The Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success, a new group of over 80 universities nationwide including all eight members of the Ivy League, have announced that they plan to develop a new “Coalition App” as an alternative to the Common Application. The Coalition Application is intended to uproot the application system, which coalition members claim prioritizes students from privileged backgrounds.

Coalition, a free website, would have a set of tools available to students to help them plan their applications and collect information on universities without the help of a college advisor. According to a Sept. 28 Inside Higher Ed article, Coalition members believe that in recent years, the college application process has been dominated by college advisors, Scholastic Aptitude Test tutors and other professionals who are paid to groom high school students for many top-tier universities. When families can’t afford these specialists, the members argue, capable students have a disadvantage when it comes to applying to schools. Those students may not know about certain activities or pieces of information to include or exclude in their applications in order to get a leg up on the competition, members argue. The Coalition, members argue, would help students make the most of the information available to them.

As of press time, the University has not yet adopted the Coalition or made any formal statement on it. At the Oct. 9 faculty meeting, Senior Vice President for Students and Enrollment Andrew Flagel commented that he thought the Coalition would cause similar problems to the Common App, namely that wealthier students could hire professionals to help them take advantage of the tools on the new website. “There’s really no interface designed for schools that don’t have large college counseling centers, … let alone for schools that don’t know how to use the Common App,” he argued. “You can only imagine the type of prep school industry that is going to grow up around this system.”

The Coalition website was scheduled to be launched in January, though that date has now been pushed back to May 2016, according to Flagel.

—Abby Patkin