WSJ: Glitches Plague College Admissions

Glitches Plague College Admissions

A Short-Lived Scholarship

By ANNE MARIE CHAKER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
April 29, 2004; Page D1

A few weeks after Max Alexander sent in his college application, he logged
on to a password-protected Web site designed to let him see whether Duke
University had accepted him as an early-admissions candidate.

The response the senior at Cherry Hill High School West in New Jersey got
was a disappointment: He was deferred. The next morning, he sat in his
counselor's office for two hours, trying to figure out where else he should
apply.

Later that day, a call from the Duke admissions office yielded an even
bigger surprise: His deferral notice was a mistake. Congratulations, the
counselor said, he was in. "I said, 'Are you joking? Is this a prank call?'
" Mr. Alexander recalls.

This year's college-admission process is shaping up to be not just intensely
competitive but also remarkably error-filled. Although most applications
went smoothly, the number of problems has been alarming. College
administrators blame a combination of factors, including a rapid movement
toward automation and the outsourcing of key technological functions, such
as Web-based notifications. In addition, many admissions offices have been
overwhelmed by a sharp increase in the number of students applying to
college.

In March, officials at the University of California at Davis erroneously
sent an e-mail to 6,000 applicants saying they had won scholarships valued
at $7,500 a year. (The notice was intended for only 800 students.) At the
same time, the University of California system alerted more than 2,000
applicants that their Social Security numbers and other personal information
may have been viewed online by other applicants.

Meanwhile, the SAT scores of some 4,800 students across the country were
sent to colleges late -- the result of a programming error at the
Educational Testing Service, which scores and processes the exam.

"We're not aware of anything like this having happened before," says Kristin
Carnahan, a spokeswoman at the College Board, which owns the SAT. The ETS
"has assured us that it can't happen again."

The increasing digitization of the admissions process is often the culprit.
Like a number of other schools, the University of Miami invested in dozens
of new computers and scanners to help better process applications. But
setting up the new equipment caused some delays in the school's responses to
applicants. "We probably didn't get as much hardware in place and people in
place ... as we should have," says Edward M. Gillis, the school's director
of admissions.

Northwestern, Yale and Duke all allow students to view admissions decisions
online. Harvard e-mails admissions notifications. And this was the first
year that UC Davis tried using e-mail to notify scholarship recipients; the
school says it is still committed to using it again next year.

In Duke's case, about 50 other applicants encountered the same mistake as
Mr. Alexander, with deferrals being incorrectly posted on the site instead
of admissions letters. The problem was caused by a data-transfer error at
the company that handles the secure Web site for Duke applicants.

The glitch was "unprecedented for us," says Christoph Guttentag, Duke's
director of undergraduate admissions, who says the office is in its second
year of using the Web-based system. With colleges increasingly dependent on
information technology -- e-mail and Web sites -- to communicate with
students, there are more chances for errors to enter the system. "A mistake
that in the past might have affected one student now can affect anywhere
from a couple dozen to several thousand," Mr. Guttentag says.

"Definitely this year there's been more of these snafus," says Robin C.
Brown, an official at the National Association for College Admission
Counseling. She blames a glut in applications combined with admissions
offices increasingly rushing to nail down students faster than their
competition. "The desire to respond quickly has overwhelmed the majority of
offices and mistakes are getting made." She expects problems to get worse as
applications continue to increase.

Indeed, college enrollment is continuing to grow, and more students are
applying to a greater number of schools: 19% of students applied to six or
more colleges in 2003, compared with 9% who did so 10 years earlier,
according to the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute. This year, for
example, applications to Yale increased 11%, to a record 19,675 for 1,310
slots in the freshman class.

So far, there has been no violation as egregious as what occurred at
Princeton two years ago, when the admissions director admitted to spying on
Yale applicants' confidential information on the Web. But the high number of
mistakes has made the process more stressful for many applicants.

The lag time -- the time between when applications are sent and when
colleges acknowledge receipt -- is up as much as 50% from a year ago, says
Marjorie Jacobs, director of counselors at Scarsdale High School in New
York. "The youngsters go online to look at their applications, they see its
[status is] incomplete, and they become quite anxious -- I want to say
hysterical," Ms. Jacobs says. A call to the admissions office often reveals
that the missing document is actually sitting in the college's mailroom, she
adds.

Bruce Scher, a college consultant at Barrington High School in Illinois,
says he got more than 40 calls this year -- up about 20% from last year --
from colleges requesting missing information. "We then have to really
scramble to get that transcript or that teacher recommendation duplicated
and out again," he says. Nelie McNeal, a college counselor at a St. Louis
private school, even drafted a letter this year telling students who receive
such missing-application notices from colleges: "DON'T PANIC. In all
likelihood, it is at the office and simply hasn't been entered into the
system yet."

To avoid this kind of problem, high-school counselors have a number of
suggestions. To begin with, of course, students should keep a copy of
everything, including any notes or e-mails from the admissions office,
personal ID numbers and passwords -- even canceled checks. With the
application, some high schools include a stamped, self-addressed postcard
intended for colleges to send back acknowledging that everything has been
received.

At every step, from taking the SAT to filling out an application, keep the
student's name consistent. "You can't be Kate on one thing and Katy on
another," says Ms. McNeal. "Pick a name and stick with it."

As for Mr. Alexander, he will attend Duke in the fall despite the admissions
foul-up. Still, soon after the call from the admissions office, he received
an apologetic letter from Connexxia LLC, the Atlanta-based Web-services
company responsible for the glitch. The letter started out correctly --
"Dear Max" -- but ends on a less accurate note: "John, we sincerely
apologize for any confusion or inconvenience our error may have caused you."

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