MIT Trashes Paper Applications
Students aspiring to attend one of the country's most prestigious business schools can say farewell to one well-known ritual: the frantic, down-to-the-wire trip to mail an application by the deadline.
Beginning this month, MIT's Sloan School of Management will accept applications only via computer apparently becoming the nation's first graduate or undergraduate school to adopt such a policy.
About 3,400 of the nation's universities have experimented with electronic applications but beginning this month, MIT will become the first school to completely throw away the paper application, which they say will be able to save thousands of dollars in processing, printing, and postage costs. Plus, MIT will be able to save hundreds of hours of valuable staff time.
"I don't know of anybody who's gone 100 percent that way," said Mark Milroy, chief officer of programs and servises with the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
Using a new Internet site, called the GradAdvantage Website, started by the folks who sponsor the Graduate Management Admission Test (the standardized exam for business school admission), applicants can fill out the required Sloan School forms, pay the application fees, and arrange to have their GMAT scores sent to the university in one eletronic package.
As of right now, the only things that cannot be processed electronically are outside recommendations, and official transcripts.
All the participating universities have to do is pay $5,500 a year for the administrative site software. Whereas the students only have to pay a $12 processing fee for each application.
Also for now, MIT is the only university telling it's applicants to forget applying if you cannot do it online. But there are other schools that will accept both electronic applications through the GradAdvantage Website as well as paper applications. They include: Harvard, Columbia, Dartmouth, Northwestern, the University of Texas, Tulane, and Michigan State.
MIT said they will grant some exceptions to the new upcoming regime. Still its hard to believe a business school candidate wouldn't have access to a computer somewhere, whether at work, a library, or an Internet cafe, said Rod Garcia, Sloan's admissions director. In fact he argued it's easier these days for applicants to get their hands on computers than typewriters.
The 3,500 who apply to MIT this year might as well get used to computers as early as possible. The 10 to 13 percent lucky enough to get accepted to the two-year program (annual tuition: $25,800) are strongly encouraged to have their own computers, preferably lap-tops.
As more and more organizations and universities get online in the recent years, electronic applications are gaining some popularity, experts say it's unlikely many undergraduate schools will require only online applications anytime soon.
After all its a somewhat elitist notion to assume that every applicant has computer acess, said Timothy J. McDonough, a spokesman for the American Coucil on Education, representing 1,800 colleges and universities nationwide.
MIT's move, meanwhile, should be no cause for U.S. Postal Service alarm. Sloan still plans to send acceptance and rejection letters the old-fashioned way.
Written by Robin Estrin.