Registration open for 'virtual college fair'
— -- It won't come to this, but none of the 10,000-plus students expected at today's big college fair will know if Cristan Trahey and her staff show up in their pajamas.
"Some of us will be in our office," says Trahey, acting admissions director at American University, a private college in Washington, D.C. "Some of us will be at home on our laptops."
The two-day event, billed as a first-of-its-kind international "virtual college fair," is from 3-11 p.m. ET today and Wednesday at www.collegeweeklive.com. It's expected to give students worldwide a chance to talk to admissions officers at about 100 colleges, see streaming video of experts and hear panel discussions on the college admissions process — all without rising from their armchairs.
The price of admission: Students must give up an e-mail address, their gender and expected year of high school graduation.
As of last weekend, more than 10,000 were registered. Organizers, who solicited attendees through social networking sites such as MySpace, say they'll keep registration open.
"It's a good adjunct to other, face-to-face interactions," says Barmak Nassirian of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. But he says it will never replace the traditional college fair. And Nassirian says he is "yet to be convinced" that the event, which requires a broadband connection and a bit of familiarity with college admissions, is a good match for low-income students whose parents didn't attend college.
"These are the least-connected members of our society and tend to need the most intensive of interactions," he says.
It's hard to deny that students of all economic stripes increasingly exist online. Members of the so-called "millennial" generation, born since 1982, get their homework online, do research online and, through social networking, communicate with a geometrically expanding network of peers. "They're completely different in terms of their communication preferences, even more than they were four or five years ago," says Trahey. "This really allows us the opportunity to speak with students in a forum in which they're most comfortable."
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