Washington Post: Colleges Go Online to Calm the Admissions Jitters

[asteriskea]

<p>I am surprised that no one posted a link to this article in the Cavalier Daily “U.Va. uses Web resources to ease admission process : University admissions officers available to answer questions of this year’s 18,036 applicants through online blogs, chats.” so here goes:</p>

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As the college acceptance waiting game continues for high school seniors, both applicants and prospective students continue to utilize some of the electronic resources provided by the Office of Admissions regarding application and admission processes.</p>

<p>“We want to get information to prospective students,” Dean of Admissions Jack Blackburn said. “So if we see increasing numbers of applications and selectivity, we feel as if we had done a great job.”</p>

<p>Blackburn said it took 12 admissions officers and nine readers to review the 18,036 applications submitted this year, which marks a 10 percent increase from last year’s pool of applications.</p>

<p>Blackburn said the Office of Admissions receives about 300-500 admissions-related phone calls per day.</p>

<p>The Office of Admissions’ Web site currently offers online chat rooms catered to specific student interests. For instance, tonight there will be an online chat for transfer applicants. The Office of Admissions is also working on a new admissions catalogue for the summer.</p>

<p>Jeannine Lalonde, senior assistant dean of admissions, created her own “Notes from Peabody” blogs more than a year ago to encourage applicants and prospective students to post general questions and concerns online. She responds to their inquiries on a daily basis.</p>

<p>“I don’t have any trouble keeping up with the students,” Lalonde said. “Most of the times what they have to ask is current and not hard to answer.”</p>

<p>Lalonde said blog postings indicated that applicants were most concerned with when they were going to receive their acceptance letters, even though the final decisions will not be mailed until March 30.</p>

<p>Last week, the number of anxious requests increased so significantly that Lalonde made a posting titled “It’s ‘Let’s not talk about college admission’ day (or weekend)!” Instead, she generated a discussion on music culture, hoping to alleviate some tension and stress on the part of the applicants.</p>

<p>“Everyone was so worried and they kept posting comments,” Lalonde said. “So I just decided to put it out there to talk about something fun.”</p>

<p>Lalonde said one of the biggest admissions rumors circulating around other college message boards and blogs involves speculations on the University’s selection process.</p>

<p>Specifically, Lalonde said many student bloggers were troubled by preconceived notions on the ratio of in-state residents to out-of-state residents.</p>

<p>Blackburn mentioned the same problem as a common misconception among college and prospective students.</p>

<p>“Out-of-state people think we only take 10 percent when it’s 33 percent,” Blackburn said.</p>

<p>Lalonde added that other students were anxious about the acceptance rate of students on a county-wide scale.</p>

<p>“People assume that we accept X number of students from this county and X number of students from that county [in Virginia],” Lalonde said. “We don’t have any rules about how many students we can take from each part of the state.”

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<p><a href=“http://www.cavalierdaily.com/CVArticle.asp?ID=29539&pid=1556[/url]”>http://www.cavalierdaily.com/CVArticle.asp?ID=29539&pid=1556&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

[Marian]

<p>DeanJ, your online application also froze my computer. Every time. Fortunately, it worked on one of the other computers in our house (which has Mozilla Firefox rather than Internet Explorer, which is what I use).</p>

<p>Kids do judge schools by their Web sites and general computer responsiveness. My daughter’s future school, Cornell, has lost face with the kids twice in the last few days – first because it took three hours after the announced time before the kids could get their RD decisions online and second because the registration form for the accepted students days program was not accessible for a full day after it was promised. My daughter’s thought was, “If they can’t even do these things right, what’s it going to be like when I get there?”</p>

[Maosorio]

<p>In my opinion, having the opportunity to access college counselors through internet forums is great. There is both so much information out other and so little actually concretely useful information, that it is wonderful to find accurate and accesible information in specific places. I just wish there were more forums like these.</p>