Paying for college is a big concern for many parents of prospective students, but that doesn't mean they're having detailed conversations about it with their children.

Half of parents have had a detailed discussion about how they will pay for college with their students by the January before they enroll, according to a new report from the consulting firm Longmire and Company. Forty-seven percent of parents said they had had general discussions by that time, while 3 percent hadn’t discussed paying for college at all, according to the report, "Study of Parents: How They Evaluate Colleges and Influence Enrollment," which is based on a survey of parents.

At the same time, 58 percent of parents said cost would play a major role in deciding where their student would go to college, but would not be the sole basis for that decision. Another 19 percent said it would be the overriding factor....

St. Louis—The way colleges decide which applicants to admit and how much financial-aid to offer them has long been mysterious to many families. The last few years have brought a student-loan scandal, a weak economy, and ever-growing worries about both getting into college and paying for it, so it’s no wonder families are interested in solving that mystery. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re on the right track.

“There’s so much misunderstanding of what we do in admissions and aid, but especially financial aid,” said Angel B. Perez, director of admission at Pitzer college, at a session of the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s annual meeting here on Saturday.

Mr. Perez told the audience that he recently gave a presentation to a group who see this confusion firsthand: college financial planners. They told him stories of families with lots of assets who apply...

St. Louis—When Dawn M. Hiles started as dean of admissions at Drury University last year, just about every enrollment metric was headed in the wrong direction. Enrollment and net tuition revenue were dropping. The discount rate was going up.

Ms. Hiles, who had worked at Drury since 2006 but had no previous admissions experience, knew the university needed to change its strategy. Drury advertised that it offered small classes and a global emphasis. So did its competitors. “What we thought we were doing that was so unique wasn’t unique at all”, Ms. Hiles said Friday at a session of the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s annual meeting here. "We are a university that sounded very much like every other university."

The university began working on a strategy to differentiate it from other colleges. But developing a strategy takes time, and Ms. Hiles believed there was...

St. Louis—Colleges have about a year to meet a new requirement that they post net-price calculators on their Web sites. It's a mistake for them to have the financial-aid office decide how to meet the requirement and not think through its larger enrollment implications, said Kathleen Dawley, president of Maguire Associates, a consulting firm.

Maguire is working with Student Aid Services, which owns the Think Ahead calculator, a product Ms. Dawley likes because of its precision. However, not all the firm's clients will necessarily use it.

In a new white paper released today, two members of the firm’s staff argue that the net-price calculator requirement will bring in a "second wave of consumer transparency." The first? They say it started in 1988 when U.S. News & World Report began to use statistically-based rankings, giving consumers information to compare colleges and holding colleges ...

St. Louis--It’s not enough for enrollment managers to understand data; they also have to apply it. That was one takeaway from a session at the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s annual meeting here this afternoon.

One presenter made a distinction between managing systems and managing process. Systems are about acquiring, storing, and accessing data, said William T. Conley, dean of enrollment and academic services at the Johns Hopkins University: “Process is what the hell you do with it.”

He gave an example. After working to beautify its campus, limiting car traffic, and putting in new walkways, Johns Hopkins found that prospective students who visited the campus were actually less interested in attending than those who had not. The reason, it turned out, had nothing to do with how pretty the campus looked: prospective students found the social environment to be...

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...