Patti Grace and Jeffery Gates are top members of an organization that sends agents to international locations to recruit potential operatives, faces ever growing numbers of stealth applicants and leaves almost no paper trail.

That organization: the Binghamton University office of admissions.

Grace is the director of Undergraduate Recruitment at BU. Her job is to oversee all methods of reaching out to potential BU applicants. Gates, the director of Admissions Operations, makes sure the annual application process runs smoothly for those who process and review the applications.

Gates said the number of stealth applicants ‘ students who have no previous contact with the University before their application ‘ is on the rise, a sign that high school students are learning about colleges in new ways.

‘We’re giving the students more information, they’re getting more information, through social media,’ Gates said. He said that the numbers for inquiries are not as high as they used to be, but application numbers continue to increase, a phenomenon that seems to be occurring nationwide.

And though high school students are getting more and more information from the Web, there is still nothing like doing things the old-fashioned way.

‘We travel a lot,’ Grace said. She and her team travel about six to eight weeks per year, she said, promoting BU throughout the country and the world. They visit high schools, set up at college fairs, sit on panels and presentations and even meet with students and families one-on-one.

Though the target spots are primarily in the Northeast, where BU’s reputation is already strong, some of the marketing is taken to the international stage. This fall for example, a troupe of BU admissions officials will be traveling to Southeast Asia to generate BU hype.

As for that paper trail, it is increasingly becoming a thing of the past. A host of new practices and changes in technology mean that the BU admissions office works almost entirely electronically.

According to Gates, about 95 percent of people who applied to schools in the SUNY system applied online. New technologies like the Common Application and the practice of converting even the few paper documents into digital files have also contributed to the shift to the digital world, and, for the first time last year, BU’s application review process took place entirely online.

Advances in computer systems have also made it easier to keep up with the workload while the admissions office staff is thinning, a result of years of budget reductions.

Yet even in the face of added financial pressure, BU continues to innovate. The group of students applying for admission in fall 2011 will be the first to be able to self-report their high school grades. They will no longer have to wait for their guidance counsellor to send their transcript to BU.

Though this is already standard practice for some schools throughout the country, including the University of California System, BU and Stony Brook University will pilot this relatively uncommon practice for SUNY.

‘This will change the face of college admissions,’ Gates said, stating it would allow students to complete their applications far more quickly.

Making the application process easier has also led to an increase in the number of applications, according to Grace, at a rate that outpaces the increase in the number of spots BU can offer. This has meant that admissions officials have to turn away more students than ever.

‘Just by the sheer volume, you know that you’re not going to be able to admit every qualified student,’ Grace said. ‘I would say that’s one of the hardest parts of the job.’