Day and night the locals chatter. They counsel and console, bicker and rant. Their questions are endless. Though often hopeful, they never stop pounding the drums of worry. This is College Confidential, a vast virtual realm where visitors can find the best and worst of human nature. Here, in moderated discussion forums, people help strangers. They…

Boston College saw a 26-percent decrease in applications this year, a drop officials largely attribute to a new essay requirement. Last year the private Jesuit institution received a record 34,051 applications for 2,250 spots in its freshman class. This year approximately 25,000 students applied, and all of them had to do one thing their…

Over the next decade, more students of color than ever before will pass through the gates of the nation's colleges and join the ranks of its work force, according to new projections by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. By the year 2020, minority students will account for 45 percent of the nation's public high-school…

Each year, admissions officers know that a small percentage of admitted applicants who sent deposits will not show up. The phenomenon, known as "summer melt," has many causes. Students might change their plans because they suddenly get off their first-choice college's waiting list--or because they opt to spend a year caring for penguins in…

Most people in admissions have a road story. There are tales of wrong turns, lost suitcases, and days when they were just well-dressed ghosts, walking in and out of high schools where no students came to see them. These are the trials of admissions representatives who leave their campuses for several weeks each fall. They trek near and far to meet…

Jeff Rickey is a numbers guy. But three years ago, a colleague asked him about something he'd never counted: applicants who came out of nowhere. The question intrigued Mr. Rickey, dean of admissions and financial aid at Earlham College in Indiana. He found that 17 percent of the college's applicants that year had not called, taken a tour, or…

Over the past two decades, college admissions has become a prime-time preoccupation. Most people know at least something about the process, especially if they have a teenager in high school and a college guide on their coffee table. Nonetheless, widespread public misconceptions persist about admissions requirements, the selection process, and the…

Wake Forest University will no longer require applicants to submit standardized test scores, the university announced last week. The move makes Wake Forest, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, one of the most prominent institutions with a "test optional" admissions policy. The university's decision reveals the increasing complexity of the…

Marilee Jones's career had been a remarkable success. She joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) admissions office in 1979, landing a job in Cambridge at a time when boys ruled the sandbox of the admissions profession. Her job was to help MIT recruit more women, who then made up less than one-fifth of the institute's students. She…

Debating annual front-page articles that focus almost exclusively on Ivy League colleges and other highly competitive institutions that reject the vast majority of their applicants, the author reports that, in 2007, 80 percent of current first-year students were admitted to their top-choice college, according to an annual survey of more than…

At the annual conference of the National Association for College Admission Counseling (Nacac), admissions deans and high-school counselors gathered in September 2007 to grapple with questions such as: (1) Rethinking the role of standardized tests in admissions (many attendees predict that psychometric giants ACT and SAT, will not always dominate…

Describes how a growing number of colleges are using on-site "instant" admissions programs to let applicants know in person whether they have been accepted. (EV)

The college admissions process teaches students how to express themselves during interviews, how to describe their best qualities in application essays. It may also make them wary of college marketing campaigns, and skeptical of being treated as a statistics, due to the large role played by standardized-test scores and grade-point averages. Such…

Describes how 28 private colleges have endorsed a set of policies designed to preserve need-blind admissions. The group agreed on guidelines for the formula used to calculate a family's ability to pay for college, resulting in more aid for more needy students. (EV)