Georgetown announced Thursday that the university is launching a three-year pilot program that will allow students to apply to Georgetown via the Common Application. The program will start in the 2026-2027 admissions cycle, ending Georgetown’s long-held policy of only offering a Georgetown-specific platform for applications. The Georgetown-specific application will also still be available to applicants during the pilot program.
Georgetown’s updated admissions practices are “aimed at maintaining the important role of higher education in fostering social mobility and maintaining a lifelong pipeline to learning, scholarship and service,” a university spokesperson wrote to the Voice.
The Common Application is an online system that compiles applications to over 1,000 higher education institutions on one website. Using the Common App, students can reuse their extracurricular information and recommendation letters for each school and have all of their supplemental essays in one place.
Georgetown also stated Thursday the university will continue to consider Pell Grant eligibility as part of its admissions process in the future, a practice that the university implemented in 2024. Pell Grants are a type of financial aid provided by the federal government to students displaying “exceptional financial need.”
Fifteen percent of the Class of 2028, admitted in the 2023-2024 cycle, is made up of Pell-eligible students—the largest percentage in over a decade.
Georgetown is one of many universities pivoting after the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action in 2023, gutting race-conscious admissions. Since, colleges nationwide have seen massive drops in the racial diversity of admitted students. Given the links between socioeconomic status and race in the U.S., advocates argue that class-conscious admissions could serve as a proxy for affirmative action and also improve socioeconomic diversity at top universities. However, Georgetown’s Center for Education and the Workforce has published data suggesting it will still not make up for the loss of racial diversity post-affirmative action.
The Voice spoke to students from first-generation and low-income (FGLI) or rural backgrounds about how they believe the move to the Common App and considering Pell-eligibility will impact the experiences of prospective students. While some are excited for the university to be added to the Common App, others expressed frustration with the decision.
Dominic Wright (CAS ’28), who identifies as an FGLI student, said that when he was applying to colleges, Georgetown was initially not even on his list because it wasn’t on the Common App.
“My school heavily emphasized doing the Common App,” Wright said. “When I looked up schools, I did see Georgetown, but saw that it wasn’t on the Common App. And from before January, I completely ruled out the option of Georgetown because it wasn’t on the Common App.”
Before the announcement, Georgetown was the only one of its peer schools not on the Common App. Georgetown’s peer schools are schools chosen by Georgetown to be compared to on the Integrated Postsecondary Data System, a national survey of most colleges and universities. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is the only other private top 25 university with its own application portal.
Keatyn Wede (CAS ’27) is from rural South Dakota. When she was applying to colleges, she was one of the only people she knew who was applying to out-of-state schools. Her high school counselor was unfamiliar with how the Common App worked, but having a consolidated platform to submit recommendations or essays was helpful.
“Everyone around me that I knew was applying through the [South Dakota State University] or [University of South Dakota] website, and no one was using the Common App,” Wede said.
She explained that when she was applying to Georgetown, her guidance counselor called the admissions office to ask how she should submit certain documents, as getting a hang of the separate application in addition to the Common App made the process more complicated.
“She actually ended up calling the admissions office and being like, ‘Hey, did you get this? I’m really confused,’” Wede said. “She’s an incredible person, a really good woman who wanted to help me out, but just genuinely didn’t know what was going on, because no one had really applied to places like these before.”
Students also mentioned that the fee waiver process for Georgetown’s application was different than it was on the Common Application, meaning that they often couldn’t figure out how to receive a fee waiver and just ended up paying the full price of application.
Evan Cornell (CAS ’27), vice president of the Georgetown Association of Small Town and Rural Students (GU STARS), is from a small, semi-rural town in Florida. He said that because the Common App put fee waivers in a specific place on each application, he could easily apply for those, but Georgetown’s was different.
“I didn’t apply or get a fee waiver for my Georgetown application, even though it is a thing, I didn’t know about it,” he said. “But all of the Common App applications, I knew about that, so I was able to apply for those and get them if I needed them. Georgetown’s wasn’t accessible, or as easily accessible.”
Cornell hopes that joining the Common App will make it easier for students to access fee waivers, encouraging low-income students to apply.
Wede also thinks that joining the Common App may help more rural students find Georgetown, as much of her college research was done by scrolling through schools on the Common App’s search function.
“I literally just scrolled through the list and was like, ‘Oh, I think I want to be on the East Coast. I think I want to be in a bigger city,’” Wede explained. “I think even Georgetown being on that list is going to get more people to apply who might not have in the first place.”
1.2 million unique applicants use the Common App every year, and a third of those applicants would be the first in their family to attend college.
However, students emphasized that one of the biggest assets of Georgetown’s separate application is that it helps recruit students with a sincere interest in Georgetown as an institution.
Lisa Kennedy (CAS ’25) is the 2024-2025 student board co-president of the Georgetown Scholars Program (GSP), Georgetown’s community for FGLI students. Kennedy, who speaks on her own behalf and not for GSP, enjoyed filling out the Georgetown application because it seemed much more personal than what was offered by other schools. Since she wasn’t able to see Georgetown in person, the application gave her a better idea of what life on the Hilltop might be like.
“I found that it made me learn a lot more about Georgetown compared to the other schools. I wasn’t able to visit any of the schools that I applied to prior to applying and then making my decision—because one, it was COVID, and also two, coming from a low-income background, that just wasn’t feasible to us,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy also appreciated that every Georgetown applicant is offered an alumni interview, which she said provides insights to FGLI students that other universities don’t.
