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Popular Online College Application Service Clogged By Procrastinators

by Terrence O'Brien on January 2, 2009 at 02:49 PM


Online college applications are one of the greatest gifts to lazy, procrastinating high school seniors around the country. Of course, now everyone can literally wait till the last moment to apply for schools, and this year that is exactly what happened.

Common Application, a site that handles applications for 350 different colleges and universities, was inundated with more than 171,000 apps between December 30 and January 1. The load of last minute submissions, combined with poor planning that scheduled upgrades during those final days, brought the site to a crawl that left many students waiting for several minutes for page refreshes and hours for applications to be successfully submitted to the site.

Parents and hopeful applicants quickly flocked to College Confidential, a site for students to voice concerns and frustrations, to vent about the failure of the site. Seth Allen, president of the Common Application, said that, "having an online application has exacerbated waiting till the last minute."

Allen may have a point, and maybe some of these students will learn a valuable lesson about procrastination (though we doubt it), but more than anything, this incident points out the potential pitfalls of our increasing reliance on online systems. [From: New York Times]

Tags: application, college, internet, procrastination, school, web

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