May

Wesleyan University is set to graduate its Class of 2012 this weekend. The university won’t give diplomas to seniors with student loans until they have completed exit counseling. But even though they get this reminder about their debt, the aid office hasn’t heard from many seniors who are worried about paying it back.

The reality of repayment may not have hit them yet, says John Gudvangen, the financial-aid director. Many graduating seniors are still unsure of what their income will be in the coming year, he says, and a good number will go right on to graduate school, deferring any loans they have.

But Mr. Gudvangen thinks there’s another reason seniors haven’t streamed into the office: The amount of debt they have taken on tends to be manageable.

Forty-seven percent of Wesleyan’s 2011 graduates borrowed, and their average debt was $25,864. Nationally, about two-thirds of students at public and private four-year colleges graduate with debt, and borrowers in the Class of 2010 took out an average of $25,250 in loans, according to the most-recent analysis from the Project on Student Debt.

Wesleyan’s average debt is raised by a small number of students who’ve taken out private loans, Mr. Gudvangen says. Forty-six percent of graduates had federal loans last year, and they borrowed an average of $19,706 in those programs. Most students with federal loans borrowed an amount close to that average, Mr. Gudvangen says. That would mean a monthly payment of not much more than $200.

Wesleyan students’ average debt at graduation should go down for the Class of 2012, Mr. Gudvangen says, though his office hasn’t calculated it yet. That’s because the university stopped packaging any loans for most students whose families make $40,000 or less and limited the loans offered to other students starting when the current seniors were freshmen.

The university doesn’t have total control over what students borrow—students can take out private loans to cover the amount Wesleyan has calculated their parents can contribute, for instance. But reducing the loans in students’ aid awards certainly encourages them to borrow less.

“Our students, and probably students at lots of institutions, trust the institution to help them out with this,” Mr. Gudvangen says. Colleges are responsible for what they include in students’ awards, he says.

Of course, not every college can afford to reduce or eliminate loans in its aid awards.

Even if students leave Wesleyan with manageable debt, or none, they may borrow more for graduate school. Parents will sometimes argue that Wesleyan should reduce what it expects them to pay so they can reserve some money for their child’s graduate education. That’s not something the staff can take into account, Mr. Gudvangen says. Who’s to say if the student will in fact go on to graduate school, or what financial aid will be available there?

It’s the aid office’s job to help students finance the four years that lead to a Wesleyan degree, Mr. Gudvangen says. What comes next is up to the graduates.

The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, known as Nasfaa, has now released a new set of suggestions for improving financial-aid award letters, which colleges send to admitted and returning students to inform them of the grants, scholarships, and loans they are eligible for.

Consumer advocates have long complained that the award letters are confusing and difficult to compare across institutions. Mr. Obama’s college-affordability proposals, released in January, include requiring colleges to use a “financial-aid shopping sheet.”

While Nasfaa agrees that the letters should be improved, the group has opposed standardization, saying that colleges should be free to decide how best to present information to their own students.

In a report on the new suggestions, the group lists 10 elements it says should appear in every award letter, including a breakdown of the cost of attendance and the college’s net cost after grant aid is subtracted.

The report, which is based on work done by a panel Nasfaa brought together this past winter, makes several additional recommendations.

It suggests that colleges inform enrolled students of their cumulative loan history and provide a way for them to estimate their repayment costs before they borrow more. And it recommends that the Education Department require all educational loans—including private loans and loans offered by the colleges themselves—to be reported to a central database.

This marks an expected but meaningful turning point, the Times reports: “While over all, whites will remain a majority for some time, the fact that a younger generation is being born in which minorities are the majority has broad implications for the country’s economy, its political life, and its identity.”

The shift also has implications for college enrollment. As the article explains: “A college degree has become the most important building block of success in today’s economy, but blacks and Latinos lag far behind whites in getting one. ”

The news serves as one more reminder that demographic change is coming to a campus near you.

But many first-generation college students have an additional hurdle, and that’s in gaining confidence and assurance that they can pay for it. Unfortunately, many of them lack adequate information about how to pay for college and obtain financial aid. So, in turn, many perceive the tuition at a  four-year university to be too costly and instead opt for a less expensive community college, even though they might want to and have the qualifications to aim higher.

