<p>Congratulations, CC! We have been mentioned by The New York Times!</p>
<p>"It is crunch time for college applications — and for the computer system that handles the flood of last-minute applications.</p>
<p>On Tuesday, from 6:30 to 6:50 p.m., and on Wednesday from 9:45 to 10:45 a.m., there was a slowdown at the Common Application Web site, which handles online applications for some 350 colleges and universities. With the clock ticking toward a Jan. 1 deadline, the briefest delay can feel like a full-blown crisis to panicky high school seniors.</p>
<p>Within moments the slowdown showed up on College Confidential, a Web site where students share their worries. At 6:30, a student posted: “What are we supposed to do? I can’t fill anything out.” Minutes later, another wrote: “This is SO not cool.”</p>
<p>Parents were also upset. “This is completely unacceptable,” said Stephen Dear, a North Carolina father whose son was unable to submit his applications for more than an hour. “You have these wonderful kids who’ve been working so hard on their applications and they’re completely at the mercy of the Common Application.”</p>
<p>Rob Killion, executive director of the Common Application, played down the delays and said the site had been running some upgrades in anticipation of a flood of applications. “That process briefly slowed the system down a bit and perhaps even caused a ‘timeout’ error for some users,” Mr. Killion wrote. More than a million high school seniors use the Common Application. Last year, the organization said that more than 171,000 applications were filed in the 72 hours from Dec. 30 through Jan. 1., 75,000 of them on Dec. 31.</p>
<p>Seth Allen, dean of admission at Grinnell College and president of the Common Application, said many students worked on their applications for weeks but waited until the deadline to submit them.</p>
<p>“I think having an online application has exacerbated waiting till the last minute,” Mr. Allen said, “and if they’re getting timed out on the site, on New Year’s Eve day, that’s certainly going to make them nervous.”"</p>