of Maryland at College Park, and the University of Washington, each of which uses the Coalition’s application exclusively. So far those institutions have accounted for much of the group’s total application volume (nearly half this year).

“Right now, a stumbling block for the Coalition is that it’s access with a small ‘a,’ " says Phil Trout, a college counselor at Minnetonka. “Students can’t use it to apply to that many colleges, especially if you’re west of the Mississippi.”

Trout applauds the Coalition’s goals but questions whether an online portal can make elite institutions any more accessible to, say, an applicant growing up on a farm in western Minnesota, who has little or no college guidance. “At the end of the day,” he says, “it’s just an application.”

That leads to an obvious question: Why can’t an application be just an application, a vehicle for transmitting data, a product like any other? Must a mere form signify anything at all?

Perhaps the answer lies in the duality of the admissions ritual, in which colleges serve their own institutional wants and needs, and, to varying degrees, the public good as well. Many admissions leaders care about the profession’s loftiest ideals, such as enrolling more underserved students; college officials who don’t really care about all that at least know it sounds good to say they do. So, whoever you are, an application that proclaims altruistic goals has built-in appeal, doesn’t it?

A prospective student’s fate is shaped by what happens well before he or she ever files an application. Recently leaders of the Coalition and the Common Application have helped draw attention to that fact. They have talked up the importance of providing low-income and first-generation students with some form of guidance — and not just information — early on. And both organizations are doing that (or planning to) in various ways.

The catch is that access happens only when a college admits a student and makes enrolling affordable. The niftiest applications in the world can’t guarantee an acceptance or a generous aid package. As one college-access expert told The Chronicle a while back: “It’s not about the tools or what an app asks for. It’s about admissions offices creating incentives for their institutions to enroll these students.” And that’s the bottom line.

Love it or hate it, the Coalition’s mere existence proves that Jim Wolfston was wrong about something. CollegeNET’s initial complaint said that the Common Application was poised to “eliminate competition.” Yet just four years later, the Common App has an ambitious competitor, born of inspiration and frustration. And Wolfston’s company has already benefited as a result. Competition is alive and well.

That’s welcome news, says Nancy Griesemer, an independent college counselor in Virginia who has written extensively about the Common App and its emergent rival. “They’re spurring each other on to do a better job,” she says. “Competition is good for the industry.”

Evidence of that spurring on is easy to spot. For instance, one of the Coalition’s major selling points is that students can create an account as early as ninth grade. Recently the Common Application started allowing students to create an account at any time and roll it over the following year.

The Coalition app features a virtual “locker” where students can store documents (essays, photos, videos) that they might later upload into their applications. For this past cycle, the Common Application added Google Drive integration, allowing users to do the same thing.

Users of both applications can invite advisers from community-based organizations to view their in-progress applications. They can also get college-planning content (the Common App’s robust trove includes information that’s been translated into Spanish).

In short, the competing applications are strikingly similar, in a Coke-and-Pepsi kind of way. Sure, each of the two platforms has a distinct look and feel. They allow colleges varying levels of control over content and give applicants more or less freedom to format their personal statements and self-report their grades. And, yes, a few colleges have invited students to send nontraditional elements, such as video, in lieu of essays, through the Coalition app. But there’s nothing stopping a college from inviting applicants to do the same via the Common App.

“There have been a lot of marginal changes around the edges,” Griesemer says of the Coalition’s platform, which some supporters have billed as a tool for redefining the act of applying to college. “But is it revolutionary? I’m not seeing much that’s revolutionary.”

That could change, of course. Maybe one day the two platforms will contrast meaningfully. One or both might allow member colleges to embrace alternative measures of applicants’ talents and potential.

For now, the Common App and the Coalition will keep competing, looking to attract more and more students. And, for a while longer, they will remain tethered to litigation that some observers don’t think will ever end.

Nobody’s betting that the Common App will agree to settle. And nobody expects CollegeNET to pull the plug on the case.

“If the legal issues here didn’t matter,” Wolfston says, he wouldn’t have kept the lawsuit going — or filed it in the first place. In which case, he figures, “life would be a lot simpler for everyone involved.” Everyone involved would agree.

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.