“A lot of it came out of fear,” said Mr. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard. “People said college was coming to an end, and they decided they were going to have to change the way they recruit.”

These days, demographic projections are once again stirring fear on college campuses. In some regions, the number of high-school graduates is projected to drop sharply, meaning many colleges must go farther afield for applicants. Nationally, high-school populations are becoming more diverse, and more and more prospective applicants are low-income and first-generation students.

Several admissions experts here discussed how colleges might adapt their recruitment strategies to reach that cohort. “We have to meet them where they’re at,” said Joe Bellavance, senior director of higher-education services in the College Board’s New England office. “We can’t just keep doing the same old things.”

Mr. Bellavance shared some revealing data on today’s test takers. From 2008 to 2012, the College Board saw a 61-percent increase in students requesting fee waivers. A third of students who take College Board examinations reveal that they will be the first in their family to attend college.

“If your CFO is freaking out about the discount rate going up 1 or 2 percent, guess what? It’s going to go up again,” said Mr. Bellavance, a former vice president for enrollment and marketing at Regis College, in Massachusetts. “There’s going to be an increased demand on your institutional funds. That’s just the reality.”

What else? Several admissions officers here said their institutions would have to create publications and Web content in Spanish, among other languages. (Just one attendee said his college already produced admissions-related content in multiple languages.)

One admissions officer predicted that colleges would double down on virtual campus tours to reach faraway applicants as well as those who are unable to visit. Another suggested that admissions offices would have to lean even more heavily on alumni to connect with prospective applicants who lack strong college counseling.

Early outreach may well become more crucial. One admissions officer described how she and her colleagues used to groan when they saw middle-schoolers on field trips descend on the campus. Now her university does much more to engage those 13-year-olds, in hopes of stoking their excitement about attending college (some get to attend classes).

“We’re coming to grips with the idea,” she said, “that we have to work with younger students.”

Demographic change doesn’t mean the sky is falling for the 21st-century admissions office, but it’s a good time to take a close look at the roof.

So far, no evidence of a hard-and-fast agreement has emerged, leading some observers to question how, exactly, an open discussion of reducing spending on merit aid at an education conference could have drawn the interest of government lawyers. For some, the investigation confirms a longstanding fear in academe: Even tiptoeing up to the subject of institutional collaboration is enough to get federal watchdogs growling.

In an interview, Robert M. Shireman, a former deputy under secretary at the U.S. Department of Education, said concerns about federal scrutiny have a “giant chilling effect” on discussions of how colleges might improve their financial-aid policies.

“It seems that what’s happening here is proof that if you go anywhere close to this territory, the Justice Department will pounce, so it is not to be discussed,” said Mr. Shireman, now executive director of California Competes, a nonprofit group. ”It is unfortunate that this chilling effect has been confirmed.”

Mr. Shireman is a co-author of a 2008 white paper, “Time to Re-examine Institutional Cooperation and Financial Aid,” that is an insightful analysis of the antitrust issue. The paper, published by the Institute for College Access and Success, or Ticas, describes how the competition for students drives colleges to give talented applicants more aid than they need. “This situation,” the paper says, “cries out for cooperation to focus on aid that meets need.”

Yet cooperation is widely perceived as legally risky, and for good reason. The paper includes a memorandum written by two antitrust lawyers, who concluded that while the law allows for some cooperation among colleges, “there remains substantial antitrust risk in engaging in activities beyond the scope of the current legislative exemption,” which allows only a small group of highly selective colleges to share information about financial-aid decisions.

A more prudent approach, the lawyers wrote, would be to ask Congress to broaden the current exemption, either by increasing the activities it permits or by allowing more colleges to use it. After all, the lawyers concluded, attempting to influence the legislative process would not sound any legal alarms: “We should note that there is no antitrust issue with interested schools working together to formulate legislative proposals and to lobby Congress to expand the current exemption.”

That’s more or less what Tori Haring-Smith has wanted to do. “We created this system,” Ms. Haring-Smith, president of Washington & Jefferson College, in Pennsylvania, said of the financial-aid process. “This is not a natural law. It’s not immutable like gravity. If we are allowed to put our minds together, we might be able to work something out for the common good of the entire country. We just aren’t allowed to do it.” (Ms. Haring-Smith is one of at least two presidents to receive letters from the Justice Department about the investigation.)

