Law School Admissions 2.0

Law schools are already in the distance learning business to varying degrees, and most law schools -- if not all -- allow students to apply online, but it'll be interesting to see whether they coordinate for this recent trend of the online college fair. This piece from the NY Times is very revealing about how students will likely search for law schools, including extensive use of both the Internet and their parents.

Cyberfamilias
Doing the Campus Hop

By MICHELLE SLATALLA

HERE is how I helped my oldest daughter apply to colleges last year. I turned the dining room into a command center and deployed a multipronged battle plan as ruthless as the one General Patton used in Europe. I put color-coded labels on folders. I devised a secret formula to calculate my daughter’s likelihood of being admitted to any four-year college in America.

“Don’t forget that you licked all the stamps,” my oldest daughter recently reminded me. “You liked that part, even after you got a little whacked out from the glue.”

Those halcyon days are a distant memory. Now it is my second daughter’s turn to apply, and she won’t let me help at all. That is not to say she isn’t thorough. She devised a system to classify glossy college brochures. She decided which SAT II subject tests to take and, for some reason, declined my offer to prep her like a politician for interviews.

Yes, it hurts to overhear her discussing with her father how to handle “people who are too controlling.” Especially when those people have so much to offer.

After I learned the other day about an unusual kind of online college fair where students — and parents! — can chat with admissions officers in real time and attend live question-and-answer sessions on topics like financial aid, I rushed over to CollegeWeekLive.com to register.

To prove that I wasn’t sneaking around, I also urged my daughter to sign up. I pointed out that by attending the free two-day fair — which is to go live again in September — she could quickly gather a lot of information, without bankrupting me with expensive trips to visit all 150 of the participating college campuses (which, believe me, she would like to do).

She did not sound terribly excited. What is with these people who think they no longer require a mother’s help?

Clearly, she didn’t know about the cool ways colleges now try to connect online with applicants. Had she never visited the MySpace page of Oregon State University’s mascot, Benny Beaver? Did she not know that the admissions department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology publishes more than 30 bloggers at http://www.mitadmissions.org/blogs.shtml? (Topics range from “Living Off Campus” to “Consider a Gap Year.”)

“Before Web 2.0, that personal communication existed only through word of mouth, through actual human contact,” said Ben Jones, the communications director who oversees the admissions blogs for M.I.T., and checks Facebook several times a day for messages from prospective students. “Now, with the blogs, which are completely uncensored and unfiltered, we try to create a connection so that that personal communication can occur on a much larger scale.”

Today’s students think it’s normal to talk casually and immediately with nearly anybody through the Internet so much so that they consider forms of communication that are not related to the Web nontraditional, Mr. Jones said.

M.I.T. had an information booth at the CollegeWeekLive fair. But Mr. Jones said that because this is “absolutely the worst, busiest time of year,” no admissions representatives were available to conduct live chats.

When I logged in to the fair, however, I found plenty of college booths with admissions officers available from an eclectic mix of public and private schools from Emerson College in Boston to Arizona State University.

Suddenly I felt nervous. What if I typed the wrong thing and prompted someone to note “super-creepy parent” in a file? I decided to wander the virtual aisles first. I was in what looked like an open auditorium filled with crowd noises, as if a lot of people were milling around. Loudly.

“What are you doing?” my husband said crankily from his computer nearby.

“I am trying to get your daughter into college,” I replied by instant message, while straining to hear the on-screen guide.

Frankly, it was a little eerie in the auditorium, because I couldn’t see or hear any other real participants. Unlike a live college fair, where you can follow the clamoring crowd to the booths of the most selective colleges, here there was no way to gauge whether more attendees were flocking to Bryn Mawr College or Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa. (Later, I was told that 12,000 parents and students had attended the fair.)

The first thing I did was to pause nostalgically at the Indiana University booth to listen to the strains of my alma mater’s song. Next, I next tried to attend a presentation featuring a live speaker discussing “How to Make College More Affordable.” God knows I am fascinated by the topic. But unfortunately, a pop-up window kept blinking on and off preventing me from joining the presentation. When I tried to type a question into the query box, it disappeared.

I returned to the (still deafening) main auditorium, where by now I had worked up the courage to chat with representatives from Bryn Mawr, Northeastern University and Colorado College.

It felt exciting to be talking almost simultaneously to three people at colleges hundreds of miles apart, all of us intelligently discussing such topics as the philosophy behind women’s colleges, co-op work programs and block schedules, where you take one class at a time intensively.

But I confess that when I reviewed the transcripts that evening, it didn’t look as if I’d learned much more than I would have from visits to those schools’ Web sites. Certainly, others at the fair later told me that they found the experience useful.

Julie Richardson, a Virginia mother of two elementary-school-age boys, attended as a preliminary way to research colleges, she said, since she “didn’t know the difference between a Harvard and a Michigan.”

Ms. Richardson, who attended live presentations and visited several college booths, said, “It was an easy way to see what’s available without having to make a lot of trips and to get some inside information on how admissions officers make decisions.”

Viewed from the other side of the chat window, Nancy Thaler, the assistant director of admissions at Bryn Mawr, said the fair was an opportunity to talk to students more informally. “I think kids were more comfortable than in person, because I didn’t have to do any probing to get them to start talking,” she said. “They would ask a question right upfront.”

The next day, though, I had even less luck at the fair. Returning to the Colorado College booth, I tried to initiate a chat in response to a greeting from a representative: “Rep anna jaquez-herron whispers hi michelle do you have any questions.”

But the window started blinking whenever I typed. Later, Robert Rosenbloom, the chief executive of PlatformQ, which produced CollegeWeekLive, confirmed that the site experienced technical problems. But all I knew was I couldn’t make out a thing. I put my cursor on the spot where I thought the query box was, and typed, “Sorry I am having trouble seeing this screen are you able to see it”

“Yes I see it”

I replied: “Sorry, I will log out and try again. Bye.”

I was about to give up altogether when my daughter, who had visited the fair on a school computer, e-mailed me. She listed her impressions, both “positive” (“information sections of each college are really extensive, easy to navigate, well labeled”) and “negative” (“really hard to figure out the chat feature, no reps would respond to any questions, chat rooms seemed empty”).

Over all, she concluded: “I would prefer to go to a real, live college fair, but this seems like it could be an informational alternative for those who can’t. P.S.: You can lick the stamps for my envelopes.”

I wonder if her father told her to write that.