Some of the videos have developed a YouTube following. The popular favorite is probably Amelia Downs, with more than 6,000 views for her video combining “two of my favorite things: being a nerd and dancing,” in which she performs a bar graph, a scatter plot, a pie chart, and a sine and cosine graph.

Image Matt Golden’s YouTube video for Tufts University.

“I tried tap dancing at first, because that’s what I do most, but we only have a cheap digital camera, and the sound came out badly,” said Ms. Downs, who is from Charlotte, N.C. “My best friend filmed me, and we did each shot once or twice. I did the editing in about an hour, and the computer crashed five times while I was doing it.”

Still, Ms. Downs said she thought it was “very cool” that Tufts invited videos.

For a number of colleges, this is the year of the video, what with Yale’s 16-minute YouTube offering, “That’s Why I Chose Yale,” a spoof of “High School Musical,” and “Reading Season,” a musical by admissions counselors at the University of Delaware.

Even without prompting, admissions officials say, a growing number of students submit videos. Maria Laskaris, the dean of admissions at Dartmouth, noticed the trend last year, and said this year had brought even more videos, mostly showcasing music, theater or dance talents.

For Tufts, the videos have been a delightful way to get to know the applicants.

“At heart, this is all about a conversation between a kid and an admissions officer,” Mr. Coffin said. “You see their floppy hair and their messy bedrooms, and you get a sense of who they are. We have a lot of information about applicants, but the videos let them share their voice.”

Videos are genuinely optional, he said, so not having one does not count against a student — and a bad video would not hurt an applicant’s admission chances “unless there was something really disgusting.”