The news came so unremarkably.

It was a school day during the foot-dragging week preceding spring break, and I sat at my kitchen table transposing music for my orchestra recital alongside my mother, who was sifting through mail as dinner simmered on the stove.

With my mind crowded with the college chatter of classmates who were all receiving their decision letters, I asked my mother if any news had made it into the mailbox yet. My eyes never left the waves of notes on my sheet music, but my ears waited attentively for a response.

“Well, an e-mail from Scripps came,” she answered, gently.

The scratching of my pencil halted and I looked up in jittery excitement. She didn’t elaborate immediately, as if she was trying to concentrate on tearing junk mail into several pieces. The puzzling situation prompted a tumbling of emotions, including a debilitating chill at the base of my spine and, before long, the feeling of spiders crawling up my vertebral column to fester in the nooks of my insecurity.

To state it simply, I was freaking out.

“And…?” I inquired, my voice laced with mild agitation.

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In the few days since my colleague Eric Platt and I began publishing our running tally on how many students applied to — and were accepted by — various colleges and universities this year, the ledger has more than doubled, to 100.

Those of you who’ve been following this exercise know that our table is to be read with several caveats in mind. One is that it is far too early in the endgame of this year’s decision process to draw meaningful conclusions from these figures, especially considering that they represent a fraction of the nation’s four-year colleges and universities. Moreover, as a number of commenters have noted, colleges and universities sometimes spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on mass-mailing campaigns to drive up the number of applications they receive — and, in effect, drive down their admission rates — so that what might appear to be instant popularity could well be manufactured.

Which is not to say that these figures are not telling and instructive — even for those of us who did not apply to any of these institutions this year. For example, if the acceptance rates this year at Williams College in Massachusetts (17 percent) or Harvey Mudd in California (20 percent) appear daunting to those readers who may be several years away from applying, they might consider that Elon in North Carolina admitted more than half who applied, and that Clark University, in Worcester, Mass., accepted more than two-thirds of its applicants.

For those readers working in college admissions offices, please continue to send us your figures via e-mail to thechoicenyt@gmail.com.

Students, parents and counselors are welcome to post comments using the box below. Many thanks to those of you who continue to tell us your admissions stories on the post, “Your Envelope: Fat or Thin.” There are now nearly 300 comments in that stream, and you can read them here.

About a year ago, there was a girl in my Spanish class who was a foreign exchange student from Santiago, Chile. She gave a brief PowerPoint presentation about her life back home, replete with pictures of mountain ranges and colonial architecture. During the Q. &A. session, one student asked, “How much is a year of college tuition there?”

“About three thousand U.S. dollars,” she estimated. The class laughed. “What?” she asked, bewildered. “Is it less expensive here?”

I want to move to Chile.

This past month, as envelopes (big and small) have rolled into my mailbox from colleges across the country, the thought of money has lingered behind every acceptance.

How much do we have? How much have we saved? How can we make more? Dinner table conversation has skirted around the issue, only occasionally addressing it outright.

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So much has happened over the past few months. My feelings throughout this crazy milestone we call the college admissions process have changed entirely so many times that it’s difficult to keep track of them all.

I started as an overwhelmed sophomore, then transformed into a generally apprehensive junior. This year, I began by experiencing myriad emotions, all with varying degrees of pleasantness, and some suspiciously similar to the Five Stages of Grief. Everything from stress, sadness, and frustration to excitement, joy, and, ultimately, acceptance.

As time goes on, and the whole crazy concept of moving out, going to college, and (gasp!) growing up looms closer, I become less and less preoccupied with the fears and ecstasies of getting into all of my colleges, and more pleased with the idea that, no matter what, I’m in. I am going to college.

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Tens of thousands of starry-eyed students apply to America’s most exclusive colleges each fall and tens of thousands of hearts are broken each spring, much as they will be this week as graduating seniors hear from the Ivy League.

It was not always thus.

A stroll through classified ads from more than a century ago shows that college was once a buyer’s bazaar for qualified students, and universities rolled out the welcome mat and reached out for the students they coveted.

Top-drawer universities like Harvard and Columbia advertised for students steadily through August and September right up to opening day and offered entrance exams the weekend before classes resumed to give students every chance of taking and passing them.

