Get into College and Get Financial Aid Without Applying

Applying for college is daunting — and stressful. Over the past few years, direct admissions programs have started making the process easier by automatically admitting qualified students to colleges and universities before they even apply. Now, a new pilot initiative in Tennessee, with the help of the Making Caring Common (MCC) project, is going one step further by also letting directly admitted students know how much financial aid they could get. 

The TN Direct Admissions pilot kicks off this fall when 41,000 public high school students across Tennessee from the class of 2026 will receive a direct admissions letter with a list of in-state colleges and universities that have automatically accepted them from more than 50 participating institutions. About 20,000 of those students will also receive details about state financial aid and college-based merit aid available to them based on their grades, test scores, or other criteria. (They’ll still need to use the FAFSA for federal aid.) Students do not have to fill out applications. Instead, using a QR code, they just “claim” their spot at the school they are interested in attending, and administrators will contact them for next steps. 

According to a recent report by Brookings, students across the United States “enter the college application process on unequal footing — with various levels of financial, social, and cultural capital they can rely on to navigate it,” and students of color, those from low-income backgrounds, and first-generation students often face the biggest barriers. One quarter of students who start a college application never hit the submit button. 

The goal of the TN Direct Admissions pilot, the organizers say, is to make the process easier for families, but also signal to students that they are “college material” and that college can be affordable. Currently, about 15 states offer direct admissions, as do organizations like Niche and the Common App. Tennessee will be the first state to combine direct admissions with financial aid estimates. 

Trisha Ross Anderson, the college admission program director for Making Caring Common, says partnering on this project was a “natural fit” with the work MCC has been doing for years with their Turning the Tide Initiative, which focuses on promoting access and equity in the college admission process.

“Several years ago, Rick [Weissbourd] and I were talking with a former collaborator about the future of college admissions and what we saw as the most promising practices. Direct admissions came up repeatedly, but there were gaps in the literature; no one had yet studied the impact of combining direct admissions with information about financial aid,” she says. “And how helpful is it to get into college easily if you don’t think you can pay for it? There was also little known about how students experience direct admissions programs — how and why do these programs affect young people’s postsecondary decisions? We were connected to our (now) research and philanthropic partners who were just as eager to explore answers to these questions as we were.”

Ross Anderson says that MCC’s role in the Tennessee pilot will be primarily around gathering and then analyzing qualitative data, which will help them determine whether providing clear financial aid information alongside direct admissions increases the likelihood of college enrollment compared to receiving only direct admissions information, or no letter at all.

“MCC will be leading the qualitative aspect of this study,” she says. “We want to know how students experience direct admissions and early financial aid information and how they feel. What aspects of the program they liked and didn’t like, what student supports were most and least useful, and why and how this sort of information affects their decision-making about life after high school. We will survey thousands of students to answer these questions and will conduct in-depth interviews with students, their parents, and educators.”

She says they also have their sights set on the impact a program like this could have beyond just Tennessee.

“We also want to learn how successful aspects of this project may be replicated in other states and organizations,” she says. “We will conduct a series of interviews with administrators and educators across the state who are implementing and impacted by this intervention to understand what aspects of implementation are most useful, effective — and scalable.”