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.”

The paper, “Easy Targets: Haphazard College Searching and the Reproduction of Inequalities in Higher Education,” is based on a two-year qualitative study at two suburban high schools in the Northeast. Its author, Megan M. Holland, expects to receive her doctorate in sociology from Harvard University this month.

Among the 89 students she interviewed, Ms. Holland identified two main approaches to the college search. Some students were systematic, learning what different kinds of colleges had to offer and homing in on those that met a set of desired criteria they had developed over time. Other students conducted a haphazard search, often condensed and not intended to find colleges that matched desired criteria.

Academic achievement, race, and parents’ education level were all linked to the type of college search the students engaged in, Ms. Holland found. While 91 percent of high-achieving students searched systematically, only 8 percent of low-achieving students did. Among white students, 81 percent searched systematically; 24 percent of African-American students did. And 63 percent of students with at least one parent with a bachelor’s degree searched systematically, while 21 percent without a college-educated parent did.

That matters, the paper says, because students lacking a systematic approach were “much more influenced by the marketing efforts of colleges.”

When such students received marketing materials, they “enjoyed feeling wanted,” Ms. Holland said in an interview. By contrast, systematic searchers were skeptical of the materials, believing that “if colleges wanted them that much, it was a negative.”

Haphazard searchers were also more likely to respond to “snap apps,” applications for admission that can be filled out quickly and free, Ms. Holland observed. Some students attended admissions events where they could be accepted on the spot by less-selective colleges. And sometimes, students would hop on a school computer to learn about a college that had just admitted them that way.

As a result, by the time decision day rolled around, some students Ms. Holland followed had a number of acceptances but no viable options. That could lead some of them, she said, to enroll in colleges from which they would have very little chance of graduating.

In an e-mail to the campus, the president, Mary B. Marcy, said the university’s annual tallies of first-year applications had included incomplete applications, resulting “in the appearance of the university being more selective in its admissions process than it is.” Dominican reported an acceptance rate of 53.7 percent for the incoming class in the fall of 2011, for instance; the actual acceptance rate was 72.6 percent.

A recent internal review revealed the discrepancies, according to Ms. Marcy’s e-mail. The university, she wrote, has since notified the U.S. Department of Education of the errors. “I assure you that we will correct the error and take the necessary steps to ensure accuracy regarding future data collection and reporting,” Ms. Marcy wrote.

On Friday a spokeswoman for the university said the misreported data did not reflect an intention to deceive the public. “It was a mistake,” she said.

So, did the backgrounds of students attending Harvard change after the aid policies did? The short answer: yes, especially in the first year.

A new paper by a Harvard senior, Nicholas Galat, takes up that question. The paper, “Addresses and the Aid Initiative: A Geospatial Analysis of the Harvard Student Body, Classes of 2003-2011,” examines whether and how the makeup of classes changed after the policies were introduced.

Mr. Galat, who expects to graduate this spring with a degree in statistics, has long been interested in the composition of the student body, he said. “From the moment I first stepped on Harvard’s campus four years ago, I was impressed by the diverse set of backgrounds represented here.”

For his research, he linked students’ home addresses listed in The Harvard Freshman Register with census block groups from the U.S. Census Bureau to determine any change in the mix of students coming from low-income neighborhoods, particularly rural ones, and neighborhoods with low levels of educational attainment.

Whether Harvard enrolled more low-income students from rural areas was of particular interest to Mr. Galat. Prior research has suggested that elite colleges focus their recruitment of low-income students in urban areas—with greater population density—and that students in rural areas have less access to good information about college.

In general, Mr. Galat found that Harvard’s shift made the biggest difference for the Class of 2009, the first to be recruited under the new policies. In that class, which matriculated in the fall of 2005, the neighborhoods students came from had lower median family income, educational attainment, and population density.

For instance, the class “contained approximately 36 more students from neighborhoods with median family incomes less than $60,000 than one would expect based on the average historical proportion of such students,” the paper says.

Most of the increase in the share of students from low-income neighborhoods was the result of more students’ coming from rural, low-income neighborhoods, the paper says. That’s probably because Harvard was already affordable for low-income students, Mr. Galat writes, and it already recruited in urban areas.

Over all, the class that entered in 2005 included more of the kinds of students the aid and outreach policies were meant to enroll, he found.

Other research has also noted the different composition of that class, attributing it to an increase in the number of qualified low-income applicants.

Because of privacy laws, Mr. Galat did not have access to student-specific admissions or financial-aid information.”That’s a fundamental limitation of my data set,” he said. At the same time, he said, “the small neighborhoods students come from are still very powerful” measures. Census block groups usually contain 600 to 3,000 people.

After 2005, Mr. Galat found, the picture changed. For the next two years, the entering classes looked more like those before the new policies were introduced. Mr. Galat offers two possible explanations for that. One is that similar aid policies introduced by other elite universities after Harvard did so attracted some of the talented, low-income students who may otherwise have ended up at Harvard. Another possibility is that the news-media attention surrounding Harvard’s announcement increased its effect that first year.

The paper does not consider students who entered Harvard after 2007 because the university changed its aid policies again that year. The analysis considers only students who reside in the United States and list their addresses in the register, a number that dropped over time.