Cecilia Lopez knows this all too well. She is one of four first-generation college students featured in the new documentary First Generation, a film that follows the students for three years as they pursue their dreams of attaining a college education. The movie was shown at the Naval Heritage Center, in Washington, on Tuesday night.

Lopez is a first-generation U.S. citizen and the daughter of migrant field workers. She lives with nine family members in a small house in Oildale, Calif. At North High School, she ran track and cross-country, took multiple AP and honors classes, kept a high GPA, and scored over 1900 on her SAT. She did this all while her mother was away for long stretches of time visiting her father, who was deported to Mexico halfway through Lopez’s junior year.

She dreamed of “being a Bruin” and going to the University of California at Los Angeles. She even rejected a full cross-country scholarship offer from California State University-Bakersfield in hopes of attending UCLA.  However, the burden of paying for college on her own and confusion over where that money would come from killed that dream.  She eventually took the offer from Bakersfield, but not without regrets.

“Now I know that most of it would’ve been paid for,” said Lopez, who attended the screening with the other students who appear in the movie. “If I knew, I would be at UCLA. I know it.”

Lopez said she didn’t even apply to UCLA because she grew impatient after filling out the FAFSA and “not hearing back from them.” What she didn’t know was that she would have received her financial-aid package after she applied and after acceptance. “I didn’t have anyone tell me that,” she said during a Q&A session after the screening. “I thought they would tell me how I was going to get before. It’s hard to think about it now.”

Carolyn E. Henrich, a legislative director for the University of California who attended the screening, raised her hand and asked, “So, no one came to your school and explained the process? We have outreach programs and people going to all the schools.” All four students shook their heads.

“They don’t tell you ahead of time,” Lopez said. “We never had someone take the time and explain this to us. I think the money is the No. 1 obstacle for kids like me.”

Now a junior at Bakersfield, it’s too late for Lopez to attend UCLA for undergraduate study, but she still has her sights set on the university. After college graduation, Lopez will be applying to law school there. “I’m going to be a Bruin, no matter what,” she said.

April

If Wesleyan University’s need-based aid has done its job, a good number of admitted students have been pleasantly surprised to find they can afford to come to an institution that costs more than $60,000.

Hearing from such students and their families is always enjoyable for John Gudvangen, the university’s aid director, and his staff. After all, these are people who give out money for a living. They like it when the people who receive it are pleased and grateful. Still, they can’t make everyone happy.

“Our natural inclination is to help families,” Mr. Gudvangen says. But “we have to balance that with a pool of limited resources and a whole set of rules.”

That means that not every conversation Mr. Gudvangen has with families this time of year is a cheerful one. While Wesleyan has a solid need-based aid program, it can’t afford to be as generous as some other selective colleges.

And Wesleyan competes for students not only with top-tier colleges that are poised to give more support to needy students, but also with institutions that offer merit aid. Some families who on paper can just barely afford Wesleyan’s full sticker price may be weighing enticing scholarships from other colleges.

Wesleyan, unlike some other institutions, will not negotiate financial aid with families based on what a student receives from another college.  “Our analysis in this office is all about looking at a family’s financial picture and applying that against the need-based formula,” Mr. Gudvangen says. “We at the same time are hearing from the family what a great student this is, what a great match this is—and that can’t be part of the influence in this office.”

Mr. Gudvangen is happy to look at the other offers families have received, however. Knowing how other colleges are treating families can help him form Wesleyan’s strategy going forward. It makes sense for the university to keep tabs on this, Mr. Gudvangen says, just as it tracks what other colleges pay their professors.

The aid office won’t negotiate, but it will reconsider an award that a family thinks hasn’t taken their whole situation into account. Mr. Gudvangen tells families: “I don’t want to mislead you to say that if you give us this information we will be able to make a change. But I want to assure you that if you don’t give us the information, we won’t make a change.”

Mr. Gudvangen will re-examine an award if a family has new information for the office to consider—and even if it doesn’t. But, he says,  “if there is no new information, chances are good we did the right thing the first time.”

The final weeks of choosing a college can be an emotional roller-coaster for students. And it can feel the same way to the aid staff as they move back and forth throughout the day between meeting with families who are happy and those who are disappointed.

