NYT: "Applications for Colleges Clog System"

[Papa_Chicken]

<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/education/01apply.html?ref=us[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/education/01apply.html?ref=us&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Lets hope this doesn’t happen again in the next 24 hours</p>

<p>

On Tuesday, from 6:30 to 6:50 p.m., and on Wednesday from 9:45 to 10:45 a.m., there was a slowdown at the Common Application Web site, which handles online applications for some 350 colleges and universities. With the clock ticking toward a Jan. 1 deadline, the briefest delay can feel like a full-blown crisis to panicky high school seniors. </p>

<p>Within moments the slowdown showed up on College Confidential, a Web site where students share their worries. At 6:30, a student posted: “What are we supposed to do? I can’t fill anything out.” Minutes later, another wrote: “This is SO not cool.”

</p>

<p>

Rob Killion, executive director of the Common Application, played down the delays and said the site had been running some upgrades in anticipation of a flood of applications. “That process briefly slowed the system down a bit and perhaps even caused a ‘timeout’ error for some users,” Mr. Killion wrote. More than a million high school seniors use the Common Application. Last year, the organization said that more than 171,000 applications were filed in the 72 hours from Dec. 30 through Jan. 1., 75,000 of them on Dec. 31.

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