Lights! Camera! College! YouTube is the Gateway to Admission

YouTube has legitimized Justin Bieber fans (even 3-year-olds), entertained millions with funny pet tricks and is now a gateway to a select college admission. Whoa, you say? How can that be? Wasn't the price of admission good grades and a painstakingly-belabored written college essay?

According to the Boston Globe, Tufts University has become the first selective college in the country to encourage applicants to amp up their application with a one-minute video, now available on YouTube for your viewing pleasure. And who doesn't want to see a self-admitted nerd combine her love of math and devotion to dance with quirky — and kinda dorky — dance moves expressing concepts like "scatter plot" and "pie graph?" How can you not be amused by a guy who has composed a song using only the noises made by ripped or crumpled paper? And isn't there a place in the incoming Tufts freshman class of 1,275 for an aspiring filmmaker who left his claymation boyhood behind and is now inventing his own camera dolly with PVC pipe and watertight housing for underwater shots?

Lee Coffin, Tufts' dean of admissions, says the video application allows for creativity that is hard to showcase in a flat paper essay. "It's easy to forget that there's a 17-year-old at the other end of this, and these videos are a very real reminder that these are high school seniors. They are goofy and they're sweet and they're still figuring things out," he says.

Six percent of the 15,436 applicants to Tufts submitted a video this year. Many of them have marshaled fans on YouTube to plea their case, like the "math dance girl" who garnered more than 6,000 views and comments like, "Current polls hold that math dance girl must come to Tufts. Otherwise people might transfer in protest."

So perhaps, Tufts might mix it up and nix the fat acceptance envelope for an emailed YouTube clip showing Lee Coffin saying, "We are pleased to inform you, you've been accepted!"

Photo by DHackney via Flickr.