Admissions in Cyberspace: Web Sites Bring Complications for Colleges Institutions try new strategies as companies offer high-tech recruiting tools By LISA GUERNSEY They started to surface a few years ago: World-Wide Web sites with an Amazon.com approach to shopping for colleges. Cyberspaces offering college-bound students searchable catalogs and on-line admissions applications. Software-company sites selling high-tech recruiting tools to admissions offices. ALSO SEE: The New Players in College Admissions: One-Stop Shops for Students Some Colleges Try Attracting Students With Their Own On-Line Innovations Now nearly a dozen of them populate the Net. Most of them -- even the software sites -- hope to become the on-line steppingstone for students starting their college searches. And nearly every one makes the same claim: Our product, our software, our Web site will radically change the admissions process. It's not exactly what admissions professionals want to hear. If one of these sites is going to become the starting point for students choosing a college, which one will it be? New materials flood admissions offices every week, all promoting different high-tech services, some of them quite expensive. Many admissions officers acknowledge that they can't even keep track of the new Web sites, let alone figure out whether they should be purchasing the products associated with them. "It's exhausting, quite frankly," says Joyce E. Smith, executive director for the National Association for College Admission Counseling. Admissions officers are also worried about how much the companies and their Web sites will change the admissions process in the long run. A few years ago, staying on top of the university's image seemed easier: By buying mailing lists and sending out viewbooks, training campus tour guides, keeping track of rankings, and setting up booths at college fairs, admissions offices could at least make sure that many prospective students had the information they needed to find the right match. The Internet requires new strategies. Some of them are no-brainers: A college's Web site must appeal to prospective students -- in addition to meeting the needs of faculty members, alumni, and students already on the campus. But other problems are difficult: Admissions officers can't control gossip about their institutions that appears in the new Web sites' chat rooms and on-line forums. They must make sure that e-mail from interested students is answered by whomever it comes to -- be it admissions employees, faculty members, or the heads of student organizations. Some of the challenges are so new that admissions officers are essentially dealing with unknowns: What information are students finding when they run searches of on-line data bases? Where is that information coming from? How accurate is it? And can colleges influence it? "I've been in the admissions business for 30 years, and this is one of the most dramatic explosions I've ever seen," says T. Joseph Watts, admissions director at Appalachian State University. Timm Rinehart, a 25-year veteran of admissions at Temple University, has the same reaction. "We've been through significant changes before," says Mr. Rinehart, acting director of admissions. "But this is perhaps the most profound change." The short shelf life of new technology is one culprit. Viewbooks, then videos, then CD-ROM tours have all been considered cutting edge in quick succession. Now colleges and universities are grappling with whether to pay for Web-site designers, electronic applications, recruiting programs, and systems to manage e-mail. They are asking how they can best afford the new services -- by hiring companies or by working in-house? No one has solid answers. "The industry has grown so much in the last 10 years that people are beginning to express some frustration, trying to figure out what they should invest in," says Ms. Smith of NACAC. In the meantime, the one-stop sites offer pages and pages of information and interactivity. And admissions officers don't know whether to laud or lament them. A best-case scenario goes something like this: A high-school junior gets on the Web to do some research. Search engines lead her to one of the many commercial Web sites for the college-bound. Using the site's data base, she plugs in the criteria she's looking for in a college. A list of two or three names appears -- colleges she didn't even know existed. She follows hyperlinks to the college's home pages, which provide clear links to information on admissions. She bookmarks the pages about eligibility requirements, browses areas that are intriguing enough to make her consider an on-campus visit, and submits her name and address to receive more information. But here's a worst-case scenario: Another high-school student finds his way to the same one-stop shop. He clicks to the college-search data base, selects criteria that match his vague notions of what he wants: a medium-sized college, somewhere in the Midwest, with a major in biology. More than 50 college listings appear on the screen. He sends automatic inquiries to the first dozen. At some point, he lands on a biology-department home page with an e-mail address at the bottom, and sends off a question to the department chairman -- who never checks his e-mail. Then the student heads to the section of the college-search site that looks like more fun: a forum where users have posted questions and answers. A few postings offer disparaging comments about colleges he's heard of. He makes mental notes and exits, then follows a link for free video-game software. Such scenarios make admissions officers worry that they are losing what little control they once had over what information students see. "The information might be questionable," says Sheka B. Pedescleaux, a recruiting counselor at Fisk University. "Is it right? Is it up to date?" To answer those questions, some admissions officers are trying to keep an eye on the one-stop Web sites. But it's not easy. Many have similar goals and much-too-similar names: CollegeEdge, CollegeNET, and CollegeView create products for admissions offices and promote themselves as one-stop shops for students. So does Peterson's, the well-known guidebook company, which has just opened a new site called CollegeQuest. The non-profit College Board also has its own site -- College Board Online. Other sites were first developed as advertisements -- for test-preparation services like the Kaplan Educational Centers; for college guides like that published annually by U.S. News & World Report; or for companies that offer both products, like the Princeton Review. Others sites that aren't as well known but that offer "one-stop shopping" for the college-bound include GoCollege, which sells products like Web-based practice versions of standardized tests; the Power Students Network, which offers access to six college-oriented sites; and CollegeXpress, which grew out of a magazine written for high-school students called Private Colleges & Universities. Many of these sites claim to lead high-school students through the college-search process from beginning to end. They provide on-line data bases of information on thousands of colleges, which students find by entering criteria on complex, Web-based forms. Interested in finding a co-ed liberal-arts college in the Southeast with a chess club and tuition under $10,000 a year? Hit the enter button on the search pages provided by these sites and a tidy list of such colleges appears. Some sites even produce instant college comparisons -- matching one institution's costs and minority enrollment against another's, for