But that may be changing.
For the last year, Barba has been reviewing applications on Apple Inc.’s iPad tablet device. She has been testing a new app, or computer program, being launched today.
Called Matchbox, the app has been adopted by five programs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s management school and the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
The company, also named Matchbox, has eight employees and is based in Kendall Square in Cambridge. It just secured a $2.5 million initial round of financing from a group of private investors and venture capital funds, including Greylock Partners, which has a Cambridge office.
The development of the software was spearheaded by Stephen Marcus, a former venture capitalist who is now the founder and chief executive of Matchbox. Marcus also once served on the admissions committee for MIT’s Sloan School of Business.
“I found the candidate evaluation process so slow and unwieldy that I offered to create an app over the summer, when the venture business is relatively quiet,’’ he said. “That turned into an eight-month project and now, a company.’’
Although college applications are often submitted online, admissions staffers at many schools find it more practical to work with printouts.
“Paper is still pervasive and persistent,’’ said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director at the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.
The online Common Application system already used by more than 400 colleges and universities is designed as a delivery system to get the digital forms to the schools, Nassirian said. It does not provide an easy way to manage the information on the forms, so “many campuses do end up printing and working with paper copies.’’
The Matchbox software seeks to reduce the paper clutter by integrating the entire process in a single app. The admissions staff at MIT Sloan has been beta testing the program for a year and has used it for three admissions cycles.
