Common App’s Latest Innovations Guide Highlights New Partnership with the Mitchell Institute 
Each year, more than a million students apply to college via the Common App, an online college application platform that represents more than 1,100 institutions of higher education worldwide. Through a new partnership with the Common App, the Mitchell Institute is advancing its mission of ensuring that no Maine student is denied the opportunity to pursue a college education because of limited financial resources.
In early September, the Common App shared its Summer 2026 Innovations Guide, an annual report highlighting equity-focused efforts from its Next Chapter initiative to close the equity gap in students from low- and middle-income communities pursuing postsecondary opportunities. The latest Innovations Guide highlights the Mitchell Institute as one of three nationwide scholarship partners to the Common App, meaning that the Mitchell Scholarship application is now hosted directly on the Common App platform.
“This is another pathway for us to reach high school students,” Casey Near, Scholarship Director at the Mitchell Institute, expressed. “Our goal at the Mitchell Institute is that this partnership will make our scholarship more visible and accessible to Maine students, who may be more likely to attend college with the support of financial resources.”
“We are proud to partner with the Mitchell Institute to host their scholarship directly on Common App,” Jenny Rickard, CEO of Common App, said. “We know that affordability is a crucial factor in determining whether a student attends college. This partnership will bring higher visibility to the scholarship, and it gives the students using our platform more opportunities to fund their postsecondary journeys.”
Near explained that the majority of Maine’s higher education institutions are on the Common App, which made the Mitchell Institute an appealing scholarship partner candidate. After a few years of conversations and administrative work between the Common App and Mitchell Institute, the partnership officially launched in the 2025-2026 application season. Now, any student who marks in the Common App that they attend a Maine public high school is automatically alerted about the Mitchell Scholarship on the Common App platform.
“More than 80 percent of our recipients actually applied through the Common App,” Near said of the 2025-2026 Mitchell Scholarship application season. “We thought it would take a few years to get to that point, but there was very high traction with students applying through Common App, which was the hope.”
Near said students can now submit their already completed Common App, plus responses to a few additional questions, to the Mitchell Institute when applying for the scholarship, making the process more streamlined. Near noted that she has already heard feedback from previous Mitchell Institute scholarship applicants about the benefits of this partnership.
“When I told them about the shift to Common App, they were all so excited about it,” Near shared. “They remembered their own process applying and thought, ‘Gosh, that would have been so easy.’”
In the 2025-2026 application season, about 25 percent of the 5,800 Maine public high school students who matched with the Mitchell Institute in the Common App applied to the scholarship. In total, the Mitchell Institute received just over 1,600 complete applications in the 2025-2026 application season, with a rise in share from first-generation college students.
“We’re not trying to increase volume to deny more students but to ensure we are reaching the students whose aspirations and lives could benefit most from our community and resources,” Near said.
The Common App for the 2026-2027 application season goes live on December 1, 2026.