College Admissions

University of California officials have extended the application period for undergraduate admissions after a computer slowdown kept some students from filing their online applications in time for Monday night's deadline. The new deadline is 11:59 p.m. Tuesday. Susan Wilbur, UC's director of undergraduate admissions, said her office is investigating the cause of the computerized malfunction that at least temporarily blocked some panicked last-minute filers from submitting applications on Sunday and Monday nights.

If you're the parent of a child aiming to attend a California State University campus next fall, you might want to give him or her a nudge this morning. Today is the deadline for Cal State applications, and overloaded admissions officers are expecting a last-minute flood. In years past, the deadline was a flexible one, in keeping with the state's mission to allow all eligible students to enroll in one of the campuses, considered the middle rung between community colleges and our flagship UC system.

More students are applying to California State University campuses so far this year, even as university officials are preparing to slash enrollment and tighten admission standards in response to the most severe budget crisis in the system's history. Since Oct. 1, Cal State has received 266,152 applications, a 53% increase over the same period last year, Chancellor Charles B. Reed said during a conference call Tuesday. Freshman applications are up 32% over the same period. A large part of the increase is from sophomores seeking to transfer from community colleges.

Stanley H. Kaplan, the founder and namesake of the nation's first test-preparation company, died of heart failure Sunday at his home in New York City. He was 90. Kaplan started a tutoring company in his parents' Brooklyn home in 1938. In 1946, a student asked him to help her prepare for what was then called the Scholastic Aptitude Test. "I was there at the right time with the proper educational approach," Kaplan told the New York Times in 1981. "I consider myself a poor man's private school."

Because nearly half of all students who start doctoral programs don't finish, educators have long wondered how best to judge applicants to graduate schools and reduce that attrition rate. Is there a way to evaluate a student's drive, persistence, honesty and creativity? What is needed beyond college grades, test scores and traditional recommendation letters? The Educational Testing Service says it has just the thing.

High school students, beware! College admissions and financial aid officers in California and elsewhere may be peeking over your digital shoulder at the personal information you post on your Facebook or MySpace page. And they might decide to toss out your application after reading what you wrote about that cool party last week or how you want to conduct your romantic life at college. According to a new report by the National Assn. for College Admission Counseling, about a quarter of U.S.

I've been talking to a lot of angry people this week. They yell; I listen patiently. They cry; I empathize. The pain of not getting into the college of your dreams is unlike any other. Students call here to Pitzer College to find out what they could have done differently. Parents call to ask us to reconsider. It's hard to justify to someone who has just been "denied" the college of their dreams that although they've done everything right, we just did not have enough seats in the class.

For a generation of students who share every detail of their personal lives in text messages, MySpace pages and other online postings, the college admissions chase is offering a lesson that some things are best kept private. Last December, when Brown University's early admission decisions were released online, students in one classroom at North Hollywood High's highly gifted magnet program could be heard applauding. In another, there was silence, followed by the sound of someone crying.

Community college student Colby Seymore has gone online 26 times in the last three weeks, begging other students to rate his chances of transfer to UCLA or UC Berkeley. With admission decisions from top institutions due in coming weeks, Seymore's chat room postings have become increasingly panicked: "I am antsy and have to know!! HELP?" and "I have the right grades . . . right?"

The gray-and-green warehouse in suburban Concord seems an unlikely headquarters for a statewide detective operation, and the fact checkers at work there insist they are not mercilessly probing the lives of California's teenagers. Still, there is an element of hard-boiled sleuthing in the University of California's unusual attempt to ensure that its 98,000 freshman applicants tell the truth about themselves and their extracurricular activities.