Want to get a good return on the money you fork over to pay for tuition? Then you might want to consider going to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where you'll make almost $1.7 million more than you would with a high school diploma. That's one take-away from a new college ranking out this week from PayScale Inc., which compiles employee salary data. Not surprisingly, media coverage of the report has latched onto which colleges provide the best bang for your buck.

But it's not quite that simple.

Colleges are ranked according to a 30-year net return on investment, which the report calculates by taking how much more a graduate of the college would make than a high school graduate over 30 years and subtracting the sticker price of the college. This figure is then multiplied by the college's graduation rate (the report assumes that for a student who begins but does not graduate...

Applying to college should be easy, but not too easy. Such is the refrain among some admissions officers who have seen sharp increases in applications over the last decade. After all, more applicants do not necessarily mean better applicants.

A recent experiment in Indiana reveals the complexity of application increases. Last year, the Indiana Commission for Higher Education started “College Go!,” a program created to prepare high-school students for college. During one week in October, Indiana’s public universities and many of its private colleges waived application fees for all high-school seniors in the state.

Supporters say the program prompted students who might not have applied otherwise to cast a net. But as the Herald-Times, of Bloomington, Ind., and the Associated Press report, the program frustrated some of the state’s admissions officers, who say their staffs had wasted time...

Atlanta—There’s no such thing as the Testing Police, but there is such thing as Robert A. Schaeffer, who’s been known to sound the siren about how colleges use standardized tests in admissions.

On Tuesday, Mr. Schaeffer, public-education director for FairTest, a watchdog group, described his plans to compile a “testing hall of shame” -- a list of colleges that use cutoff scores in their evaluations of applicants. He hopes that the list will persuade such institutions to stop relying on minimum ACT and SAT scores, a practice that the National Association for College Admission Counseling, among other groups, has condemned.

Mr. Schaeffer’s remarks came during the annual conference of the Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools here at Agnes Scott College. Mr. Schaeffer predicted that more and more colleges would go test-optional as the “demand” for such policies grew among...

Atlanta — Standardized tests are the mother-in-law of college admissions: demanding, influential, and not going away anytime soon. So it was inevitable that test-preparation would eventually become a fixture in high schools throughout the nation.

On Monday, college counselors expressed their ambivalence about this trend here at the annual meeting of the Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools. During a frank, one-hour discussion of the issue, several counselors lamented the growing prominence of test-prep inside the buildings where they work. Said one: "We're all doing things we wouldn't have dreamed of doing 10 years ago."

That is, incorporating test-prep courses into the official curriculum. Or offering test-prep after school and on weekends. A few counselors said their schools require students to take such courses; others said their schools strongly encourage them. ...

A new paper has rekindled one of the most controversial questions in the long history of the nation’s most famous test: Is the SAT racially biased?

In 2003, Roy O. Freedle, a retired senior research psychologist at the Educational Testing Service, took up the question in an article published in the Harvard Educational Review. His conclusion was that black students often do better than white students of similar ability on difficult SAT questions, but that they do worse than their white counterparts on easy items. He suggested that easy questions use a common vocabulary, making them more open to interpretation based on a test taker's cultural background.

Mr. Freedle’s conclusions were rejected by the test's backers, the College Board and the Educational Testing Service, which have long maintained that the test is not biased.

Now, two researchers who replicated Mr. Freedle’s methodology ...

The immigration debate has swept through state houses, town squares, and NBA arenas. And this week it came to the nation's most famous campus.

On Monday, Eric Balderas, an undocumented student who attends Harvard University, was detained by immigration officials at a Texas airport. Mr. Balderas, who has lived in the United States illegally since he was 4, now faces the possibility of deportation. In an interview with The Boston Globe, Mr. Balderas, a biology major, said: "I honestly never thought I'd make it into college because of my status, but I just really enjoyed school too much and I gave it a shot."

The case has rallied immigration advocates who support the passage of the federal Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act (or Dream Act). The legislation would allow states to charge illegal immigrant in-state tuition. It would also provide a path to citizenship for...

On Monday, William H. Hughes learned that Newsweek magazine had ranked his high school as one of the best in the nation. To be exact, it was tied for No. 1,622 on a list of 1,623 high schools.

Was that an honor? Sure, says Mr. Hughes, principal at Winfield High School, in West Virginia. "We're excited about it," he says. "It's a good thing, but it was not our goal to make the list. Our goal was to have more students in AP classes."

Newsweek creates its list of "America's Best High Schools" by taking the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, and Cambridge (AICE) tests given at a particular school each year, and then dividing that total by the number of graduating seniors. Schools with at least one test per graduate made the list (about 6 percent of high schools).

The formula, known as the "Challenge Index," is controversial, to say the least. For one thing, the...

In many tales about college admissions, the protagonists are nearing a conclusion. The nervous high-school senior, fretting as application deadlines loom. The overwhelmed junior, juggling college guides. Those stages of the admission process are compelling, even dramatic.

Nonetheless, by the time students reach the later years of high school, they have (or have not) done many things that influence where they will apply—and whether they will attend college at all. What courses did they take? What goals did they set? What kind of information did they receive about postsecondary options? Such questions are especially crucial for underrepresented students whose parents did not attend college.

These days, many people are thinking harder about how to engage families in conversations about the admissions process well in advance, no small task in an era of staff and budget cuts. On Wednesday, ...

Two-thirds of prospective applicants said the economy had "greatly" or "somewhat" influenced their decision about where to apply to college, according to a recent survey of high-school seniors.

The results of the 2010 College Decision Impact Survey reveal that the recession continues to shape families' decisions in various ways. A majority of students - particularly those who cited financial concerns - said they were interested in attending a public institution. Yet 38 percent of seniors with grade-point averages of 3.5 or higher expressed an interest in private college, up from 29 percent in 2009.

Compared to last year, students who preferred private colleges were less likely to report that the listed tuition, or "sticker price," would affect whether they would submit an application (33 percent compared to 42 percent). The finding suggests that more families are thinking carefully...

Washington—On Thursday afternoon, nobody was allowed to say the word "Harvard." That's what Paul Osterman told his audience here at a conference hosted by the American Enterprise Institute. After all, Mr. Osterman, a professor of human resources and management at M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management, came to discuss community colleges, which serve a much larger proportion of American students than elite, four-year colleges do.

Mr. Osterman discussed findings from a new paper, in which he concludes that "mission creep" hinders community colleges from improving student outcomes. In short, he argued that many community colleges try to do too much, a tendency that perhaps stems from a strength of two-year institutions—their ability to innovate.

Moreover, Mr. Osterman lamented that public discussion about such institutions tends to focus disproportionately on work-force development. Roughly ...