That’s why Ms. Haring-Smith and several of her counterparts at other colleges have expressed an interest in, as she said, discussing “the shape of legislation we might lobby for.” After all, cooperating on financial-aid policies is one thing; talking about changing the law is another. If 100 college presidents decided to gather around the Washington Monument tomorrow to brainstorm ideas for a better law, according to antitrust lawyers I interviewed this week, the First Amendment would protect those discussions.

Would that ever happen? Lloyd Thacker hopes so. “There’s a real opportunity here for colleges to act beyond their institutional self-interest,” said Mr. Thacker, executive director of the Educational Conservancy. ”This is a character-testing opportunity.” His nonprofit organization recently secured funds for research on presidents’ opinions of financial-aid practices, and the possibility of greater collaboration. Mr. Thacker hopes the findings will help legislators assess the effects of antitrust rulings on aid policy.

Of course, not all presidents think alike. Although some surely view the Justice Department’s investigation as an impediment to useful discussions about more-equitable aid practices, others might see the issue differently. In describing several reasons colleges do not collaborate more, the authors of the Ticas paper included this theory: ”It is possible that colleges do not want to focus their aid on students with financial need, and that they use the ‘bidding war’ and the antitrust laws as a rationale to continue their current practices.”

The RADD project, announced last fall, is intended to spark innovative ideas for student aid and find ways to use them to encourage college completion. The project’s first round, which wrapped up in the spring, resulted in white papers by 16 grant recipients.

The new announcement, made by the National College Access Network on Friday, describes the plans of a consortium, consisting of the network and six other groups, to “further explore the issue of financial-aid simplification and transparency.” For that purpose, the consortium will receive a $340,000 grant from the foundation.

The other members of the consortium are the Center for Law & Social Policy, the College Board, the Institute for Higher Education Policy, the New America Foundation, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, and Young Invincibles. All but the College Board were also involved in the first round.

Three other consortia will participate in Round 2, said Elizabeth Morgan, director of external relations at the National College Access Network. Each consortia has a focus area, and the others will consider loans, grants and work-study, and tax benefits, she said.

A spokeswoman at the Gates foundation was unable to provide further detail on Friday. The Chronicle will continue to follow Round 2 as more information becomes available.

“Evergreen resources” from the blog will still be available in the paper’s online archives, and Times reporters will continue to cover the “issues most relevant to college-bound students and their families,” according to a post on the blog announcing its end.

The post does not elaborate on why the paper is closing down the blog. But Eileen M. Murphy, the paper’s vice president for corporate communications, wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle: “We are in the process of evaluating our various blogs in advance of a redesign of our Web site and article pages, which is coming later this year. As part of this process, we have already shut down several blogs,” in favor of frequently updated section fronts.

The Choice offered first-person accounts of students going through the admissions process and Q. and A.’s with experts. It also published tallies of colleges’ application numbers.

The blog began in the spring of 2009 as the paper’s approach to covering higher education was evolving. It was initially led by Jacques Steinberg, a Times reporter and author of The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College. Mr. Steinberg announced he was taking a buyout earlier this year and is now a senior consultant at Say Yes to Education, a nonprofit group working to raise graduation rates in high schools and colleges for inner-city youths.

That’s why Tessa McSwain sees promise in live chats. At the Rocky Mountain Association for College Admission Counseling’s annual conference here on Thursday, Ms. McSwain, assistant director of admissions at the University of Colorado at Boulder, described her office’s recent experiments with two forms of online communication.

So far this year, Colorado has held five “group chats,” in which two or three admissions officers fielded questions about a range of subjects, including financial aid, housing, and on-campus dining options. Recently, two all-day chats attracted about 250 prospective students and parents, who received quick answers from real, live human beings on the other end of the Internet.

The chats have proved especially useful for communicating with international students in far-flung time zones. ”That instant gratification happens in real time,” Ms. McSwain said.

Colorado has also begun to test software that enables visitors to its admissions Web site to ask questions (during specific hours) by typing questions in pop-up chat windows, just as they might do when communicating with banks and cable-television companies. The idea is to allow students and parents to get information—in, say, five to 10 seconds—that they would otherwise have sought by telephone (the university’s call center handles the online inquiries).

Colorado is working with a software company called LiveAcademic to manage both kinds of chats. Because today’s applicants expect the immediate feedback they get through social media, said Shane Gibson, the company’s director of technology, colleges should consider ways of enhancing their virtual communication to provide a more-personal touch—even if that touch is fleeting.

