Katie Bandekow, 17, got up one Saturday morning, clicked on her home computer and began typing her application to the University of Delaware.
Thirty minutes later, she pressed a button to fling it into cyberspace and skipped off to her part-time job at a bakery.The electronic college admissions age has arrived. A rising number of students are applying to college on the Internet. No paper. No envelopes. No stamps. No typewriters or meticulous margins.
Although some students are shy about entrusting the Internet with a form that symbolizes their passage from high school to college, it was routine for Bandekow.
"We order stuff from catalogs on the computer, so we're used to it," Bandekow, a student at Cape Henlopen High School in Lewes, Del., said nonchalantly.
Her parents rested easier, though, after they called and e-mailed the university to make sure their daughter's application had arrived.
"I wasn't apprehensive. I just wanted to make sure it went through," her father, Lee Bandekow, said.
With computers, high school seniors can download applications from university sites on the World Wide Web or request applications on computer disks. They can send them in electronically or make printouts and mail them.
Students also are connecting to university, commercial and government Web sites to find financial aid information, select a college, learn about degree programs and take virtual tours of some campuses.
The number of college search sites is multiplying on the Web - CollegeNET, CollegeTown, FishNet, CollegeView, CollegeXpress, Internet College Exchange, College Edge and XAP, to name a few.
Software disks that contain hundreds of applications from individual schools, or the common application form accepted by 164 private schools, also are available.
Some help is free, but there is a charge for some services.
Computer-savvy high school seniors don't stop after taking campus tours online. They are e-mailing college alumni, reading campus newspapers on the Net, and quizzing students and faculty to get an insider's view of schools.
"Admissions offices can no longer control the institution's marketing message, nor do students have to rely on the admission office as their primary source of information," said Kenneth E. Hartman, director of guidance and admission services in a regional office of the College Board.
Colleges, though, are not yet being inundated with online applications. Only 4 percent of 500 schools that responded to a National Association for College Admission Counseling survey said they received 10 percent or more of their applications electronically.
But many predict the trend will escalate.
Last year, the University of Delaware received 400, or 2.2 percent of its 14,000 applications, online. Since Sept. 1, the university has already received 247 e-mail applications - 16 percent of the total, said Jeffrey Rivell, senior admissions director.
But Eric J. Furda, admissions director at Columbia University, said, "The traditional application is still going to be here until there is universal computer access. We're not going to shut anybody out."
For now, some students still want to touch and feel their applications, said Jim Sims, guidance director at Hinsdale South High School in Darien, Ill., in suburban Chicago.
"This idea of click and it's gone - whoa!" Sims said. "How do you know that it didn't end up at the University of Vladivostok?"