By JACQUI NEBER News & Features Editor
The University has joined the Coalition for Access, Affordability and Success, which is dedicated to improving the often complicated college admissions process, along with 80 other public and private colleges and universities. The program will launch for all high school students in 2016.
The goal of this coalition is to make the college application process more engaging and accessible to students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
According to its website, the coalition was formed after research demonstrated that students from disadvantaged backgrounds have a more negative experience with the admissions process than their more affluent peers. An example of what the program aims to ameliorate is to make students more aware of the financial aid that they qualify for.
Vice Provost for Admissions and Financial Aid David Phillips explained that the goals of the coalition align with Hopkins’ institutional goals, those of creating more diversity and a more financially diverse campus.
“These are goals that we care about at Johns Hopkins,” Phillips said. “Over the past five years, we’ve increased financial aid grants by 38 percent, continued to build programs like Baltimore Scholars and endeavored to ensure that economic circumstances don’t hold back superb students for whom Johns Hopkins is the right choice.”
Phillips emphasized that the coalition is made up of colleges and universities who share in Hopkins’ desire to make the college admissions process more accessible to all students. The process is often said to discriminate against disadvantaged minorities.
“The coalition represents an important next step,” Phillips said. “As a partnership of like-minded colleges and universities, we’re creating tools that the best and most talented students — particularly those from lower income families, first-generation students and those with fewer resources — can use to find, apply to and enroll at the schools that are right for them.”
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