Welcome to the big leagues.
Columbia University has seen applications skyrocket by 32 percent among high-school seniors this year, new data show.
The seismic surge brought the Morningside Heights school’s applicant pool to 34,587 — second among the Ivies only to Harvard University, which had nearly 35,000 applicants.
School officials and other experts attributed much of the increase to Columbia’s recent embrace of the “common application,” which allows seniors to fill out just one college-application form and send it to any of more than 400 participating schools with the click of a mouse.
Before Columbia began accepting the common application last year — becoming the last of the Ivy League schools to do so — interested students had to write additional essays and fill out extra forms to apply.
“Usually schools that join the common application see a 15 to 20 percent bump in the sheer numbers of students applying,” said John Pryor, director of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Certainly with Columbia, you might surmise that their huge increase came from their using the common application for the first time.”
Pryor added that the number of students applying to multiple schools has been inching up every year for the past decade.
In 2009, about 23 percent of high-school seniors applied to more than seven colleges, compared with 12 percent in 1999.
This was attributed, in part, to record levels of interest in all of the Ivy League schools, which saw gains in applications ranging from 2.9 percent at Brown to 17 percent at the University of Pennsylvania.
Columbia University officials acknowledged that applying had been made easier than ever, but they also said there were other reasons behind the boost.
“We attribute this continued and growing interest in Columbia to a variety of factors, including our commitment to communication and outreach to communities which have been historically underserved or under-resourced educationally, an increase in global awareness of Columbia’s reputation [and] the continued desirability of New York City,” said Jessica Marinaccio, dean of undergraduate admissions.
Elsewhere in the city, New York University saw its freshman-application numbers increase by 11 percent this year compared with last year.
The city’s largest college, City University of New York, is expecting a 10 percent increase in applicants for the fall semester.