Admissions: 27 hours and counting

After months of breathless anticipation, eager applicants are just 27 hours away from being able to go online and find out if they had been granted a spot in the Class of 2013. Anticipation has been building around the net: The Daily Beast is out with a story on the "Dirty Secrets of College Waitlists," the Princeton page at collegeconfidential.com is going crazy...even the New York Times decided to mark the occasion by launching a new blog called "The Choice."

So here's the big question: what will the acceptance rates be? The Times quotes Harvard admissions king Bill Fitzsimmons as saying he will accept just 7 percent of the 29,112 who applied-- down from 8 percent last year. Stanford saw an astonishing 30,350 applicants-- a 20 percent increase over last year! Officials there estimate a 7.5 percent acceptance rate. Yale, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Penn and Princeton are keeping quiet on predictions.

Look for West College to make their official announcement later this week: Will Princeton accept less than the 9.25 percent for the Class of 2012. What about the 9.5 percent for the Class of 2011? The 10.2 percent for the Class of 2010?