Expert Admissions in the News

BY BARI MELTZER NORMAN
Special to The Miami Herald

Gone are the days when students ran to the mailbox to look for the proverbial thick envelope. In the age of the Internet, high school seniors' hearts race as they go online to learn if they were admitted to college.

Applicants may log on to a university's website or log into their personal e-mail accounts, depending on how decisions are delivered. But by the time a letter arrives via regular mail, the admissions decision is usually old news. These days, some students wait days to open the envelopes.

Students admitted to Columbia University found an e-mail from the Office of Admissions waiting in their inboxes this year with either good or bad news. Early decision applicants to the University of Pennsylvania were instructed to log on to the university's website with a unique password and personal identification number to find out their fates. Not surprisingly, the site briefly crashed, due to heavy traffic.

Still, some schools are sticking to the tried and true, what's now known to many as snail mail.

Barnard College, the women's college of Columbia University, is one school that still sends the news via the U.S. Postal Service. ''We feel that the communication of an admissions decision marks a momentous occasion in a young woman's life,'' said Jennifer Fondiller, dean of admissions at Barnard. ``E-mail communication, while speedier, doesn't do that justice in the same way as a personal, printed letter.''

New York University and the University of Miami are two other popular colleges that continue to rely on postal mail notification. The University of Florida, Florida State University and the University of Central Florida notify students online.

Online applications have been available for approximately a decade, but use of the Internet for college applications has surged in recent years. This year, almost all universities that offer online applications are reporting an increase in online filings.

About 57 percent of students who applied to college in 2004 used an online application. Just 35 percent of applicants applied online in 2003, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

UF has moved exclusively to online applications. At FSU, applicants log on to their student accounts and see their admissions decisions flash before them on screen.

Today's applicants, who are typically computer savvy, like online notification.

''I like online decisions because [they're] instantaneous. Most of us check decisions on the computers during school because it's tough to ignore them. But some people wait until they get home,'' said Matthew Best, a senior at Nova High School, a magnet school in Davie.

At Cornell University, administrators believe that online notification gives the delivery of admissions decisions some uniformity. ''Our applicants live all over the world, so allowing them to access their decisions online allows them to receive the decisions in a timely manner,'' said Doris Davis, associate provost for admissions and enrollment. The decision are also sent in hard copy.

One thing is for sure: Online decisions don't take away the angst.

''As the days draw nearer to the decision dates, everyone gets excited,'' Best said. ``It gets to the point where, on the day of, the sole focus of every senior's conversation is who got accepted into which university.''