“We experience the highs and lows of the month of April, not just for us, but for families,” Mr. Gudvangen says. “We feel kind of entwined with that. It’s hard to say to a family: ‘I’m really sorry, I can’t help you any more.’ And it’s really gratifying to hear a family say, ‘Thank you so much for what you’ve done. This is really great, it’s going to work for us.’”

That began to change around 2006 with the help of a consultant. Julie Fleming, the director of admissions, and Lacey Satterfield, the assistant director, described on Tuesday how their process has evolved. They spoke during a session of a joint conference of the Potomac and Chesapeake Association for College Admission Counseling and the Southern Association for College Admission Counseling, held here.

Before the consultant arrived on the scene, Reinhardt had no strategy for buying names. It didn’t explore the return on investment for search—whether students who ultimately enrolled had been on its list.

Not only did the admissions office send everyone the same one search piece, it did the whole thing in house. The office didn’t even use electronic signatures. “My first three weeks at this job, all I did was sign Julie Fleming’s name,” Ms. Satterfield said.

The workload was light under the old system, Ms. Satterfield said. But as an alumna of the university, the status quo bothered her. “It was kind of embarrassing,” she said, “to be at this place I loved so much, and have it be behind in reaching out to students.”

But things did change. Reinhardt started buying more names, including those of juniors, and sent different mailings to students in each grade. It started to use e-mail, which allowed it to be in contact with prospective students more often, and began using vendors to help with its outreach.

The university started sending specific messages to prospective students based on their intended major and where they lived. And it became more data-driven. Reinhardt had always known many of its students were from the immediate area. But data pushed the point further: It turned out that 96-percent of freshmen came from just seven SCF codes (the first three digits of a ZIP code).

The admissions office decided to home in on those nearby high-school students, even though “it felt really risky to us,” Ms. Satterfield said.

The new process seems to be working. Inquiries have grown 48 percent between 2007 and 2011, Ms. Satterfield said, and more than 40 percent of inquiries can be linked to the names Reinhardt bought.

There are still challenges ahead for Reinhardt’s admissions office. Not least among them, Ms. Fleming and Ms. Satterfield recently learned that the administration has changed the goal for the incoming freshman class, many of whom will deposit later than May 1.  The new goal is 550 freshmen, up from the 410 the office had been aiming for.

And Reinhardt is starting a football team, which Ms. Fleming and Ms. Satterfield expect will attract more students—and bring more changes to the admissions process.

The admissions world has its own language, full of poetic terms, such as “demonstrated interest,” “need-based aid,” and “holistic review.” Don’t forget the beauty of “binding early decision” and “single-choice early action.” But how do the words admissions officers and college counselors use affect the admissions process? What can they do to reform the ills of admissionsese?

On Monday afternoon, I listened to an intriguing discussion of these questions here at the joint conference of the Potomac and Chesapeake Association for College Admission Counseling and the Southern Association for College Admission Counseling. The consensus: some words in the “admissions lexicon” need more clarity, and others just need to go.

Nancy Beane puts the term “safety school” in the latter category. Ms. Beane, a counselor at the Westminster Schools, in Atlanta, says the term implies that a college on a student’s list isn’t a good one. In turn, several counselors agreed, some students internalize the message that they, too, are no good if they end up enrolling at a—um, what should we call it? Ms. Beane uses the term “foundation school,” and encourages her students to do the same.

Much confusion arises from the terms “need-blind” and “meets full need.” Some parents perceive them as the same thing. This is why Ms. Beane suggested that admissions offices publish clear definitions of such terms on their main Web pages.

Ms. Beane also wished that colleges would use the term “grant” when referring to need-based financial awards. This, she suggested, would help prevent confusion about the difference between “merit-based scholarships” and “need-based scholarships.”

Only it’s not that simple, one admissions officer replied. Although he agreed with Ms. Beane’s suggestion, he said that some colleges shy away from the word “grant” because the word “scholarship” has “more shine to it.” That shine just might make an applicant feel special. In other words, sometimes transparency sometimes works better in theory than in practice.

Even the word “application” can cause confusion. One admissions officer said sometimes families ask if “application” refers collectively to all of its parts, including recommendations and transcripts, or just to the document that students must complete. Another admissions officer said he and his colleagues have realized that many applicants just don’t get what “defer” means.

