If you’ve ever tried filling out your own tax return, you’re no doubt familiar with the frustration that often comes from deciphering government documents. Many parents feel exactly the same way when they try to tackle the FAFSA — the free application for federal financial aid. While the application may be free, it often costs many hours of aggravation to complete it. Now a new study has found that helping low- and moderate-income parents with the FAFSA might be a good way to start closing the college attendance gap between rich and poor.

In The Role of Simplification and Information in College Decisions: Results from the H&R Block FAFSA Experiment, co-authors Eric Bettinger, Bridget Terry Long, Philip Oreopoulos, and Lisa Sanbonmatsu report on the results of a random assignment experiment. One group of low- and moderate-income families received help completing the FAFSA from H & R Block tax professionals. They also were given an estimate of how much government aid they might receive along with information about local college options. A control group received personalized aid eligibility information, but did not get any assistance with the FAFSA.  When the researchers compared the two groups, they found that those who completed the FAFSA with the help of H & R Block were substantially more likely to not only submit the financial aid form, but also enroll in college the following fall and qualify for more financial aid.

 While all kinds of approaches have been tried over the years to increase college attendance rates among low-income students, this study involving 23,000 people suggests that one answer may lie in helping families gain access to financial aid. The low-income families who were not expected to contribute to their child’s college expenses were the ones who benefitted the most from the intervention.

Students hoping to get accepted to top universities often take Advanced Placement courses, a rigorous series of classes in 30 subjects that can earn them college credit. In order to receive credit for the courses, students must get a passing grade on a three-hour exam that is independently graded and includes both multiple choice questions and a so-called “free response section.” While the rigorous exams always strike fear in the hearts of high school student, the anxiety level is on the rise as word spreads that changes are in store for both the courses and the tests.

The College Board’s Advance Placement Program is making changes to AP world languages, science and history in an effort to “foster students’ capacity to think and reason in a deeper way.” First up are changes to German, French and World History, which will be implemented in the 2011-2012 school year. Changes to select AP science courses will not go into effect until the 2012-2013 school year, but the College Board has already posted a draft version of the revised AP Biology curriculum online.  As Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board put it, “These changes will spread best practices across AP classrooms worldwide.”

While news headlines and anxious parent may tell you otherwise, the fact is it is no more difficult for most students to get into college today than 10 years ago. That’s the message in a new report from the Center for Public Education, an initiative of the National School Boards Association.

The report, titled “Chasing the College Acceptance Letter,”  concludes that if students are well prepared in high school and earn the right credentials, they will most likely get into a competitive university. What qualifies as the right credentials? Not necessarily straight A’s. The report suggests “decent grades,” college prep courses, and good scores on college entrance exams will get most students into a competitive university even if it is not the school of their dreams.

But the report also points out that minority and low-income students are less likely to get the credentials necessary for admission into a competitive university. And even those low-income students who are well prepared are less likely to get accepted to a competitive school than their high-income counterparts (67 percent vs. 80 percent).

As for all the news headlines about colleges being flooded with applications and having to turn away more students, it’s important to keep the facts in perspective. Just because the number of applications are up, it doesn’t mean there are fewer spots for qualified students. As the report says: “Does a C student sending an application to Harvard decrease the school’s acceptance rate? Yes. But does it decrease the chances of a straight-A student getting admitted? Doubtful.”

Now for the fine print. The authors of the report stress that their conclusions are based on the “average” applicants’ chances of getting into a competitive or somewhat selective college. That means universities that admit between 75 and 85 percent of their applicants. So what does an average high school student look like? The criteria used in the report was a GPA of 3.1, a score of 21 on the ACT and a passing grade in math and science courses up through chemistry and trigonometry (or the equivalents, Algebra III and Analytic Geometry.)

“Admissions creep” is the term the National Association for College Counseling has coined for the tendency that universities have to admit students earlier and earlier in their senior year. The result is that high school seniors often use their admissions letters as an excuse to blow off rigorous courses. That’s why the NACAC is now requiring its 1,600 member schools to give applicants until May 1 to respond to admissions offers. “More and more colleges are admitting students earlier, so their senior year kind of goes away,” Joyce E. Smith, chief executive of the association, told the New York Times. Known as National Candidates’ Reply Date, the May 1^st deadline will be more strictly adhered to beginning this year.

In another policy change, NACAC is also asking its members not to offer extra incentives to students who state a particular university is their “first choice.”  Perks have often included the first choice of housing or classes. “Colleges were putting far too much emphasis on students’ responses,” Smith says. “A 17- or 18-year-old may not have a strong preference for No. 1 over No. 3.”  For students who have no doubts, they still have the option of early decision.

