It’s Sink or Swim in the Usual Flood of Last-Minute College Applications

For the academically inclined, it was the Deadline with a capital D, the high school senior’s equivalent of April 15.

Thursday was the last day to mail freshman applications to the University of California. No talking your way out of this one. If the dog ate your application, you’d better mail in the dog.

More than 55,000 prospective freshmen are expected to apply to the UC system this year, with the usual flood arriving at the last minute.

Nov. 30 also was supposed to be the day applications were due for the California State University system. But, as stock market investors have discovered, high-tech isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The online system for applications got so bogged down with traffic this week that the deadline was extended to Dec. 5.

Now students have five more days to procrastinate, a skill that will come in handy over the next four years of college.

More than half the expected 200,000 Cal State applications will be filed through the Internet. “We list it in our literature as the preferred method of application,” said Allison Jones, assistant vice chancellor for academic affairs.

By the end of Thursday, Cal State expected to receive 81,000 applications online.

On Wednesday, 13,740 students completed Cal State applications online compared with 4,774 on the same date last year.

Because computers can track these things, UC officials determined that about 3,000 prospective students were beginning to fill out their online applications on Tuesday, two days before the deadline. A third of the online applications to UC last year were filed on the last day, and two-thirds came in during the last four or five days, said Terry Lightfoot, a UC spokesman. Total online applications are up nearly 50%.

Asked why she had waited until the last day to turn in her application, Michele Lee, 18, of Sunny Hills High in Fullerton said, “I guess all the other school stuff I had to do, and the essay part.”

Ah, the dreaded personal essay: Tell us about yourself.

“For the last 12 years they’ve been asked to write analytically and to write in the third person,” said Mary Jo Wilson, a counselor at Sunny Hills High. “They’re asked to do a little more introspective thinking, and they haven’t been asked to do that very often.”

Some seniors stayed home Thursday, coincidentally, as the application deadline approached.

“It’s amazing how they suddenly got ill,” said Cynthia Martini, head counselor at Sunny Hills. She pointed out that students had two months to complete the application.

This month, counselors were available during lunch and after school to help.

On Thursday, though, Martini and Wilson spent much of their day reviewing last-minute applications.