Students weigh their gut feelings, while some schools try some carefully calibrated wooing.
But for others, it's the biggest fork in the road of their young lives - with no yellow bricks to follow. What complicates the decision further is that increasingly, students are getting the hard-sell from campuses, whether in the form of a personalized acceptance letter or a call from a famous graduate. But don't tell that to Kanoe Lum. She wants to be a broadcast journalist, and applied to seven schools near major media markets. Harvard was second because she heard the Cambridge, Mass., school was so academically oriented she might miss out on a fully rounded campus experience.