Most members of the senior class, including senior Kirthana Ramesh, flooded the corridor to the office with their white college packets on Sept. 12.

Similar to many others in the line to get their packets checked off by guidance counselors, Ramesh had all eight spaces for early action or early decision colleges completely filled.

Five years ago, however, Ramesh’s brother, 2011 alum Navneet Ramesh, had only one college filled out on his early packet.

This was normal, but according to guidance counselor Alinna Satake, there has been a large increase in the number of early colleges that seniors are applying to in the past two to three years. This year, according to the guidance department, approximately 70 percent of the senior class applied early.

Seniors have the choice of applying either early-action, early-decision or regular decision. Students who choose to apply early-action submit their applications during the fall of their senior year, rather than during winter and early second semester. Those who apply early-decision, if accepted, are required to attend the school the following fall because of the binding agreement. The only approved and legitimate reason to withdraw from the commitment is insufficient financial aid.

Kirthana chose to apply early action to eight schools, including popular out-of-state public schools like the University of Michigan and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. With eight early applications to complete, Kirthana at times has sometimes found it difficult to think of original ideas and complete all her applications on time by the Nov. 1 deadline.

“It was definitely a struggle for me to finish all of my early applications and put some of my best work for each college,” she said. “Also, the 100-word college supplements were really hard to write since I couldn’t say everything I wanted to. I had to reword sentences and cut a lot of them to fit the word count.”

But Kirthana said the time crunch was worth it because students applying to colleges early have a higher acceptance rate.

“Especially for some schools that are my ‘reach’ colleges, I think applying early shows that I really want to go there and that I am willing to put in the time and effort to submit to an earlier deadline,” Kirthana said.

Satake said this has been a view shared by most seniors for many years. More colleges are communicating to students that they have higher acceptance rates for early applicants in order to assure an accurate prediction of percentage yield, the number of students colleges predict will accept their acceptance letter. According to Satake, colleges want to have a good idea of how many accepted students will actually enroll.

“Anytime colleges can get a student to commit earlier, it is in their favor since they are closer to that percentage yield,” Satake said.

The load of essays for students is not the only effect of applying to more schools early. Faculty members have also been feeling the stress of getting packets and letters out by early November or even early October, for schools such as Georgia Tech that have an Oct. 15 deadline.

“I think that all of us who are writing recommendation letters feel the extra stress,” Satake said. “It’s a very accelerated timeline that even if I try to write one letter per day, I don’t have enough time to finish all of them.”

Because 60 to 70 percent of the writing load happens before Nov. 1, the counselors had to request college packets in early September, compared to past years where they accepted the packets in October.

Each year, Satake said students become more competitive in this “rat race to college” and feel the need to compete against their peers. Applying to many early schools provides a “confidence booster” for students since in December, they will get a general idea of what their options are.

For senior Caroline Li, the incentive of having many of her college responses in hand by December was a major factor in picking early deadlines. Li applied early action to nine colleges, far more than the average senior. But for her, it is more of a personal choice: She knows that if she gives herself a later deadline, she probably wouldn’t write her essays until the end.

Though finishing applications with an earlier deadline prove to be stressful for seniors who are also tackling their classes, Satake suggest that seniors still pick a few colleges to apply early to.

“Though students will be reviewed against a more competitive pool by applying early, receiving responses during first semester gives students reassurance that ‘Hey, I’m going to go to college,’” Satake said.