Your essays are written, your recommendation letters are mailed, and your college applications are submitted. Now what? Well, college admissions counselors suggest there are some things you can be doing while you’re waiting for the fat envelope. U.S. News & World Report talked to a few of them, and here’s what they suggest:

•  Follow up with your high school: You requested your transcripts, but were they actually sent? This is a busy time of year for high school counseling offices, and it’s important to check so you don’t accidently fall through the cracks.
• Market yourself to colleges: Now is the time to visit to the school of your choice and see if you can get an interview with someone from the admissions office. But once you’re there, be considerate of people’s time.
• Consider your options: If you really like a school, but are undecided about your major, consider choosing a program with lower enrollments.
• Think about finances: Now is the time to complete those lengthy financial aid forms, and talk to your parents about your options. Don’t wait until you’re accepted to apply for financial aid.

Those are some do’s, and you can find more tips here.  What about the don’ts? Greg Roberts, dean of admissions at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, says that’s pretty simple. Don’t “send mountains of unessential supplemental information, or e-mail or continually contact the admission representative during the time when they are reading applications 60 hours per week.”

When students are making the all-important decision of where to apply to college, they often turn to U.S. News and World Report’s rankings of colleges and universities. According to one study, more than half of incoming college freshmen surveyed said the rankings were important when making their decision about which school to attend.

But a new study calls into question the methodology used to rank the schools. Specifically, it examines the “reputational” survey that makes up 25 percent of the score that the magazine uses for its rankings. The research shows that reputational scores are based on the previous year’s rankings, and rankings, in turn, are based on the reputational scores. In other words, the scores are circular.

The study, published in the American Journal of Education, was conducted by Michael N. Bastedo, an associate professor of education at the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan, and Nicholas A. Bowman, a postdoctoral research associate in the Center for Social Concerns at the University of Notre Dame.

In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, Bastedo said that the study raises serious questions about the validity of the reputational survey. The findings suggest that reputational rankings won’t change, even as the quality of colleges does change. But Robert Morse, director of data research for U.S. News, says it’s not surprising that reputational scores are “relatively stable from one year to another,” adding that “schools themselves say they change slowly, not rapidly.”

What if students applying to college knew that they could enroll in the school of their choice, and receive a tuition reimbursement if they later discovered it wasn’t a good fit? That might be possible some day if the insurance industry adopts a type of policy that two economists have outlined in a working paper. In Insuring College Failure Risk, Satyajit Chatterjee, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, and A. Felicia Ionescu, an assistant professor of economics at Colgate University, explain why such a policy makes sense.

At the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, the economists presented mathematical models, which show that “failure insurance” might be a useful component of the federal student loan program. The models theorize that students’ college decisions are driven by their finances, their views on future earnings, and the amount of “disutility” that they expect from the academic work. If structured correctly, the failure insurance would ease student anxieties over debt, while giving them an incentive to stay in school. The economists explained how it would work in a Q & A with the Chronicle of Higher Education.

This opinion piece by Jill Tiefenthaler, Wake Forest’s provost and professor of economics, first appeared in the Greensboro News & Record.

By JILL TIEFENTHALER

There are no objective inputs to the college admissions process. We crave clear tests that offer a fair chance to prove merit. The SAT was conceived for this purpose, but that objectivity has eroded.

We want to believe that, irrespective of our different backgrounds or experiences in life, we are judged based on our work ethic and achievements. At Wake Forest University, this premise has been woven into the fabric of our institution since its founding. We have always sought to provide opportunities to those willing to earn them, without regard to advantages in life or the lack thereof. In order to preserve this important heritage, we have taken a bold stand to acknowledge the absence of objectivity in college admissions and redirect emphasis to the subjective measures that work.

The race for spots at the most competitive national colleges and universities has reached a fever pitch, and families have responded by trying to maximize every input. Standardized test scores provide a great example. These scores generally improve with guidance and repetition, and so the tests have encouraged an industry of test training that takes advantage of the ambitions of students and their families. Test preparation courses have become commonplace, and students take tests over and over to improve their scores. At the extreme, consultants whose fees reach tens of thousands of dollars contribute to an escalating craze.

