Georgetown’s slow, confusing application platform has become a joke for admitted students—something to gripe about and bond over once they get to campus. But to Keatyn Wede (CAS ’27), it never seemed that funny.
When Wede came to visit as a prospective student during Georgetown Admissions Ambassador Program Weekend, a university speaker joked about the inconvenience of Georgetown’s application website.
“I remember everyone in the room was laughing, but I was like, ‘It’s really not that funny.’ It was so awful; you guys are giggling, but I didn’t know what was going on,” Wede said.
Wede is from a small town in South Dakota. In her graduating class of about 180 students, only three left the state for college, she said. Coming from a high school that didn’t have the resources or staff to support students applying to selective universities, Wede felt underprepared for her college research and application process. Georgetown’s application platform only made this worse.
Nationally, rural students are less likely than their urban and suburban peers to go to college at all. Some of these students said that Georgetown’s separate application platform—along with other aspects of Georgetown’s application process like recommendation letters and a lack of university outreach—makes admissions even more inaccessible.
“I feel like it’s so pretentious to not be on the Common App,” Wede said. “On the record, Georgetown admissions: I think you’re pretentious.”
The Common App is a shared application platform used by over 1,000 colleges and universities. It offers one platform to upload essays, request letters of recommendation from teachers and counselors, input demographic information, and list extracurriculars or work experience.
Of U.S. News and World Report’s top 50 universities, Georgetown and MIT are the only private universities not on the Common App. Instead, they require students to provide all their information in an entirely separate, university-specific application.
Having a separate platform complicates the application process for both students and school counselors. Rural high schools are often underfunded and understaffed, leaving counselors with a high caseload of students and without the support, capacity, or training to provide individualized help with college applications. Many of these counselors are not very familiar with the process for students applying to college, especially to out-of-state or selective private universities.
“My guidance counselor had no experience even with the Common App, so when I first sent her that, she was confused. But then I sent her the Georgetown one, and she was more confused,” Wede said.
Students also criticized the fact that applicants have to pay Georgetown’s application fee when they first open an account, before they’ve filled out or submitted their full application. The fee is $75, unless a student qualifies for a waiver. Georgetown’s admissions website encourages applicants to open an account “as soon as possible.”
“Having to pay beforehand too, before I even knew if this is a place I fully wanted to apply to and commit to, was very nerve-wracking,” Mara Lewis (CAS ’27), who is from a town of 2,600 in Pennsylvania, said.
Wede said that figuring out Georgetown’s separate application, including the fee to open an application, was confusing, especially when compared to the Common App, which doesn’t require a fee to open an account.
“In all of the education I did trying to figure out how to apply to colleges, the Common App made that so much easier, because it was universalized,” Wede said. “Once I figured out this one platform, I could figure it out for so many different schools.”
Despite student complaints, university officials have maintained that Georgetown’s separate application is an asset because it makes the application process more personal and encourages students to research…
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