Confusion over admissions lingo doesn’t affect just families. One admissions officer from Georgia said many administrators on her campus don’t understand popular admissions terms, either. This confusion extends to the ethical standards—such as NACAC’s Statements of Principles of Good Practice, or SPGP—that are supposed to govern the admissions profession. “If I say, ‘I can’t do this because of the SPGP,’ they look at me like I have three heads,” the admissions officer said.

One counselor from South Carolina complained about the variations on a particular theme. A college in her state offers an “early answer,” while others have “early action” programs that work differently. “That drives them absolutely crazy,” she said of students and parents. This prompted one admissions officer to say that an institution where he previously worked had once used the term “early action” to describe its binding early-decision program; the mention of this linguistic maneuver prompted several groans from the audience.

It’s hard to hear all this without picturing the admissions world as an ivory Tower of Babel. ”One the most frustrating things is that there is no universal answer,” one counselor said.

And that’s the rub for students and parents. American colleges and universities are diverse, and this diversity extends to their admissions philosophies and practices. “Every college has its own dialect of the same language,” said Matt Kaberline, assistant dean of admissions at the University of Mary Washington, in Virginia. “Whose responsibility is it to create the translation chart, the dictionary? I think it’s all of us.”

Sure, but what does he mean by “responsibility”?

He wasn’t talking about college admissions, but his message applies. When I go on campus tours, I often marvel at all the facts that flow from the mouths of student tour guides—names, numbers, statistics, and obligatory tallies of the library’s books. The personal stories I hear from students are often more memorable than all of that data, however. In other words, a good story can help those facts go down easier.

On Monday morning, I spoke on a panel here at a joint conference of the Potomac and Chesapeake Association for College Admission Counseling and the Southern Association for College Admission Counseling. I was joined by two admissions officers who’ve thought a lot about the importance of storytelling during the admissions process. Our message: Telling good stories can help colleges communicate more effectively with students and parents.

Laura Martin, vice president for enrollment and dean of admission at Agnes Scott College, said she warns her guides not to become “tourbots” who could be easily replaced by machines. Instead of just talking about a particular building, she might tell a guide, take visitors to the classroom in which you had a great class that persuaded you to become a sociology major.

Authenticity matters, Ms. Martin insisted. “We often think in admissions that everything has to be beautiful,” she said. “The millennials, they see about 5,000 marketing messages a day. They’re pretty good at figuring out what’s not authentic.”

To that end, challenges students have overcome, even if they reveal the college’s imperfections, can present opportunities for telling personal stories. She suggested, for instance, that a tour guide might say: “I did struggle with getting my classes my first year, but here’s how I got around it.”

Students may need help developing ideas for stories. At Agnes Scott, Ms. Martin’s staff gets the guides thinking by asking them questions. Who’s your favorite professor? What’s your favorite place to study? Which restaurant do you always ask your parents to take you to?

“The goal is you want people to remember something when they leave your campus,” she said. “It’s gonna be the stories.”

Mary Tipton Woolley, associate director of undergraduate admissions at Georgia Tech, encouraged her colleagues to consider ways of helping visitors experience the campus. By giving them a pass to the dining hall and the recreation center, for instance. Or by granting them the same access to technology that students have.

“You’re trying to put on a show, and I don’t meant that in a razzle-dazzle, wow, kind of way,” Ms. Woolley said. “But you are trying to help people have experiences while they’re on your campus.”

My own two cents: Good stories must contain conflicts and resolutions. So why not tell the one about resolving your differences with that roommate from hell? Or the one about overcoming some kind of academic struggle? Or the one about how and why you chose a major, only to switch it a year later after that memorable epiphany?

These days, applicants and their parents have many questions about post-college outcomes. Alumni, it seems, can tell effective stories about their professional experiences. What was their first job, and what enabled them to get that second one? What circumstances later persuaded them to switch careers? And how did their alma mater—or something they learned there—help them succeed after they encountered a specific obstacle?

The caveat, of course, is that all of these stories must be true.

The Common Application’s membership, once dominated by private colleges, continues to grow more diverse. New members include nine public institutions, five overseas colleges, and two historically black colleges. The full list is here.

