So what might this mean for the Ivy League, which doesn’t offer any athletic aid but which has played the Patriot League in football for years? On Wednesday The Sports Network posed that question in a Q&A with Robin Harris, executive director of the Ivy League.

You can read all about it (and study some colorful charts) here.

The latest reminder arrived on Monday when Claremont McKenna College announced that a senior administrator had resigned after admitting to falsely reporting SAT statistics since 2005. In an e-mail to the campus, Pamela B. Gann, the college’s president, said an internal review found that scores for each fall’s freshman class had been “generally inflated by an average of 10-20 points each.” The apparent perpetrator was Richard C. Vos, long the college’s dean of admissions and financial aid, who has resigned from the college.

The announcement has shaken those who work on both sides of the admissions process. In the span of 24 hours, Mr. Vos, described by several colleagues as an engaging and thoughtful dean, has become a symbol of the pressures that come with top-level admissions jobs. As one mid-career dean said on Tuesday, “I just keep thinking about how much pressure an experienced and mature admissions professional must be under to do whatever he did.”

Furthermore, the falsification of SAT scores at Claremont McKenna reveals an uncomfortable truth: The same numbers to which applicants and parents—not to mention presidents and trustees—often attribute great power and meaning, are, like most things on the planet, subject to manipulation. For better or worse, the admissions industry generally operates on an honor system that governs the flow of “self-reported” data submitted to the federal government, accreditors, bond-rating agencies, and publications such as U.S. News & World Report. The Common Data Set has standardized the information colleges provide to various outlets, but admissions officials say interpretations of even the most basic information vary from campus to campus.

Does this mean all colleges fudge their numbers? Of course not. Could this happen anywhere? Probably.

“The long and the short of it is that there are ‘gentlemen’s rules’ about what you report and to whom,” Charles A. Deacon, Georgetown University’s dean of admissions wrote in an e-mail on Tuesday.

At Georgetown, Melissa A. Costanzi, the university’s senior associate director of admissions, oversees a daily flood of data. An applicant takes the SAT, tells the College Board to report his score to Georgetown, and ultimately an electronic file containing that score makes its way to the admissions office. Ms. Costanzi then loads each score into the office’s database, which matches it to the appropriate applicant’s file.

Months later, once Georgetown has its final list of enrolled freshmen, Ms. Costanzi then creates a data “snap shot” that contains information about the entire class. She then works with the university’s office of institutional research to make sure there are no discrepancies or missing data. The university then uses the same data set to send information to the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, U.S. News, and other outlets.

“We want to present ourselves in the right way, to be as transparent as possible,” Ms. Costanzi said. “How easy would it be to go into that data file and just change the scores if you wanted to? It wouldn’t be hard to do, but it would be a slimy thing to do.”

An institution’s very structure may make it more or less difficult to inflate the numbers, admissions experts said on Tuesday. At some small colleges, for instance, one person in the admissions office oversees all data and signs off on the numbers. On other campuses, the responsibility for maintaining admissions statistics is shared between two different offices, or rests outside the admissions office.

At DePaul University, for instance, the office of institutional research maintains admissions data and handles reporting. “Those people are reluctant to round up to the nearest hundredth of a point,” Jon Boeckenstedt, associate vice president for enrollment policy and planning at DePaul, said of the university’s institutional researchers.

Like many admissions officials I interviewed on Tuesday, Mr. Boeckenstedt suspected that misreporting is neither rare nor rampant, but somewhere in between. “The fact that students and parents like to make strong distinctions between insignificant differences is part of the problem here,” he said. “I’m not blaming the victims, but there’s a reason why people believe there’s a strategic advantage in doing this.”

Mr. Boeckenstedt also described the many other ways that colleges have manipulated data to pump up their test-score averages. Over the years, some institutions have not included the scores of athletes and low-scoring applicants admitted through special programs, for instance. This practice gave rise to the term “NIPS,” for “not in profile students.”

Although lying to Moody’s or any credit-rating agency could land an college in hot water, falsifying test scores doesn’t carry the risk of criminal charges. “Asking colleges to report their own SAT scores is like asking automakers to report their own gas mileage,” Mr. Boeckenstedt said. “A lot of them are going to use the most favorable numbers.”

