The agonizing wait for admission has become a thing of the past for prospective ISU freshmen.

Applicants used to be subjected to a wait that lasted anywhere from a couple weeks to two months — depending on the time of year that they submit their application — to discover whether or not they had been accepted. Iowa State now offers a two-business-day turnaround on applications that U.S. high school seniors submit online.

Now applicants can log online and submit their academic record online, including their class rank, composite ACT score, grade point average and number of years of courses in English, math, science, social studies and foreign language they will complete while in high school.

This change was made due to the realization made by Phil Caffrey, senior associate director of admissions, and Marc Harding, assistant vice president of admissions, that high schoolers’ transcripts were causing a backup in the admissions process.

“We receive more applications than students that actually enroll,” said Caffrey. “It’s a trend that’s evident nationwide, where students fill out applications for multiple schools and wait to see where they get accepted. This creates a large pool of applications, so we end up spending two-thirds of our time processing applications for students that never even enroll at Iowa State.”

While falsifying academic records is a possibility, students who decide to enroll at Iowa State are required to submit an official transcript from their high school. Caffrey spoke with his counterparts at Rutgers University about the possibility of applicant dishonesty when they were considering the new system.

“They found that a surprisingly small percentage of students will exaggerate their academic record,” said Caffrey. “They actually found that more students are actually likely to underestimate their record when they’re self reporting.”

If this is the case and applicants underestimate their academic record, they will receive a notice that with the information they submitted they don’t meet the admissions requirements, but their application will be individually assessed by the admissions office, Caffrey said.

Iowa State is the first to offer such an admissions program in the Midwest. Students who apply and meet the requirements for freshman admission are notified of the status of their application via e-mail within two business days whether or not they are accepted. On the third day their official admission letter is mailed.

Lorraine Duitsman, post-secondary strategist at Abraham Lincoln High School in Council Bluffs, works with seniors applying for college and scholarships and sees the benefit that such a quick turnaround on applications as for students.

“If you think of scholarships and everything, the sooner [students] know whether or not they’re accepted the better,” Duitsman said. “Knowing if you’re accepted so quickly allows students to apply for things like their housing soon and can ultimately help them decide [which school they’ll attend].”

Caffrey hopes the new system puts Iowa State at an advantage for recruitment.

“If a student finds out two days after they apply that they were accepted it might impact their decision if they have to wait longer to find out if they’re accepted to other schools that they applied to,” Caffrey said. “In this day and age, given the technology, the typical consumer expects a response automatically so they’re no longer happy with waiting.”

Along with helping prospective students make decisions about their college education more efficiently, the new process for admissions will also help the employees of the admissions department. The burden that once accompanied the approximately 15,000 applications from U.S. freshmen each year has been greatly lessened with the addition of the self-reporting process.

“I estimate that there will be about 10,000 fewer high school transcripts that we will have to deal with,” Caffrey said. “This is an enormous relief in terms of the burden of processing these applications. It allows us to process other applications for transfer, graduate or international [students’] applications.”

Aside from time and manpower, the new process will save the admissions department thousands of dollars in overtime expenses that they would usually incur at this time of the year, Caffrey said.