Richard C. Vos, the official who manipulated the data, acted alone, and none of the college’s other leaders knew of his actions, the report says. A disagreement over “admission priorities,” the report’s authors conclude, may explain his motivation for altering the numbers he presented to the college and the public. Mr. Vos could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

In late January, Mr. Vos, then the vice president and dean of admission and financial aid, resigned after admitting that he had reported inaccurate SAT statistics for each freshman class going back to 2005. The following day, Claremont McKenna’s president, Pamela B. Gann, announced that that the college had hired a law firm, O’Melveny & Myers LLP, to conduct an external investigation. The announcement served as a reminder that admissions numbers—scrutinized by presidents and trustees, students, and parents—are not always what they seem (one expert described the “the elasticity of admissions statistics“).

Moreover, the incident underscored the importance of oversight. The lack of internal verification procedures enabled Mr. Vos to conceal his actions, the report said: He was a “long-time and trusted executive who closely controlled and exercised ultimate authority over the reporting of admissions statistics.” The investigation also revealed that Mr. Vos altered other admission statistics, including ACT scores, class rank, and application totals.

Although Mr. Vos said he was solely responsible for the falsifications, he told the lawyers who wrote that report that Ms. Gann had “pressured him” to improve the test scores of incoming classes. The report, however, states that Mr. Vos enjoyed his job and felt secure in his position, and that there was no evidence that he was subject to “coercive or improper” pressure. Mr. Vos “suffered no disciplinary or economic consequence” for reporting false median SAT scores below his goals in 2008, 2009, and 2010, according to the law firm’s findings.

“While we believe that the VP sincerely feared disappointing the president if he did not meet his goals,” the report says, “we concluded that his subjective fear cannot reasonably be viewed as the product of undue pressure.”

What motivated Mr. Vos to fudge the data? A disagreement over “admission priorities,” the report concludes. In 2002, Claremont McKenna adopted a 10-year strategic plan, which included goals for enhancing the academic quality of its students. Among the most important benchmarks for measuring that quality were SAT scores. This long-term plan informed the annual admissions goals that Mr. Vos set each year, in consultation with Ms. Gann.

In 2004, the year Mr. Vos apparently began falsifying data, he reported a median SAT score of 1400 for the first time. The actual median was 1390, according to the report. Mr. Vos later told a college official that in 2005, when the median SAT score was also below 1400, he began inflating SAT scores because he “could not bring himself to tell the president about this development,” the report says.

During the investigation, Mr. Vos offered an explanation for fabricating the SAT scores. “He explained that the president’s admission priorities, while achievable, did not match his own,” the report says. “The VP stated that the college’s applicant pool could support the goal of maintaining or incrementally increasing SAT scores. He also acknowledged that achieving the SAT goal required some adjustments to the priorities applied in the admissions process. Rather than make some adjustments, however, the VP applied his own admission priorities. The VP stated that he knew what was in [the college]‘s best interest when it came to admissions decisions. And, although he embraced and achieved some of the president’s admission goals, he felt she had too many goals and that some must give way. When the VP’s admissions decisions did not produce the targeted SAT statistics, he chose to falsify the SAT statistics to conceal the outcome from the president.”

In other words, Mr. Vos apparently decided to reward a number of applicants for their qualitative attributes—such as leadership qualities and personal interests—rather than for their grades, test scores, and class rank. He did so, it seems, in keeping with the college’s holistic evaluation process, but also at the cost of quantitative measures of each class’s academic quality. It’s unclear whether Mr. Vos perceived that the college’s emphasis on improving academic quality threatened its ability to enroll a diverse class, but such a tension is common inside the admissions offices of selective colleges.

In an interview on Tuesday, Ms. Gann described the college’s admissions goals as “totally reasonable and totally commonplace.” She said she did not recall Mr. Vos expressing any concerns about those goals. “In general terms, we felt at the college that the admissions area was very high-performing,” she said. “In retrospect, we were basing that evaluation on what turned out to be misreported … admissions statistics.”

When asked if she would have been satisfied with Mr. Vos’s performance had he reported the correct numbers between 2004 and 2011, Ms. Gann’s response was “not entirely.”

“If I had seen the actual data, we would have had a conversation about his holistic admissions process,” Ms. Gann said. “The report clearly states that the … academic goals could clearly have been met with some adjustments in shaping the class.”