Starting this school year, South teachers have been able to send college recommendation letters out online, making the switch from paper to digitized letters.
According to South's College and Career Counselor Barbara Brown, nearly all colleges now accept online applications from students. Over 360 schools accept the Common Application Web site from prospective students. Around 1,000 colleges also collect applications and other forms online from Naviance, a college planning Web site that all South juniors and seniors have the option to use.
“Now colleges really prefer [the online process],” Brown said. “They really don’t like paper anymore, and some colleges — and this is the way of the future — are going completely paperless, so you have to apply online.”
But online recommendations have not spread among most South teachers yet. “Not that many have [sent out letter online], but the ones who have have sent out a lot,” Brown said. “We appreciate the fact that teachers are doing this; it’s much easier for them because they just download it into the program, and then it goes off.”
Brown said most teachers still mailed paper college applications this year because they were only given the option to use it starting in October. “It’s just like anything new,” she explained. “I’m sure more and more will be doing it as time goes on.”
Colleges began accepting the Common Application online three or four years ago. “Almost everybody does at least some of their applications online, and the Common Application has made it so easy, because it’s just this one Web site; it’s like one-stop shopping. Many schools require … a supplement,” Brown said.
For teachers to send online recommendations on Naviance, students must first waive their rights for teachers to see their information and then request their teachers. Once this is done, teachers can easily upload applications and recommendations, check which forms have already been completed by the student and send messages to the student through the online program.
Despite the efficiency of sending recommendations online, Naviance and the Common Application have both had problems before. Sometimes the Web sites will overload close to a deadline. “[The Common Application] is much more perfected than it used to be,” Brown said. “There were all kinds of problems when it first began … but for the most part it seems to work fairly well.“
For history teacher Deborah Linder, who has sent out a number of recommendations online through Naviance, the online system was initially problematic.
“There were a lot of problems, there were a lot of glitches, a lot of bugs,” Linder said. “I was on the phone with Naviance probably about four times because of the bugs.”
Linder explained that sometimes the program wouldn’t show if a teacher had sent in a recommendation or not, even when they had.
Once she got past all of Naviance’s problems, however, she found that the online process was much more effective than the old method of mailing letters.
“I didn’t need to photocopy constantly, I didn’t have to lick envelopes, I didn’t cut my fingers,” she said. “Kids saved money off of stamps — I still actually have to give back a bunch of envelopes. And when some kid calls me and says, ‘Could we put up another application?’ I don’t have to go find that, photocopy it, do this and that. I can just go click, click, click and it’s done.”
Doing college recommendations online hasn’t made the process easier just for teachers. All of senior Emily Flynn’s teachers did their college recommendations for her through Naviance, simplifying the process for her, as well.
“It’s definitely made things easier,” Flynn said. “I don’t have to fill out tons and tons of envelopes and bring them in, which is really nice. It’s cheaper.”
Unlike Linder, Flynn did not encounter many glitches on Naviance.
“I had one problem where there was a mix up about my teachers name … but aside from that [there were] no other problems,” she said.
Flynn also mentioned that every year the number of colleges to which students apply has gone up, making Naviance even more convenient for sending out recommendation letters. “I [decided to apply] to one school two weeks before the deadline … and I just had to go on Naviance,” she said.