The goal of evaluating standardized test scores and measures like GPA is to find the applicants with the brightest minds who are motivated to excel and offer meaningful contributions to the learning of their peers. Admissions professionals try to determine which students will be academically successful and make important contributions to the learning community. There is some correlation between standardized test scores and first-year college grades, but high school grades — even with the differences in curriculum across schools — are by far the best predictors of college success. When a predictive model accounts for high school grades, adding in standardized test scores does not significantly improve the accuracy of the model. In fact, the SAT is correlated more closely with socioeconomic background than with college success. More

One acceptance letter to an Ivy League school is enough to get any family excited. But imagine receiving four acceptance letters all in the same day. That’s what happened to Ray, Kenny, Carol and Martina Crouch, quadruplets at Danbury High School in Connecticut. All four had applied to Yale under its early admission guidelines. The New York Times reported in an article (http://bit.ly/5g5h8X ) that each one received news that they had been accepted on the same day, a quadruple first for Yale.  None of the Crouch sibling has decided yet if they will be attending Yale since they have until May 1 to make up their minds. Plus they have yet to hear from the nearly 30 schools that they have applied to collectively. As for Yale, they are hoping to see all four Crouches on their campus next year.  “Their applications were terrific, and we simply hope that they will all decide to come!” Jeffrey Brenzel, the dean of admissions at Yale, told the Times in an email. Asked if Yale had any policy on admitting members of the same family as a package, Brenzel said, “We don’t feel an obligation to render the same decision on siblings in the same year.”

Since the publication of J.K. Rowling’s first book, Harry Potter mania has taken the nation by storm.  And as it turns out, college campuses are no exception. In a light-hearted opinion piece for the New York Times, Oregon high school senior Lauren Edelson recounts her recent experiences while on a college tour of legendary institutions like Harvard, Dartmouth, and Middlebury College. “It turns out, they’re all a little bit like Hogwarts — the school for witches and wizards in the Harry Potter books and movies,” she writes. “Or at least, that’s what the tour guides kept telling me.” She goes on to explain how the Harvard tour guide compared the freshman dining hall to Hogwarts’s Great Hall. At Middlebury, Edelson discovers that students play a flightless version of the Quidditch game, complete with broomsticks. And the list goes on. What to make of all this Harry Potter talk? Edelson contends that colleges are trying too hard to convince students that their campuses will fulfill student fantasies. “I care about diversity and need-blind financial aid — and, of course, the social life. But I don’t care about what percentage of the student body runs around on broomsticks,” she writes, and then adds. “They’re selling the wrong thing. And my friends and I won’t be fooled. After all, Harry Potter is frozen in high school, and we’re growing up.”

Changes are in store for the Graduate Record Examination. Beginning in fall 2011, the Educational Testing Service will begin scoring the test on a 130-170 point scale, with score increments of one point. The new system will replace the current 200-800 scale with score increments of 10 points.  (The writing test will keep its 1-6 scale.)

David Payne, an ETS spokesman, said the scoring change was designed to discourage graduate programs from viewing 10-point increments as representing big differences among applicants. Payne pointed out that students who score a few points higher than others do not necessary have significantly different abilities.

The other major change will affect students who take the computer-based GRE. They will have the option of moving around between questions in each section instead of providing a final answer before receiving the next question. These and other changes to content and format will make the exam “much friendlier” to test takers and will represent “the very best” option for graduate programs, Payne said.

But Robert Schaeffer, public education director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, questions whether graduate schools even need the GRE at all. Given that graduate programs admit from “a much smaller universe” (of colleges) than do undergraduate programs (with many more high schools), “the argument that you need testing” to compare candidates “is weaker,” Schaeffer told Inside Higher Ed.

At last count, California State University had received more than 600,000 applications for admission next fall, with more than 70,000 of those arriving the day before the November 30 deadline. Most of Cal State’s 23 campuses are no longer accepting applications, but a few are placing late applicants on a waiting list.

The sheer volume of applicants means that this year, admission at Cal State is far from guaranteed. While in theory, almost all of the applicants meet the school’s qualifications, the proportion of students actually admitted is expected to go down significantly. According to an article in Inside Higher Ed , Cal State’s transition from a non-competitive to a competitive institution is one of the biggest admissions stories of the year.

One of the reasons for the shift is California’s budget cuts, which is forcing the university to reduce enrollment in spite of higher demand. “Philosophically, most of us who work at the university are devoted to the access we’ve had throughout our existence,” James Blackburn,  director of enrollment for the system, told Inside Higher Ed. “To turn away so many students who have the potential, to turn away someone who meets the requirements, it’s very sad.”

There is some good news however. Blackburn said he was hopeful that the system would maintain its diversity since applications from Asian Americans, Latinos and African Americans were all up more than 35 percent this year.