The month of January is the busiest time for high school seniors and it definitely impacts us in admissions.
Last year, we received about 22,000 applications for the incoming freshman class and it is looking to be around the same or slightly more for this year.
It's great to be popular! Tubs of mail arrive today from applicant hopefulls and highschools.
With the advent of the online application that appeared ten years ago at many schools, it has changed how people apply and how the application is put together. In many years past, we used to receive a paper application in the mail that was typed or handwritten (hopefully legible). In many cases in the same envelope were sealed official high school transcripts and SAT/ACT scores.
In today’s world, we receive almost all of our applications electronically. We download this information into our system and extract the information that we need to help us with our review. Transcripts are still mostly coming through mail (or encrypted emails) directly from the schools. The SATs/ACTs are now coming in mostly through a direct feed from CollegeBoard or ACT. All of this information has to get matched up.
Since many students wait until the very last second to apply or wait until the last week to request their transcripts to be sent in, this creates a large backlog of mail. We have to sort and match all of these extra pieces of mail to the application. If the transcript comes in first, it is filed until we have the application to match it.
We started a few years ago giving students the ability to check their application status online to see if we have all of their materials. Students are emailed an application reference number so that they can check daily to see if we have everything for their application.
Of course now, we have probably raised the panic level for all of these students. They check daily to see if we have everything matched up and then they call, email, and threaten their school/mailman to make sure we have everything.
Our processing staff spending time matching up all the transcripts to applications recently submitted.
I thought I would just provide a little perspective to let you see all that we have going on this time of year. Today, on the application due-date,we received nine tubs of mail! These are filled with envelopes of transcripts and other materials that need to be matched individually with each application. Some envelopes contain one transcript, some contain twenty. We will continue to receive probably 5-7 tubs of mail over the next week that needs to be sorted and matched for thousands of applicants.
It is a long process to be sure that every item is matched up perfectly with every application. Once we get caught up with all of our mail received over the next few weeks, we will let students know if we are still missing anything and give them a date to have that sent.
So, be patient with the process, if we need anything we will let you know. 