Outright fabrications are one thing; varied interpretations among earnest admissions officials another. In an era when the College Board’s Score Choice program allows applicants to choose which test scores colleges see, admissions officials must make many choices how to present enrollment statistics to the public. Some of those choices are not black-or-white equations. Should a college “super score,” adding an applicant’s highest SAT math score to his or her highest critical-reading score, even though those tests were taken on different days? Such questions toll in many admissions offices, and there are many variations on the practice among colleges.

“When we talk about admissions statistics, we’re so used to hearing stories of the elasticity of admissions data,” says David A. Hawkins, director of public policy and research for the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “Generally speaking, the effort to put your best foot forward with your data happens all the time. How far is too far? There are many details and there are often gray areas.”

Robert G. Springall agrees. Mr. Springall, dean of admissions at Bucknell University, said he got chills when he first heard about the inflated scores at Claremont McKenna. Less than two weeks ago, he had dined with Mr. Vos, the former admissions dean at Claremont, at an event in Tampa. The two talked shop, discussing recruitment, the economy’s effect on admissions, and how to talk to parents about what happens in admissions committees.

Reflecting on the falsified SAT scores, Mr. Springall said there’s a difference between lying about data and wrestling with difficult questions about how to present data. The first is wrong, but the second is ubiquitous. “What do we count and what don’t we count?” Mr. Springall said. “This is something we all discuss on our campuses.”

For example, Mr. Springall and his staff have recently discussed the increasing number of applicants who submit both ACT and SAT scores. In the old days, applicants took one or the other, but so far 1,383 of this year’s 8,191 applicants have sent scores from both exams. ”Which score,” Mr. Springall said, “is the student score of record? Do we report both? Do we use the better score? What data point’s in the student’s best interest? Which one’s in the institution’s best interest?”

Bucknell’s policy is to use the highest score and discard the other. So the SAT scores of an enrolled student who scored higher on the ACT are not included in the calculation of the incoming classes SAT scores. But there’s no regulation preventing Bucknell from changing this policy tomorrow.

It’s just one reminder that there’s more than one way to create a profile. A quick check of a few Web sites reveals that some colleges publish online profiles that include the median scores for admitted students. Others, like Bucknell, publish median scores only for the students who end up enrolling. ”We would look 30-40-50 points better, in terms of the SAT, if we did it the other way,” Mr. Springall said. “In part, that would be a marketing effort.”

The relentless demands of marketing and the allure of institutional metrics may or may not explain why an admissions official at Claremont McKenna air-brushed the college’s SAT scores for seven years. Either way, Mark C. Moody, co-director of college counseling at Colorado Academy, believes the news sends a frustrating signal to the many audiences watching colleges.

“On the other side of the desk, in the trenches with the kids applying to college, we work really hard to be honest and to help kids present themselves authentically,” he wrote in an e-mail Tuesday. “We try to understand the colleges’ decision-making (as reflected in part by ‘the numbers’) so we can help students honestly self-assess and advise them well. We also maintain the belief that the system is fair and honest, and try to head off the cynicism that our families could easily adopt by viewing college admission as a rigged game of numbers and self-interest.”

Although Ms. Gann did not identify the administrator in her e-mail, Richard C. Vos, vice president and dean of admission and financial aid, is no longer listed as a member of the college’s admission staff. Max Benavidez, a spokesman for the college, said he could not name the official who had resigned, but he confirmed that Mr. Vos is no longer employed by the college.

Ms. Gann wrote that the administrator had been “solely responsible” for the misreported numbers. “At this time, we have no reason to believe that other individuals were involved,” she wrote. “If we learn otherwise, we will take prompt and appropriate action.” The college has hired a law firm to review how it processes admissions data.

Mr. Benavidez said the inaccurate SAT scores had been provided to all outlets that collect data from colleges, including the Department of Education and U.S. News & World Report. Test-score data is also collected and used by bond-rating agencies, which require sworn certification.

For the freshman class of 2010, Claremont McKenna reported a combined median score of 1410 (out of a possible 1600) on the SAT’s math and critical reading sections, but the actual score was 1400, according to Ms. Gann’s e-mail. That year, the college reported a 75th-percentile score of 1510; the actual score was 1480.