Harvard even played down the difficulty of its entrance exam in ads, reprinted above, that it placed in The New York Times in September 1870, noting that of the 210 candidates who took its test the June before, “185 were admitted.”

In other words, nearly seven out of eight candidates who sat for the exam made the cut, a statistic that few selective colleges these days would pay money to broadcast.
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By now, many of you who are applicants (or parents of applicants) for the Class of 2015 have received your admissions decisions.

When The Times launched The Choice blog two years ago this week, one of the goals I set for it was to insure that applicants could put their fat and thin envelopes in some broader context. In beginning to draft the chart of 2011 admissions statistics you see above, my colleague Eric Platt and I wanted those of you who got denied, say, by Columbia to know you were in good company: only 7 percent were accepted this year.

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Illustration by The New York Times

For those of you applying to college this year, these last few days — and in some cases, weeks — may feel a bit like those early scenes in the “Willie Wonka” books and movies, when young Charlie furiously tears open candy wrappers to see if he has scored a “golden ticket.”

And so, we at The Choice have a proposition for you: we hope you will consider sharing your news, whether uplifting, disappointing or inconclusive. At the least, we’d like to build an instant, virtual support system here on the blog — and give us all the feeling of sitting around an enormous kitchen table, or a computer console.

As the number of colleges that have yet to release their decisions dwindles — among the last are the eight colleges and universities of the Ivy League, which are scheduled to inform applicants Wednesday at 5 p.m. Eastern time — I hope you will use the comment box below to let us know how things went for you, or your child.

Those of you who have long since passed through this process as applicants, or even as parents, are also welcome to tell us your stories, for this is truly a time when some much-needed perspective is in order.

It is one thing for me, as a journalist and an observer, to tell those applicants who didn’t make it into their first choice, or even their sixth, that all will surely be well. It is another to hear it from those who have been in similar situations, and gone on to have great college experiences (and lives, too).

So let’s talk, and commiserate.

Saturday morning, and my window is wide open. Is that the garbage truck? No, too quiet. I stumble out of bed and make it to the front door without running into anything. This is a good day so far. Greg gets back into his truck and pulls away, stopping twice more before turning out of the cul-de-sac and vanishing around the corner.

I won’t see him again until Monday afternoon; why can’t the mail come on Sundays?

Pants. I need pants to go outside. My feet take me on a round-trip journey to my room, with a stopover at my dresser and a painful collision with its sharp corner. Almost awake, I trek barefoot to the mailbox. Nobody is watching; I checked to be sure. Lots of little envelopes today, and a few big ones.

I casually sort through the mail, ignoring the return addresses on the large packets and pretending that the rest of the stack deserves equal attention. I get down to the last three business-size envelopes: a checkup reminder for my dog, a dental bill for my dad, and, with an impulsive shudder, a college letter.

False alarm. I didn’t even apply to Iowa State University.

Five big pieces of mail. The first, a medical journal for my dad, the second, another journal for my dad, but then, excitement. Apprehension. Joy? Not so fast.

Under a cooking magazine for my mom, I spy “Congratulations” in giant blue letters at the top of large-packet number four. Beneath that envelope, a warm “Welcome!”

Could they be for me?

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The Hall Pass Tour Trailer on Vimeo.

During the eighth season of “American Idol,” Janelle Bechdol survived the early rounds of auditions and heard the panel of judges say the words that every contestant longs to hear: she was going to Hollywood. Viewers even caught a glimpse of her singing her favorite song, Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

Though she was ultimately cut from the competition well before the final rounds, Ms. Bechdol, 25, has never lost her desire to perform, and to inspire. To that end, she is about to launch a concert tour she helped conceive — a musical revue of rap and hip hop called “Hall Pass” — that will make the rounds of high schools (and some middle schools), initially in New York but ultimately nationally. Its mission is to get students excited to go to college.

“Kids get the message from their parents and teachers that college is the way to go,” said Ms. Bechdol, who graduated from the State University of New York in Albany with a degree in communications and classical music. “We were thinking it might be better received if it came from a 20-something musician who looks and sounds a lot like what they might see in mainstream media.”
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