Georgetown has required its own, entirely separate application for as long as most current applicants' families can remember -- one of the very few genuinely selective schools, alongside MIT, that never used the Common App. That's changing, starting with the cycle now underway.

What's actually happening

Georgetown announced in March 2025 that it will join the Common Application on a three-year pilot, starting August 2026, for students applying to enter in fall 2027 (the Class of 2031). Georgetown's own application portal opened as usual on June 18, 2026, and the Common App option became available on August 1, 2026 -- so for this cycle, applicants can genuinely choose either path.

This is an addition, not a replacement. Georgetown's traditional standalone application isn't going away -- it continues to run in parallel with the Common App option throughout this three-year trial.

Why Georgetown is doing this

The stated reasoning is about access, not admissions strategy. Interim provost Soyica Diggs Colbert said the move is meant to ensure "Georgetown's applicant pool contains a rich set of backgrounds and life experiences" -- reflecting a widely held view that requiring a fully separate application, on top of whatever else a student is already juggling through the Common App for other schools, functioned as a real extra barrier, particularly for students with fewer resources to manage multiple distinct application systems.

What isn't changing

Dean of Admissions Charles Deacon was explicit that this is a platform change, not a standards change: "Our rigorous admissions process will continue to be as personalized and holistic as possible." Don't read "joining the Common App" as any signal that Georgetown got less selective or less rigorous in how it evaluates applicants.

Georgetown also remains test-required, not test-optional -- consistent with its long-standing position, covered in our piece on the test-optional/test-blind landscape. In the same broader admissions update, Georgetown is also introducing SAT/ACT superscoring for the first time starting this cycle, letting applicants submit their best score from each section across multiple sittings rather than a single test date's composite -- a real, separate change worth factoring into your own testing strategy if Georgetown is on your list; see our SAT vs. ACT breakdown for how superscoring interacts with test planning generally.

Why this matters beyond Georgetown itself

Georgetown was genuinely one of the last major holdouts -- more than 1,100 colleges and universities already use the Common App, including every one of Georgetown's usual peer institutions except MIT. With this move, MIT becomes essentially the last major highly selective school still running a fully separate application system on its own. It's also part of a broader current wave of admissions-process changes happening across elite schools right now -- alongside the wave of schools dropping supplemental essays and the ongoing application-volume surge that tends to follow when a school lowers the friction to apply. Whether Georgetown sees a similar jump in application volume once this pilot is fully underway is worth watching -- it's exactly the kind of accessibility change that has driven measurable application increases at other schools recently.

What this means for you

  • If you're applying to Georgetown for fall 2027 entry or later, you now have a real choice between the Common App and Georgetown's own portal -- since this is a new pilot, check Georgetown's admissions site directly each cycle for the current specifics rather than assuming last year's process still applies exactly.
  • Don't mistake platform access for lowered standards. Georgetown's own dean was explicit that the evaluation process itself hasn't changed.
  • If Georgetown is one of several schools on your list, it now fits into the same Common App workflow as the rest, rather than requiring you to build an entirely separate application from scratch -- worth factoring into how you sequence and pace your overall application timeline.
  • Remember Georgetown still requires test scores, and can now superscore them -- plan your testing approach for Georgetown specifically with that in mind.

Sources