In the most recent edition of Best Colleges, U.S. News rated Claremont McKenna ninth on its list of national liberal-arts institutions. Robert J. Morse, director of data research for U.S. News, said in an e-mail late Monday that the college had informed him of the inaccuracies earlier in the day, and that he had asked for “far more detailed” data going back to 2005. “So far,” Mr. Morse wrote, “they haven’t been willing or able to give me the old and new year-by-year … So, until we get a full disclosure of [the] extent of false SAT reporting, U.S. News can’t say what the real impact on CMC’s Best Colleges ranking is.”

In another e-mail last night, one admissions veteran told me he was stunned by the news. “Seems a sad tale,” he wrote, “of the pressure to compete.”

The recent wave of college admissions decisions shows more high school seniors applying to more colleges than ever before. This puts top-tier colleges in the position of rejecting more applicants than ever before, inevitably leaving disappointed students and parents to ask “What else could I have done?”, “Did I miss something along the way?”, and, often, “Was my school counselor really in a position to give me the best possible college advice?”

Two recent reports from respected voices in the education community indicate school counselors themselves would answer that last question with a resounding “No.” The College Board’s Annual Survey of School Counselors reports more than half of school counselors polled felt even marginally well trained for their work. In December, those findings were followed by a report from the Education Trust, in which less than half of all counselors surveyed felt they were positioned to advocate for the students they serve.

Both reports offer recommendations for improving the utility and effectiveness of school counselors, including one that screams with common sense: If school counselors are to help students and families make strong college and career decisions, universities that train counselors should provide them with the skills they need to complete these important tasks.

This recommendation speaks to a paucity of current training that is alarming, but not well known. Of the 450 colleges that offer counselor-training programs in the United States, fewer than 10 percent offer a separate course in college advising, and fewer than five programs require this course to be taken by all school counselors. Since counselors report that college readiness and advising take up to 20 percent of their time on the job, a vast majority of counselors effectively enter their chosen careers with a training void that leaves them ill-prepared to answer every question asked of them for one full day out of every work week—a void counselors say takes anywhere from five to 10 years of on-the-job training to even begin to fill.

It is equally dismaying that this absence of significant training has been identified in a number of polls, white papers, and articles that appeared long before the current College Board and Education Trust reports. Counselor educators have been made aware of this need for years, but every time a new study is released, they dismiss claims counselors are poorly trained by pointing to the strong ratings their programs receive from the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP), the accreditation body that reviews many counselor training programs.

As for many other entities of higher education, the opinion of a training program that is held by fellow educators outweighs the opinion of the program’s utility by the recipients of their training. Since improved college and career training is of no concern to CACREP—and that is clearly the case—it is of no concern to counselor educators, no matter what counselors, parents, and students may think, and no matter how this lack of training affects our society’s competitiveness in the global economy.

The findings by the College Board and Education Trust may not be new, but there is hope this round of recommendations may lead to the changes needed in training programs and in school counseling offices to create brighter futures for our students and our country. The longstanding effects of a sluggish economy and ever-rising college costs are creating impatience among civic and business leaders for high school graduates who are career savvy and college ready. This pressure, combined with pressures from a taxpaying public and tuition-paying parents looking for a greater return on their investments, demands that state legislatures, state school boards, and universities make sure the educators best positioned to guide young people to better futures have the required training to make as big a difference as possible.

Policymakers at every level should be encouraged to adopt all of the recommendations of the College Board and Education Trust reports immediately, so school counselors can give our students—and our society—every opportunity to realize their full potential.

January

January is a quiet time on Wesleyan University’s campus, with students on break for much of the month. For the financial-aid office, this is the calm before the storm. Before long, it will be time to evaluate need and package aid for students who applied regular decision—work that must happen quickly because Wesleyan sends financial-aid awards with its acceptance letters.

In the meantime, John Gudvangen has been wrapping up his projections for how much the office will spend on aid this year. Because Wesleyan admits students without considering what they can afford to pay and is committed to meeting their needs with limited loan amounts, the aid office can’t do much to rein in costs as it goes through applications.