“Your Web site,” Mr. Gibson said, “is your funnel.”

The report, “Preparing Students for College: What High Schools Are Doing and How Their Actions Influence Ninth Graders’ College Attitudes, Aspirations, and Plans,” is based on an analysis of new, nationally representative data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009.

That analysis found a relationship between counselors’ interactions with prospective first-generation students and their parents on the one hand and the students’ college aspirations on the other. The time counselors spent on college-going activities had a statistically significant effect, for example, on students’ perception that college was affordable.

Similarly, speaking to a counselor about college correlated with students’ plans to enroll in a bachelor’s-degree program right after high school. The same pattern appeared for students whose parents had talked to a counselor or teacher about college.

In addition, the report provides data on student-to-counselor ratios, the attitudes and activities of high-school counselors, and the college-level classes that high schools offer.

A number of cases of misreported admissions data have surfaced in recent months, including Dominican University of California’s announcement that it had included incomplete applications, making it appear more selective, in data it sent to the U.S. Department of Education.

Officials at York College of Pennsylvania and the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, in Texas, each advised U.S. News that they had reported inflated data. In both cases, the inaccuracies resulted in the colleges’ receiving higher rankings than they otherwise would have.

As it has in other cases when revised data would have resulted in different rankings, U.S. News moved the colleges to its unranked list. Two other recent additions to that list are George Washington University and Tulane University’s business school.

The magazine has not removed the numerical ranking of colleges whose misreported data did not change where they landed on the list, as in the cases of Bucknell University, Claremont McKenna College, and Emory University.

“U.S. News,” the blog post says, “will continue to handle each case of data misreporting on an individual basis.”

York College of Pennsylvania told the rankings publication it had excluded 20 percent of the 2011 entering class’s SAT scores when calculating its average. The college initially reported an average SAT score of 545 in math and 532 in critical reading. The corrected scores are 527 in math and 516 in critical reading. The misreporting had been going on for more than a decade, the college told U.S. News.

The University of Mary Hardin-Baylor told the magazine it had submitted incorrect numbers of applications and admitted students for the fall of 2011. The misreported data showed an acceptance rate of 27.4 percent; the correct figure was 89.1 percent.

So can a program that doesn’t reach students until their senior year still make a difference in college enrollment?

It can, according to a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. But the program the paper examines—which includes both mentoring and cash incentives—made a difference only for women.

The paper, “Late Interventions Matter Too: The Case of College Coaching New Hampshire,” describes the effects of a program designed to reach high-school seniors who are not sure of their college plans, who are intimidated by all they must do to apply, or whose default setting is not to go to college because none of the people closest to them have done so.

The researchers—Scott Carrell, an associate professor or economics at the University of California at Davis, and Bruce Sacerdote, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College—worked with a dozen high schools in New Hampshire. The schools identified students, about 1,150 over several years, who were on the fence about applying to college, and the researchers randomly assigned them to treatment and control groups.

Students in the treatment group were given a mentor—a current Dartmouth student—who would meet them each week until their application goals had been reached. The students were told they would qualify for $100 in cash if they completed college applications, requested transcripts and letters of recommendation, and began their applications for financial aid.

On the whole, students assigned to the treatment group were 5.4 percentage points more likely to enroll in college than were students in the control group. But when the students were broken down by gender, no effect was found for men. Women, in contrast, experienced a 15.1-percentage-point increase in college enrollment (from a base of about 50 percent).

As expected, the effect was quite a bit stronger for those women randomly assigned to the treatment group who actually participated in the program. In their case, college enrollment increased by 30 percentage points.

The researchers don’t know for sure why men and women responded differently to the program. Mr. Sacerdote said in an interview that he suspects it’s a combination of two factors. For one, men with no education beyond high school earn more in the labor market than do women who haven’t gone to college. Perhaps men were attracted to opportunities to earn a living right away. And second, it’s possible that the women came into the program with a stronger drive to follow through on their goals.

Because the program raised enrollment among students on the margin of college attendance, there was a risk that participants would be more likely to begin college and then drop out, Mr. Sacerdote said. It was important to check if the program was “setting kids up for failure,” he said. But there was no evidence it did: Students in the program had similar persistence rates to those in the control group.

The researchers also wondered whether they would find the same effects if they provided the cash incentive alone. In the last of several years of data collection, they offered the $100 reward to students in the control group. The researchers found that the money alone made no statistically significant difference in enrollment. Interviews with participants, too, indicated that money was not the most important factor in the program to those who went through it.

