This fall, recruiters for the College of Wooster visited Jamaica, Hong Kong, Japan and California. But despite the sweeping travel schedule, they couldn't be everywhere.

So new Admissions Director Mary Karen Vellines signed the private Wayne County college up for what is being billed as the first virtual college fair in the country — CollegeWeekLive, which began Tuesday and continues today.

Wooster is one of four Ohio colleges that bought a ''booth'' at http://www.collegeweeklive.com, for the chance to ''meet'' with students it might not see otherwise.

Two Ohio public colleges, Ohio Uni
versity and Miami University, and the private University of Dayton also are participating.

''It's an experiment,'' Wooster's Vellines said. ''We're looking forward to seeing if this will attract students.''

Last year, 3,169 students applied for this fall's class at Wooster; 78 percent were accepted and 545 were admitted.

Yet at $40,022 a year for tuition, room and board, the college is pricey. Despite liberal financial aid averaging $21,450 a year, some students may pass on Wooster without giving it a chance.

Now they don't have to, said Michael Lewis, marketing director for Platform Q, the Needham, Mass., company that is conducting the fair.

''It's easy for them to interact with schools,'' he said. ''From a student perspective, they can target which ones they want to see with a certain amount of anonymity if they're apprehensive about their GPA or their test scores.''

With numbers still growing Tuesday, 130 colleges and universities had plunked down anywhere from $395 to as much as $2,000 for increased functionality for the chance to meet with 15,000 students who had signed up to participate.

Students were recruited for the event via the online social networks Facebook and MySpace, sites where young people congregate en masse, Lewis said.

Today's event will include live streaming video of keynote speakers, including Penny Hastings, author of How to Win a Sports Scholarship, at 9 p.m. and live video chats with students at the Boston Conservatory at 4 p.m., Tulane University at 7 p.m. and the University of Vermont at 8 p.m., among others.

Lewis, the fair's marketing director, said the event may be especially appealing to students who can't afford to visit colleges, who live outside the United States or who are interested in so many schools that visiting each is an impossibility.

Institutions as geographically diverse as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Arizona and the University of San Francisco are taking part.

At Wooster, all 10 members of Vellines' staff were trained on the kinds of questions they may be asked in the real-time, interactive question-and-answer sessions.

Yet while Wooster uses technology, ''nothing replaces the person-to-person contact. Ideally, we would love everybody to come and see the campus,'' Vellines said.

For those who can't, the fair — free to students, parents and guidance counselors — continues from 3 to 11 p.m. today.