Even if the university did try to tinker around the edges, say, by adding an extra thousand dollars in loans for each student who borrows, it wouldn’t make a big enough difference to really straighten out the budget, Mr. Gudvangen says. Besides, he says, such a change could result in a drop in the university’s yield (the share of admitted students who decide to attend), especially because Wesleyan already expects students to borrow more than many at its peer institutions do.

If the incoming class ends up requiring more support than expected, the university just spends more than it planned to on aid. That’s what happened last year.

It’s a very different model than the one used at “need sensitive” colleges, which consider the financial need of some fraction of their applicants as they build a class. In that case, a college can meet its aid budget by only admitting those students it can afford at the end of the admissions process.

Even though the amount budgeted for aid at Wesleyan won’t actually restrict what Mr. Gudvangen can spend, it’s still important to get a good estimate, he says, because “we’re not the only budget priority on campus.”

While Wesleyan is better off than many colleges, it does have to make tough choices about spending. If the board doesn’t have a good sense of what aid will cost, it is less able to make wise decisions of what else Wesleyan can and can’t afford. Unlike some colleges, Mr. Gudvangen says, Wesleyan doesn’t have a pool of money to draw from if it overspends on aid. Doing so simply means there is less money for other campus needs.

And there is little reason to expect financial aid to be less costly this year. “We haven’t seen recovery in the economy across enough sectors to think that oh, we should be able to predict a stronger income pool this year,” Mr. Gudvangen says. In other words, making ends meet while holding to the university’s philosophy on student aid won’t be getting any easier anytime soon.

Neither of those approaches is particularly practical, according to Mark Kantrowitz, the student-aid expert behind the Web sites FinAid and Fastweb. In a column for the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators’s Web site, Mr. Kantrowitz writes that refusing to repay loans will hurt borrowers more than the government or other lenders, and that mass loan forgiveness is not the best way to stimulate the economy.

Still, Mr. Kantrowitz writes, the protesters and petition signatories have a point:

“Many of the protesters claim high levels of education debt and difficulty getting jobs,” he writes. “Unemployment rates won’t drop to pre-credit crisis norms for at least four more years, assuming the current economic downturn follows the pattern of previous recessions. But even after the economy recovers, the debt will continue. There are also ever-increasing numbers of students graduating with excessive debt each year, due to a failure of grants to keep pace with increases in college costs, inadequate counseling, and some students blindly following their dreams without contemplating the consequences of too much debt.”

There is no easy fix to this problem, but Mr. Kantrowitz suggests several things Congress and colleges could do to help. For example, he says the government should let student loans be discharged in bankruptcy and make the improved income-based repayment plan available to all borrowers, while colleges should require students to go through financial-literacy training.

I recalled this experience today while reading Janice D’Arcy’s On Parenting blog, which she writes for The Washington Post. Ms. D’Arcy linked to a January 15 article, written by the Post’s Michael Alison Chandler, about how more K-12 teachers are ditching “empty praise” in favor of more-precise language that helps students overcome mistakes and seek out new challenges.

“A growing body of research over three decades shows that easy, unearned praise does not help students but instead interferes with significant learning opportunities,” the article says. “As schools ratchet up academic standards for all students, new buzzwords are ‘persistence,’ ‘risk-taking,’ and ‘resilience’—each implying more sweat and strain than fuzzy, warm feelings.”

If you work in admissions and/or worry about kids these days, this article’s worth reading. If you’ve ever dealt with those confident creatures known as Millennials, you should also follow Ms. D’Arcy’s link to a recent Saturday Night Live skit called “You Can Do Anything!” It’s mean, but meaningful. And if you’re really, really fascinated by the culture of praise and its potential downsides, I’ve written about research conducted by Jean M. Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, here and (at much greater length) here.

Back in 2007, Ms. Twenge, author of Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before, told me that “we have to stop telling kids they’re special all the time.”

But what are applicants (and their teachers and counselors) supposed to tell admissions committees? When they fill up their applications with the great-in-every-way prose of praise, are they operating under some dangerous illusion of specialness? Or are they just doing exactly what colleges have asked them to do?

The press release came from SeekingArrangement.com, a Web site that matches prospective sugar daddies (and sugar mommies) with, um, “sugar babies.” That is, men and women who seek “mutually beneficial relationships” can find each other there to “buy and sell first dates.” The New York Times, employing an especially touching metaphor, called the Web site “the best sugar daddy fishing hole.” (Yes, there’s more than one.)