Financial incentives can change behavior when people already have a strategy in mind, Mr. Sacerdote said. That’s why home-buyer credits work. The fact that cash alone didn’t make students enroll suggests that they simply didn’t know how to approach the application process, rather than that they knew what to do but needed an incentive.

The researchers are continuing to test iterations of the program, Mr. Sacerdote said. “We clearly have an interest in programs that can be done on a larger scale,” he said. To that end they are tweaking the program to use administrative data instead of counselors to select the students and trying out less personal but less costly versions of mentoring.

The paper, “Time for Change: A New Federal Strategy to Prepare Disadvantaged Students for College,” reviews research on the TRIO and Gear Up programs. It finds that most of those program evaluations do not meet the evidence standards of the Institute of Education Sciences, the U.S. Department of Education’s research arm, and the one that does meet those standards finds the program has no major effects on college enrollment or completion. The other studies do find some effects, but the paper says that research is “suggestive rather than definitive.”

In light of that pattern, the paper’s authors—Ron Haskins, co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, and Cecilia E. Rouse, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University—suggest that the government take a quite different approach. They propose a reform similar to what the Obama administration has done with Head Start, the program that prepares low-income children to begin school.

The government should roll the $1-billion it spends annually on the TRIO and Gear Up programs into a single competitive grant program, they suggest. Two- and four-year colleges, local education authorities, and other agencies should be allowed to compete for grants, with no preference given to current recipients.

In order to receive funds, programs would have to prove that their efforts were grounded in evidence, have a history of improving at least some measures of college readiness, and offer a plan for evaluating their work. The Education Department would have flexibility in selecting grant recipients and could choose programs taking a broad range of approaches. It could also use up to 2 percent of the money for research and for demonstration projects.

“Some will think our recommendations harsh,” the paper says. “But social policy should be based on evidence, and everything we know leads to the view that many, if not most, social programs produce modest or no effects.”

The policy brief was released as a companion to the new issue of the journal The Future of Children, a joint project of the Woodrow Wilson School and the Brookings Institution.

Yet the most interesting response came from David Hawsey, a longtime admissions professional who helped create College Confidential in 2001. “It was founded for a different reason than people may think,” he wrote.

Mr. Hawsey, now vice president for enrollment management at Emory & Henry College, in Virginia, described his motivations for starting the free Web site: to educate the public about how colleges recruit and select applicants, and determine financial-aid awards. Back then, as the site’s primary producer of content, including responses to the popular “Ask the Dean” column, he sought to provide objective information about the practices admissions officers understood but many families did not. In short, he hadn’t hoped to create a forum for handicapping a student’s odds of being admitted to the nation’s most-selective colleges.

As College Confidential’s popularity grew, and the message boards became a hot spot to trade advice, Mr. Hawsey saw a shift. “To me, the site turned sour with all the ‘my college is better than yours’ trolling and a specific lack of professional advice outside my own experience,” he wrote.

In an interview this afternoon, Mr. Hawsey, who stepped away from the Web site years ago, reflected further on the online community he helped create. “When I look at it today, I think, My God, what a monster,” he says. “There’s all this ‘mine is bigger than yours’ stuff. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of very good comments on the message boards, but they got way, way out of control.”

How? “They became overburdened with Ivy lust,” Mr. Hawsey says. “There’s not enough information that truly answers the question, What’s the right school for me? Something that leaves out the histrionics. The emphasis today, in the consumer participant’s mind, is on getting in, and far less, it seems, on what’s the right fit and why. Most students don’t go to the Ivy League, so where’s the Web site for them?”

Mr. Hawsey has thought about creating an alternative college-planning Web site, a nonprofit portal that doesn’t rely on advertising revenues. He imagines it as a forum where families could get an insider’s perspective, without all the back-and-forth chatter about so-and-so’s chances of getting into Harvard or “beating” the SAT.

College Confidential’s never far from Mr. Hawsey’s mind. Like many colleges, Emory & Henry now advertises there. The confirmation of his purchase of the Web site’s domain name hangs, framed, on a wall in his home. He keeps it as a reminder of what the site did and did not become.

“I feel unfulfilled personally,” Mr. Hawsey says. ”I feel like I failed to carry out my original mission to its conclusion. The interest in prestige overran the intent.”