This Year's College Common Application Website Is A Total Disaster
In my updating of Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas, his satirical handbook of “Tradition, Order, and Sound Conventions,” I have added the following entry:
private sector: Always efficient, always competitive. Cure for all governmental ails.
Members of Congress doing Monday-morning quarterbacking on healthcare.gov have frequently claimed that such a screw-up could never happen in the private sector. In fact, it happens all the time. Remember Microsoft’s Kin phone? The Apple III? Or the Edsel?
There’s now an even closer comparison available: the college Common Application. Created to facilitate reusing data and admissions materials across multiple college applications, this year’s Common Application, which services 517 colleges and universities, has become a technological fiasco thanks to the interaction of two famously inefficient parts of the (mostly) private sector: programming contractors and educational administration. They came together in the form of the nonprofit membership association Common Application Inc. (I will use “Common App” below to refer to the company.)
On Aug. 1, this year’s upgraded Common Application software rolled out, consisting of a major overhaul to the application process that was, according to Common App senior director of policy Scott Anderson, “a completely new system built from the ground up.” It immediately crashed.
Read more:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2013/11/common_app_problems_a_meltdown_worthy_of_healthcare_gov.html