“Having that alumni interview component, getting to talk to someone who went to the school was really great for me and getting exposed to what it meant to go to Georgetown,” she said. “I got to disclose to my interviewer that my parents never went to college and I don’t really know what I’m doing, and he was super helpful.”
When students open a Georgetown application, the university is able to coordinate interviews with them even before they’ve submitted their application, helping the university organize interviews for all applicants. However, with the application now being available on the Common App as well, Kennedy fears that alumni interviews may become a thing of the past, especially with the increased number of applications Georgetown will likely receive. The university has not yet released any information on whether the school will continue to offer interviews to all applicants.
Research from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that when colleges first join the Common App, they see an increase in applications by 10%. Over the subsequent decade, applications increase on average by 25%. Some students worried about how an increased number of applicants to Georgetown might impact who gets admitted.
“I do like the idea, but I also understand that it’s going to be a lot harder for students to be able to get in, because there will be more applicants,” Wright said.
Kennedy believes that joining the Common App may actually mean that the share of wealthy students applying to Georgetown will rise.
“I think there’s a misconception among a lot of people who have long been advocating for us to move to the Common App that more applications means we’re getting more applications from students from underrepresented backgrounds,” Kennedy said. “I feel like when we move to the Common App it’s going to be more of the people who can afford to just check a box and pay $80 to apply and recycle the same essay, and then they’re just going to go wherever the best school is that they get in.”
In the university press release, Interim Provost Soyica Diggs Colbert (CAS ’01) said that joining the Common App would “make Georgetown’s admissions process more accessible to students from a wide variety of backgrounds.”
However, Cornell doubts the university’s intentions behind the change. He feels that one of the chief motivations for joining the Common App is that “acceptance rates will go down, and rankings will go up.”
“Why now, is it just for rankings?” Cornell said. “In my heart of hearts, it doesn’t feel like it’s coming from a good place where we’re doing it for the students, for our future.”
Increased recruitment in rural and traditionally low-income communities could be a way to meaningfully reach students from underrepresented backgrounds, Cornell said. His Florida high school didn’t receive visits from schools like Georgetown, which he thinks may have been helpful.
“[Georgetown should be] investing some time in admissions officers or graduates who live in these areas to do outreach programs, so that when you go to Florida, you’re not just going to Miami and Tampa and Jacksonville,” Cornell said.
The university spokesperson told the Voice in December that Georgetown works with other universities to reach rural communities.
“In 2022, Georgetown founded a joint travel consortium with four other universities to reach talented students in small towns and rural communities,” the spokesperson said. “This consortium, which consists of Brown, Georgetown, Harvard, Howard and the United States Military Academy, travels together biannually to underrepresented regions.”
Beyond recruitment and acceptance letters, Kennedy also said that the university needs to make sure that students can afford Georgetown once they’re admitted.
“Georgetown’s financial aid doesn’t even compare to the institutions they’ll want to compete with,” she said. “Every year when I make calls to admitted students in GSP, there’s always a whole bunch that won’t even answer my call or will immediately stop me and be like, ‘I’ve already committed to a different school that gave me better financial aid.’”
According to the press release, Georgetown’s financial aid budget for the upcoming year sits at $285 million, making it the “largest-ever commitment to financial aid in the university’s history.”
Although Georgetown almost doubled the number of Pell-eligible students in the Class of 2028 compared to previous years, the proportion of Pell-eligible students is still low compared to that of peer universities. Twenty-four percent Columbia’s Class of 2028 is made up of Pell-eligible students, compared to 21% at the University of Pennsylavania and 24% at Johns Hopkins. In fact, of all the peer schools that have reported their share of Pell-eligible students in the Class of 2028, Georgetown’s share is the lowest.
With Georgetown considering Pell-eligibility in admissions, the university will likely continue admitting a greater number of Pell-eligible students. Kennedy said that demographic growth needs to be met with proportional funding growth, something that she said GSP struggled with this past year, though GSP is primarily donor-funded.
“There were a bunch of students admitted this year that qualify for GSP that were not brought into the GSP program because we had already expanded it so large beyond its means this year that we couldn’t accommodate any more students,” Kennedy said.
In Thursday’s press release, Georgetown also confirmed that some of its controversial admissions policies will not change, including requiring applicants to submit an ACT/SAT score and practicing a preference for legacy students.
Asher Maxwell (CAS ’26), a lead organizer with Hoyas Against Legacy Admissions, criticized the university’s continued reliance on legacy admissions.
“For Georgetown to get serious about protecting opportunity and access in admissions, it must begin by eliminating the many preferences given to wealthy students, and the best place to start is eliminating legacy preference,” Maxwell wrote to the Voice.
Without action on legacy, Maxwell argued that any additional changes to Georgetown’s admissions policies will be ineffectual.
“Two years after the affirmative action decision, Georgetown has announced two reforms that will be insufficient to stem the loss of opportunity for underrepresented and working-class students,” Maxwell added.
While students had mixed opinions on Georgetown’s addition to the Common App and the other admissions announcements, they all told the Voice that they want a Georgetown degree to be more accessible to students from all backgrounds.
Wede thinks that Georgetown gets a bad rep for being “super privileged.” She’s hopeful that these policies will lead Georgetown to admit more students from historically marginalized backgrounds, bringing the university closer to its mission.
“I think it would get us closer to being the equitable, socially just, Jesuit institution that we strive to be.”
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to reflect that the university first announced its consideration of Pell eligibility in 2024 and to clarify Kennedy’s position in GSP.
