Molly can't sleep because she doesn't know whether she should drop AP chemistry. Leo hopes to get into an Ivy League college, but he fears losing touch with his Dominican roots. Michael thinks a lot about the dazzling academic success of his older sister as he tries to find his own path to college. Lindsay gets three or four envelopes from colleges each day, yet she wonders if she should go away to college at all, because of her mother's illness.

These four students star in In 500 Words or Less, a documentary film about the admissions process. The film, which is scheduled for release in May, captures the lives of four families in suburban New Jersey; Yonkers, N.Y.; Atlanta; and the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. It reveals the gut-churning anxiety of the application process, at least for those students who apply to super-selective colleges (all four here fit the bill). It captures...

Josh Kurtz is brand-new explorer in the wilderness of college admissions. Recently, he set off to survey the landscape the way many parents do—by packing up the car and driving to campus after campus after campus.

Mr. Kurtz; his wife, Caryl Ashrey; and their two daughters left their home, in Takoma Park, Md., late on a Friday night. They returned eight days later after visiting seven colleges and putting well over 1200 miles on their Hyundai Elantra. They filled up the gas tank at least five times. They stayed in cheap motels. They bought healthy food when they could find it and stopped at a Cracker Barrel when they could not. All told, the trip cost the family at least $750, and Mr. Kurtz, a journalist, blew five days of vacation time.

So, was it all worth it? Sure, Mr. Kurtz says. After all, his daughter Zoe is a high-school junior, and the trip allowed her to get a feel for...

Transfer students are relatively anonymous players in this season of front-page admissions angst, but on many campuses they are a crucial part of the enrollment picture. And some colleges expect to rely more heavily on transfer students to fill their classes in the coming years.

A report released today by the National Association for College Admission Counseling explores the realm of students who start at one institution and end up at another—about a third of all college students.  (The report is based on NACAC data, and was administered in partnership with a dissertation project at Michigan State University.)

Nationally, the average acceptance rate for transfer students was 64 percent in the fall of 2006, compared with 69 percent for first-year students, says the report. On average, colleges enrolled 64 percent of the transfer students they admitted, compared with 42 percent of the...

Easton, Pa. -- Picking up the telephone and calling total strangers is not the easiest job in the world. Just ask Nirav Giri.

Mr. Giri, a freshman, is just one in a crew of students at Lafayette College who have been dialing up accepted applicants this spring. It's just one part of the college's multifaceted strategy for ensuring a good "yield" (the percentage of admitted applicants who ultimately enroll), which I describe in an article ("The Sweet and Subtle Science of Wooing the Admitted") published in this week's dead-tree edition.

Lafayette prides itself on providing students with personal attention, and the telephone calls to undecided applicants are meant to transmit that message. And, of course, to give them an opportunity to ask questions.

Recently, one student Mr. Giri called asked whether or not Lafayette was a party school. Mr. Giri paused. "I wasn't sure if he wanted it to...

In spring, the flowers bloom, the birds sing, and U.S. News & World Report produces a lot of mail.

Recently, the magazine sent its annual "peer assessment" survey to colleges and universities, the results of which will influence the next round of college rankings, due in August. This year, U.S. News once again solicited the views of high-school counselors, who view the admissions realm from the trenches.
 
It's a fascinating pairing. On the one hand, many counselors have a deep well of information (and opinions) about particular colleges. Some know far more than the college presidents, admission deans, and provosts who fill out the peer-assessment survey. So why not ask counselors for their two cents?
 
"We highly respect counselors," says Robert J. Morse, director of data research for U.S. News. "They have a lot of expertise about colleges—it's their job."
 
Nonetheless, counselors, in...

Depending on your view of the state of college admissions, the following tale will either make you smile—or affirm your suspicion that things are going to hell in a handbasket designed, created, and brought to you by marketing firms.

Here are the facts. Last Saturday, Wilkes University, a private institution in Pennsylvania, put its mascot, "the Colonel," and 30 of its students on a school bus, which drove to five towns in the Keystone State. At each stop, this merry band of travelers, clad in bright yellow "Be Colonel" T-shirts, swarmed an unsuspecting high-school senior who plans to attend the university this fall. Members of this surprise greeting committee (the "Colonel Coalition") waved yellow rally towels and signs that said "Welcome to Wilkes" and "Fall 2010."

Tori Sallo, who works part time at All That Pizazz Salon, in Clarks Summit, was sweeping the floor there when, all of a ...

When Andrew Wright worked at Eastern Michigan University, he helped plan big receptions for admitted students each winter. Such events have long been considered essential rituals in college admissions, and the university's enrollment data indicated that they had a high "yield" (the percentage of students who ultimately enroll).

But one day Mr. Wright looked more carefully at the numbers and discovered something interesting: Over the years, about 90 percent of the students who attended those receptions had already signed up to visit the university and register for classes. The data told him that no-shows for those visits were rare and that nearly all students who attended went on to enroll in the fall. So what did this mean?

"They were already hooked," Mr. Wright said. "We were spending thousands upon thousands of dollars on a program that was unnecessary."

Mr. Wright, now assistant...

Last year, Albion College planned to enroll 475 to 500 freshmen, but ended up with just 434. At small colleges, that kind of shortfall hurts a lot.

Albion is liberal-arts institution in Michigan, which has the nation's highest unemployment rate. Jobs are on everyone's mind, and that includes college applicants. "We were hearing from more and more students who felt like they needed help planning their careers," says Donna Randall, Albion's president.

So Albion's leaders decided to make career preparation an even larger part of the student experience—and the centerpiece of its new marketing pitch. The result was "Albion Advantage," an in-depth plan for helping students explore their personal interests and develop career goals.

Call it a recruitment strategy for the age of employment uncertainty. The plan comes with a pledge from Albion: graduates who struggle to find jobs in their field...

The Common Application has become a fixture of the admissions realm, and many people in the field think that's a good thing. After all, it's a tool that simplifies the complexity of the application process for students.

But what would happen if colleges also adopted a common form for their financial-aid offers? It's an idea that Nina W. Marks endorses in an opinion piece in today's Washington Post.

Ms. Marks is president of Collegiate Directions Inc., a nonprofit group that works with low-income, first-generation students in Maryland. In her op-ed, "Simplifying the College Aid Maze," Ms. Marks describes April's annual fat-envelope fever from the perspective of students who lack both wealth and college savvy. "Aid offers differ markedly in their delivery date, format, language and presentation," she writes, explaining how those differences tend to complicate the process of reviewing and...

By popular demand, I'm following up on a recent post about those shiny, happy admissions announcements. You know, the ones that sing the praises of admitted students and tout record-breaking numbers of applications.
 
The wave of superlatives will not relent, it seems. On Wednesday, the University of California at Los Angeles sent out a news release describing the institution as the "most popular campus in the nation," and offering the numbers to prove it. The announcement paraphrases one administrator as saying that this year's admitted students are "outstanding in every way."
 
One might ask how someone could achieve complete outstandingness after only 17 or 18 years on this planet. You might conclude that what such students really need is a new spaceship, not four years of college. 

Or you might do what I did, which was to imagine higher education in a strange, parallel universe, where...