An Empirical Analysis of the ApplyTexas Postsecondary Application

Since its writing into Texas state law, only one empirical study has been published which compares the relative ease or difficulty of ApplyTexas against other national-level postsecondary applications of which ApplyTexas competes with. Taylor’s (2019) cross-analysis of ApplyTexas versus the Common Application, Coalition for College Application, and Universal College Application was revealing, as ApplyTexas was longer (by word count) and more difficult to read (14.6th grade reading level) than the other applications in the study. This new study integrates several new metrics for evaluating the difficulty of postsecondary applications. To address emergent research suggesting Internet speed can affect students’ ability to access postsecondary education (Dettling et al., 2018), this study employs Sitechecker Pro’s page size tool (Sitechecker, 2021), which measures the byte size of a webpage, informing the website developer as to how quickly or slowly a webpage may load depending on the speed of an Internet user’s connection. Moreover, given the progress toward migrating the ApplyTexas application to Amazon Web Services to increase its technological capacity, this study evaluated the auto-save features of each application system to learn if technological safeguards are being written into application systems to save application progress in the event of a device shutdown, Internet outage, or user error. Applications were completed using a high-speed, 100mbps Wi-Fi connection. Regarding metrics related to how the application is written at the question- or fillable form-level, additional metrics were added to the current study to provide further insight as to how long or complicated the application may be for the average student. First, this study captures both the number of fillable forms required to create an application profile and the application itself, providing a measurement of how many questions or “blanks” a student needs to fill in order to complete the application. This study also evaluates the overall number of webpages required to complete the application, again providing a measure of how long the application is and how difficult it may be for a person with a low-speed Internet connection to load and complete each page of the application.