Because we get lots of University of California news at work, I read random articles about things going on there. I know that some of the numbers (SAT and high school GPA) floor me at times. Newsweek has a series of articles from Kaplan on colleges. I'm certainly pleased to see Carnegie Mellon University listed as a "New Ivy." Then, there's lots of talk about other aspects of college admissions in 2007. I particularly liked the notion of the ACT putting the SAT out to pasture. I did particularly well on the ACT, and only pretty well on the SAT, and I always felt that the ACT was just a saner test.

Of course, the last time I took either exam was, I guess, 18 years ago. (Whoa!)

Anyhow, one of the articles uses the huge increase in application numbers to support the notion of something they're calling "Prestige Panic," a concept any law student can understand:

From 1994 (the recent low) to 2006, the increase is 28 percent. Still, 64 percent of freshmen attend schools where acceptance rates exceed 70 percent, and the application surge at elite schools dwarfs population growth. Take Yale. In 1994, it accepted 18.9 percent of 12,991 applicants; this year it admitted only 8.6 percent of 21,000.

They do mention that there are more high-schoolers now then there were then. And certainly, it strikes me that people are more obsessed with mastering the entrance exams than we were back in the late 80s, and I assume the early 90s. Heck, the standard practice for SAT and ACT prep for me an my friends was to buy a prep book, set it on our shelf, and look at and think about doing some practice exams here and there.

What this article seems to completely ignore between 1994 and 2006 is the rise of the Web and other technologies that have made college admissions much easier. When I was applying to schools, I had to take paper applications down to a Kinko's, rent a typewriter (gasp!) and type my college applications. I applied to exactly one school (Stevens Institute of Technology) that allowed for electronic submissions. How did that work? You used a modem and a terminal program -- at 1200 baud -- and called up a computer system they ran and entered all of your application information that way.

When Emily was graduating from high school and applying to colleges, she was able to buy a CD that filled out many parts of her college applications for her. A major service now appears to be CommonApp, which is supported by nearly 300 schools. Even schools that don't support CommonApp (MIT's a notable) have online admissions procedures. Using a computer to prepare an application is a whole lot easier than using a typewriter.

Do high school students today even know what a typewriter is? My contracts professor made a joke about IBM typewriters one day in class, and I think Stan and I were the only ones who laughed. I figured most of my classmates weren't sure IBM had ever really made typewriters.

That's beside the point. I can't help but thinking a huge reason for the increase in applications to schools like Yale, while maybe in part related to "prestige panic," isn't also aided by the fact that it's far easier to submit a college application today than it was in 1994. That makes shopping for prestige much easier than it used to be.