For its part, the university maintains that its policy change in 2004 was effective. “Harvard’s decision to launch the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative (HFAI) in 2004 led to profound changes in our applicant pool and our undergraduate student body, and to similar efforts at many of our peers,” Jeff Neal, senior communications officer, wrote in an e-mail. “That in turn created strong competition for talented low-income applicants.”

Alumni volunteers can be extremely valuable resources throughout the recruitment process. Their first-hand knowledge of history, traditions, and spirit give alumni a unique voice in speaking to students and families about the value of a degree from your institution. Alumni volunteers can assist recruitment throughout the entire admissions cycle by participating in college fairs, interviews, high-school visits, on and off-campus programs, letter-writing campaigns, and more. Alumni-volunteer networks can also provide passionate alumni a way to give back time and talent to the university and maintain a strong bond with the institution.

For Bowling Green State University, it was critical to reach out not only to other office on campus, but to other colleges as we developed our alumni network. Four years ago, BGSU’s alumni volunteer network had only about 40 active volunteers. After working to improve relationships on campus, with other universities, and with our alumni, we now have more than 200 volunteers participating in volunteer recruitment events. The key to building this program was creating strong partnerships with other institutions across the state.

Typically, in admissions, institutions have secrets and practices they don’t share with other colleges because they are competing for the same group of students. But that doesn’t apply to developing alumni volunteer recruitment programs. After all, colleges aren’t recruiting the same alumni.

Many times, you can work with your closest competitors to help build your alumni program and share best practices. For example, when I started in admissions at BGSU, I was given responsibility to run BGSU’s alumni volunteer network. I was overwhelmed by the notion of maintaining and improving an alumni volunteer network, and not sure where to start. At a regional conference, I sat in on a presentation from Katie Troyer at Ohio University about her keys to success while creating an alumni volunteer network.  Over the years, Katie and I have built a strong relationship, and we often work together to try new initiatives, and share challenges and achievements in our programs. We have found this collaboration to be extremely beneficial, and decided to take it to the next level by creating a regional alumni volunteer network comprised of 10 schools around the state to share materials and information on initiatives and emerging trends in alumni volunteer networks. This is proving to be a great resource for all involved to learn from each other, find inspiration, and improve our programs.

There can be many challenges in starting up or maintaining an alumni volunteer recruitment network with limited resources and time. The key is to know you aren’t alone, and reach out to other programs for support. Sometimes your greatest competitors can also be your greatest resources as you work to engage alumni in the recruitment cycle at your institution.

The two officials—Colette Atkins, assistant dean of adult accelerated programs, and Jason Clapp, the registrar—described how they had worked together to meet the needs of older students who have job and family responsibilities on top of academic ones.

In the coming years, the adult-student population is projected to grow more quickly than the traditional-age one nationwide, Mr. Clapp said. “We need to be paying attention to that market.”

Mount Mercy started an accelerated program for working adults in 1997, and it has “just boomed in our community,” Mr. Clapp said. Today close to a quarter of the Iowa university’s enrollment is in that program.

The university has teamed up with a nearby community college that offers a similarly structured program to start students on the path to a bachelor’s degree. A number of local employers offer partial tuition reimbursement. More recently the university has started graduate programs for adult students on a similar model.

Nontraditional students face additional barriers to college access, and the speakers offered some ideas on how colleges can help mitigate them.

Some barriers are situational, they said. For example, older students often have family obligations. They may have to travel for work or be on a shift schedule. Limits of money and time are also concerns.

Colleges can help by running orientations that include older students’ families, offering on-site day care, and making sure there’s a quiet place to do homework later in the evening.

Financial aid can be the biggest hurdle, Ms. Atkins said, because students are eligible for federal aid only if they enroll in courses bearing a certain number of credits.

The university has tried to make its pricing clearer to the accelerated students. Rather than providing a discount off a published price, it offers them a reduced rate of $425 per credit (traditional students’ sticker price comes to $698 per credit). And when money is a particular problem, the university’s advisers will steer prospective students to start at the community college.

Institutional barriers are also of concern. The biggest one just might be course scheduling. Semesters are long, and most classes happen during the workday. Mount Mercy has created a block schedule in which classes are offered for five or 10 weeks, one night a week. Such schedules have created some operational challenges for the university.

They have also created more paperwork because not all of the adult students are comfortable using the university’s online-registration system. Some prefer to call up an adviser, who uses a paper form. “Our logistics,” Mr. Clapp said, “can’t keep us from doing what’s right for the student.”

The university would prefer to let adult students enter the program at any point in the year, but hasn’t been able to do so under financial-aid rules.

Some of the university’s traditional students want to take the accelerated courses, but they’re usually not allowed to. Younger students may not have the focus and maturity the schedule demands, Ms. Atkins said. “We are as flexible as we can be,” she said, “but I have to have something to tell a student no to.”

Mount Mercy has also set up Ms. Atkins’s office as a mini one-stop shop, helping adult students with all of their needs at one location.

Some solutions are basic. Like nearly every campus, Mount Mercy has limited parking. So the accelerated program takes place in a single building, near a parking lot that commuter students have cleared out of by the time the working adults arrive.