Applications will no longer be accepted on paper from people wanting to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It says that the move to electronic form-filling will save hundreds of hours of staff time.

Sloan is anticipating big savings

Students wanting to enter the business school in autumn 1999 will have to send their details through an online application form, available through a Website.

'Natural next step'

The only concession to paperwork will be letters of rejection or acceptance, which will be sent through the post.

"In our traditional process, we printed and mailed 30,000 applications," said Sloan's associate director of admissions, Rod Garcia, who welcomed the savings in cost and administrative effort.

"This is a significant step,eliminating the input and storing of 3,500 returned applications.

A computer is easier to find than a typewriter, says the admissions director

" We're taking the natural next step from using the Internet as an information source to now using it for transactions," he said.

Although the Sloan School of Management is unusual in refusing paper applications, a number of colleges in the United States have begun to admit students through electronic application forms alongside conventional methods.

Apply to Harvard by Internet

The 'GradAdvantage' web site used by Sloan offers a service for online applications to business schools at universities including Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh, Columbia in New York, Washington University in St Louis and Harvard in Massachusetts.