example. But run the same search on three different sites and three different lists of colleges may appear -- depending on what information is in the sites' data bases and whether the sites have made deals to favor some institutions over others. The Power Students Network, for example, invites students to "Find Your College" by clicking on a link to CollegeXpress. Yet a search of CollegeXpress retrieves only names of private colleges. There is no mention of the fact that the data base excludes public colleges and universities. For some admissions officers, the one-stop Web sites are the most direct evidence yet that a consumer mentality now defines a student's search for the right college. Guidebooks and national rankings started the comparison-shopping trend; now, on the Internet, a college search can feel almost identical to an on-line search for a camera, computer, or even a car: Plug in the price and features you want, compare different products instantaneously, browse some third-party reviews, and fill in an order form -- or admissions application. Not all admissions officers are comfortable with the implications of such analogies, but many say that they have to keep the retailing model in mind. "It's kind of like wanting your product to be in as many stores as possible so that when the consumer enters, you're on the shelf," says Mr. Rinehart of Temple. "We want to be on the shelves of these Web sites." But even if the shopping expeditions do land students on colleges' Web sites, admissions officers are nervous. They worry that their Web pages and e-mail systems aren't quite up to par. John Dolan, admissions director at the Catholic University of America, says he gets anxious every time he sees parents walking into his waiting room with printed pages from Catholic's Web site. "I'll get off the phone with these vendors and then go out and see these families with print-outs in their hands and say, Oh gosh, maybe I should get back to these vendors. I've got to get our Web page in shape." But how does an admissions office pay for a revamped Web site, or a souped-up e-mail service, while still producing printed products and glossy viewbooks? So far, most colleges have no plans to cut back on direct mail. The pressure to be high-tech is matched only by the pressure to find minority students, and direct mail is the proven way to reach them -- especially since minority families, over all, don't have as much home access to the Web as do white families. Admissions mailings, however costly, won't end any time soon. Partly because of that, many admissions officers say they plan to save money by building their Web sites and applications in house, instead of paying companies to enhance their Web pages or to guarantee prominent placement on companies' Web sites. But the software companies and developers of Web sites come on strong. "If colleges don't move quickly they are going to lose ground," says Seppy Basili, executive director of pre-college programs for Kaplan Educational Centers, which sponsors one of the one-stop Web sites. Some companies say they will create seamless systems that transfer on-line applications to the internal computer systems of admissions offices automatically -- sparing employees in the admissions office the work of re-keying information submitted on paper applications. A few companies create Web-based applications or applications that can be downloaded from the Web. At least one of the companies, CollegeEdge, offers to help colleges manage their admissions e-mail by setting up systems to sort incoming mail instantly and then automatically compose specific replies to the messages. Such systems can cost colleges anywhere from a few thousand dollars to several hundred thousand, depending on the level of integration and the expanse of services that are provided. But the cost is worth it, company representatives insist. "You see an enormous number of schools trying to develop on their own what we do on a routine basis," says Jim Wolfston, president of Universal Algorithms, the company that developed CollegeNET. Those colleges are probably spending more than is necessary, Mr. Wolfston says. While many admissions professionals are excited about systems that make it easier for students to ask questions and submit applications, others caution that the new technology could bring with it unwanted side effects. Take e-mail, for instance. A few of the sites use the data to offer features like "instant inquiries" -- e-mail messages that are automatically composed, using the registrant's personal data, and that are then sent to selected colleges. If those messages come from students who are truly interested in applying -- and who will actually read the costly viewbooks they may receive, instead of chucking them in the trash can -- colleges are happy to add them to their pool of prospects. But mass-produced e-mail doesn't always translate into a serious inquiry. Virginia A. Carey, the dean of admissions at the College of William and Mary, says that she has already learned to question whether all e-mail inquiries truly need quick, personal responses. A few months ago, she says, she received a message from a parent who described her child's academic credentials and asked if he might be considered for a merit award offered by college. "I started to craft a long e-mail in response and then I looked at the header," Ms. Carey says. "This question had been sent to at least 100 institutions. When it is such a blanket, shotgun inquiry like that, is it really worth it to invest that kind of time?" In the end, she never replied. On-line and electronic applications may have similar consequences. Some applications can be filled in on Web sites and submitted with the click of a button. A few Web sites now give users the opportunity to send electronic admissions applications in bulk. Fees may thwart less-serious applicants, but they don't stop students whose families are willing to spend whatever it takes to get into college. "It will definitely confound all kinds of projections" that admissions offices have to make, says Ms. Carey of William and Mary. As the variables in their already-complex equations change -- and more variables are added -- admissions offices are likely to have a harder time predicting how many students are serious about accepting and how many might enroll. It may be foolhardy, too, to make predictions about how one-stop sites might revolutionize the college-search process. A survey released last spring showed that most high-school students were still not aware of sites like CollegeView or the U.S. News site. The national poll, which was conducted by a consulting company called the Art & Science Group, also showed that students prefer paper viewbooks and applications to the digital versions -- for now, at least. But managers of the Web sites say they are getting more traffic every week. And in the last few months, several of them have signed contracts to be featured on well-known Web sites like Yahoo! and Excite. Amid the push for technology, however, admissions officers remain convinced that most prospective students will want to leave their computer screens at some point and visit campuses in person. "I just don't think you can make a good match over the phone or over computers," says Mr. Rinehart of Temple. "You've got to be able to walk around, feel the philosophy, hang around a place." Even if it means that families will be walking the grounds with printed pages from Web sites -- reviews, rankings, and price comparisons -- held tightly in their hands. http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Page: A27