What does this have to do with college admissions? Well, as you might have heard, paying for college isn’t easy, and students everywhere are finding creative ways to finance their educations. And some of them are taking the sugar-daddy route. (Now, now, don’t judge.)

How many students are doing this? And what colleges do they attend? I’m so glad you asked. The company’s press release included a top-20 list (what else?) of colleges with the largest number of prospective sugar babies who joined the Web site in 2011. New York University topped the list with 185 registrants, followed by the University of Georgia (155), and the University of Phoenix (144). This kind of institutional diversity’s lacking in other rankings of colleges.

Surely you’ll be surprised to know that registrants certified as “college sugar babies” receive three times as many inquiries from potential sugar daddies as nonstudent registrants do, according to the press release. Does this nation believe in higher education or what?

And so I’m off to build a new career. If there’s room for independent college counselors, then there’s got to be room for sugar-baby consultants, too. After all, there’s a limited supply of sugar daddies and sugar mommies out there, just as there’s a limited supply of seats in Harvard University’s freshman class. As the competition among students becomes more and more intense, prospective sugar babies will need to find ways to stand out in the eyes of their would-be benefactors. Looks alone, I’m afraid, just won’t cut it.

That’s where I’ll come in. As a consultant in this brave new world, I plan to offer low-cost seminars on an array of topics, like “7 Hot-But-Brainy Adjectives That Will Get Your Profile Noticed,” “How to Converse With Someone Twice Your Age,” and “Balancing Proust With Pampering.” I’ll be making money while doing some good. Man, it’s going to be sweet.

A company called Unigo has started an online service that allows students to participate in one-one-one video chats with counselors from public and private secondary schools. The charge: $100 for 60 minutes.

Jordan Goldman, Unigo’s founder and chief executive, describes the venture as a cost-effective way of leveling the precollege playing field. “College counseling in America, despite the best efforts of many amazing counselors, is broken,” he says. “There are too many students who don’t get enough college counseling.”

Students can browse a directory that lists each counselor’s professional background, years of experience, and areas of expertise (“Where to Start: Considering the Big Stuff,” “Building Your College Research List,” “The Essay: Advice and Editing,” and “Waitlists, Deferment, Rejection” are among the options). Visitors can choose different types of sessions (“Getting In,” “Paying for It,” “College Life” are a few examples).

If browsing through 500 listings seems like too much of a chore, students can click a button that says “Tell us about yourself and we’ll find the perfect counselor.” The link takes them to a questionnaire that asks about grades, test scores, and intended majors. Within 24 hours, they will be matched with counselors who fit specific descriptions. She speaks Chinese, for instance, or has experience advising home-schooled students.

Students can schedule a session with a counselor, or they can log on and see who’s available for an immediate chat (via video, audio, or text). Since the service started almost three weeks ago, the site has hosted about 500 chats, which have taken place at all hours.

Many students who have sought out chats live in areas with high counselor-to-student ratios, according to Mr. Goldman. “Sometimes, it’s the parents saying ‘My kid got time with the counselor, but I didn’t get any time with the counselor,’” he says. Most conversations have been big-picture. “It’s not ‘Can you help me get into Harvard?’ It’s ‘Here are the schools I’m applying to. What am I missing?”

To moonlight on Unigo, counselors must answer at least three of 39 questions that are designed to reveal their expertise. The company’s editorial team reviews those answers (so far, about half of the applicants were approved). After each chat, users can rate counselors, who receive $50 for every session they hold.

Patrick J. O’Connor, director of college counseling at the Roeper School, in Michigan, recently accepted Unigo’s invitation to join. He plans on devoting about five hours a week to the service, which, he says, meets an important need for a reasonable price. “Some students are looking for more than what their local counselor may be able to offer,” he says. “It will certainly open up additional counseling options to many people.”

Nonetheless, Mr. O’Connor says he’s proceeding with caution. “When you do any kind of online work in education, you always have to take steps to ensure the advice is solid,” he says. “The advice can only be personalized if the relationship is strong. It’s not like we want this to become the 7-Eleven of school counselors.”