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Cherry Creek High School seniors Kiran Herz and Jaiden Hwang have spent hundreds of hours filling out college applications and writing admissions essays.
Hwang estimates he wrote 30 essays just over the summer. Herz, seeing the stress that fellow students face when applying to college, wanted to find a solution to make college admissions easier.
His research led to a 1997 Texas law that guarantees in-state students who graduate in the top 10% of their high school class receive automatic admission to every public state university. The two Colorado friends hope they can get voters to pass a similar law here during the November 2026 election.
“It’s so incredibly difficult to get into some of these universities,” Hwang said. “There’s so much ambiguity and stress involved.”
In proposing the ballot measure, the two teenagers could initiate a broader statewide discussion about how to get more students to college and alleviate admissions process stress.
National advocates for easier admissions say statewide initiatives take the guesswork out of applying to a university. They say these policies reduce stress, encourage students to stay in state, and help students who come from low-income families or would be the first in their family to attend college see higher education as an option.
The students’ proposal would ask voters to require state-funded universities guarantee admissions to students with a GPA in the top 10% of their high school’s graduating class. Eligible students would need to apply for admittance within two years of graduating. The proposal would limit the number of students admitted to 75% of the school’s freshman enrollment.
To get their proposal on the November 2026 ballot, the students need over 124,000 voter signatures by December. They want voters to know that the stress of applying to college can be unbearable, and they’ve seen peers decide against college altogether.
“The admissions process is incredibly more complicated than it needs to be,” said the Lumina Foundation’s Melanie Heath, who advocates for and has studied easier admissions policies nationally. “And we’ve seen a movement across many states to do some type of simplified admissions process.”
The Lumina Foundation is a nonprofit philanthropy that supports greater access to opportunities beyond high school. (Lumina is a Chalkbeat funder. See our funders here, and read our ethics policy here.)
Nationwide, about a dozen states have guaranteed admissions policies that set a bar at state universities. All students who meet that criteria are admitted. Guaranteed admissions are seen as a way to attract higher-achieving groups of students to apply to state schools.
Another dozen states have direct admissions policies, wherein state colleges notify high school seniors that they’ve been accepted without the students ever needing to apply. Direct admissions programs primarily help students who might not think college is for them.
So far, Colorado state leaders and higher education officials haven’t coalesced around a single strategy. Instead, universities have taken different approaches.
Metropolitan State University of Denver and the Colorado School of Mines have guaranteed admission for students from select school districts. CU Denver recently announced a new program for Denver Public Schools students.
Five Colorado colleges, including Colorado State University Pueblo and Adams State University, have direct admissions.
Colorado doesn’t have cascading admissions, which is when university systems notify students they’ve been accepted at other schools if they’re not admitted to their first choice.
“Maybe even more than the complexity, these policies take the stress out of applying,” Heath said.
In 2022, David Tandberg, during his first year as Adams State University’s president, asked school administrators to create a direct admissions system for San Luis Valley students.
The idea was new to Colorado, but not Tandberg, who previously worked at the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. There, he was involved in helping other states replicate Idaho’s pioneering Idaho Campus Choice, a statewide direct admissions program.
“We in the Valley have the lowest educational attainment rates in the state,” Tandberg said, referring to Alamosa and the San Luis Valley. “And for most students, if they have a high school diploma or GED, we admit them. So why not do direct admissions here?”
Heath said direct admissions policies don’t cost much, and Idaho spends about $30,000 a year sending out letters. The small investment has yielded a big return, she said, with an increase in enrollment by 4% to 8% at open-access institutions. The program has also kept about 8% to 15% more Idaho students in state.
Adams State officials found they only needed to invest time in creating the first direct admission program in the state. University officials drafted letters for families and students and created a system to share student information between school districts and the university.
“I’ve had parents and grandparents stop me in the street and say, ‘You have no idea how much that meant to our kid and to us,’” Tandberg said. “The real delta is with those students that check themselves out, that thought higher ed didn’t want them.”
Jason Gonzales is a reporter covering higher education and the Colorado legislature. Chalkbeat Colorado partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage. Contact Jason at jgonzales@chalkbeat.org.
