by Marian Wang, ProPublica.

George Washington University — which got in trouble last year for misreporting admissions data to bolster its college ranking — is making yet another confession.

The university has been misrepresenting its admissions and financial-aid policy for years, touting a “need-blind” admissions policy while in fact giving preference to wealthier students in the final stages of the admissions process, according to the student newspaper, the GW Hatchet, which first reported on the practice. Meanwhile, hundreds of academically comparable but needier students were put on the wait-list for admission because they lacked the financial resources.

Many colleges and universities like to tout “need-blind” admissions processes, or the practice of judging their applicants’ academic qualifications strictly on their merits and making decisions without factoring in applicants’ wealth. In recent years, some colleges that have traditionally been need-blind have weighed whether to become more need-aware.

Until a few days ago, the undergraduate admissions page for George Washington University stated, “Requests for financial aid do not affect admissions decisions.” That language was removed over the weekend. (Here’s the archived version.)

The updated page now explains that the admissions committee “evaluates” candidates initially without factoring in their financial need, but then considers applicants’ financial resources “at the point of finalizing admissions decisions.”

“I believe using the phrase ‘need-aware’ better represents the totality of our practices than using the phrase ‘need-blind,'” Laurie Koehler, senior associate provost for enrollment management, said in a statement to ProPublica.

“What we are trying to do is increase the transparency of the admissions process,” said Koehler.

Top GW administrators have repeatedly stated over the years that the university is need-blind. When the student newspaper in 2011 did a story about how some colleges are moving away from need-blind admissions, one administrator told the paper, “We’re still need-blind.”

It’s worth noting that the “need-blind” label can be as much about marketing as it is about giving all applicants a fair shot.

Many schools are “need-blind” but don’t actually give out much need-based aid. We recently detailed how universities, looking to boost their bottom lines, are increasingly using financial-aid dollars to attract wealthier students.

“It sounds better to people to say, ‘We’re need-blind.’ People think that’s a badge of courage,” said Matt Malatesta, vice president for admissions, financial aid, and enrollment at Union College, a small liberal arts college that practices need-aware admissions.
Unless schools pony up the aid dollars to meet students’ financial needs, touting the need-blind label isn’t particularly meaningful for students, who may simply get the offer of admission along with an offer to take on unsustainable debt.

“There are pluses and minuses on both sides of the debate,” Malatesta said in an earlier interview. “I’m not a believer that one is better than another.”

But in contrast to GW, many of the schools that have weighed the pluses and minuses of need-blind versus need-aware have done so quite publicly.

Grinnell College, for instance, announced earlier this year that after considering whether to become need-aware, it would remain need-blind for the time being — but would still look to wealthier students in the recruitment process and use merit aid to help attract them.

Wesleyan University last year took the other route, announcing it would give up the “need-blind” label and start to consider students’ financial need once its aid dollars were given out.

Both institutions are part of a handful of colleges across the country that promise to meet the full needs of all admitted students. George Washington University has not offered any such guarantee.

Earlier this year, George Washington University was featured in the Washington Post as trying to buck its “rich-kid reputation.” “I’m not going to deny we have a lot of students that come from wealthy families,” GW President Steven Knapp told the Post in April. “But we are increasingly trying to diversify, and I think we have been diversifying compared to where we were 10 years ago.”

About 13 percent of undergraduates at George Washington University receive the federal Pell grant for low-income students. That’s low, according to a recent report by the New America Foundation that also noted that the university charges its few low-income students, on average, a high net price even after grants and scholarships.

Tuition alone is more than $47,000 a year, and room and board costs another $11,000. The majority of students at the university pay less than the full sticker price, due to the university’s strategy of offering grants as discounts.

But even after grants are applied, low-income students at GW still pay a heavy price. Federal data for the 2011-2012 school year show that students at the university coming from families making $30,000 or less paid, on average, $21,000 to attend the university.

Photo: clio1789 via Flickr

by Marian Wang, ProPublica.

As college-bound students weigh their options, they often look to the various statistics that universities trumpet — things like the high number of applications, high test scores, and low acceptance rate.

But students may want to consider yet another piece of info: the ways in which schools can pump up their stats.

“There’s no question about it,” said David Kalsbeek, senior vice president for enrollment management and marketing at DePaul University. “There are ways of inflating a metric to improve perceived measures of quality.”

Some of these tweaks — such as a more streamlined application — can actually benefit students. Others serve to make the admissions process more confusing. Here’s a rundown.

1) Quickie, often pre-filled applications

Express applications — sometimes known as “fast apps,” “snap apps,” “VIP applications” or “priority applications” — are often pre-filled with some student information and require little, if anything, in the way of essays. And especially when they’re accompanied by an application-fee waiver, what’s a student got to lose? Not much, fans of fast apps argue.

The school, meanwhile, has a lot to gain. The tactic, designed to broaden the pool of applicants, can help super-charge application numbers. Drexel University and St. John’s University — the only two private colleges among the top 10 for most-applied-to colleges in 2011 — both market broadly and use fast apps.

Both schools received roughly 50,000 applications in the fall of 2011, according to U.S. News & World Report data. Both schools enroll roughly 3,000 freshmen.

Getting in more applications can also boost the appearance of selectivity. Critics contend that some schools use fast apps specifically for this purpose — luring students in to apply to institutions they hadn’t heard of and ultimately rejecting a portion of them. Neither school, when contacted, responded to requests for comment.

2) Shorter applications, Common Applications, and shorter Common Applications

Another way to get more applications is to adopt the Common Application, as nearly 500 colleges have since its inception in 1975. The form, which lets students apply to multiple schools at once, has fueled the long-term rise in applications. And as more colleges have adopted it, other schools have felt pressure to start using it too.

Many schools have long required that students submitting a Common Application include additional answers or essays. Dropping the extra requirements can result in a spike in applications. That’s what happened for Skidmore College, which saw a 42 percent jump in applications this cycle after it stopped requiring supplemental essays to the Common App. (Skidmore College’s dean of admissions did not respond to a request for an interview.)

3) Dipping into early-application pools

Another statistic schools often try to control is their “yield” — that’s admissions parlance for the percentage of students offered admission who choose to attend.

Though it’s no longer statistically factored into U.S. News’ ubiquitous rankings, yield rates are still a data point made available to prospective students. They’re also inextricably tied to acceptance rates because schools use previous yields to calculate how many students they should admit to fill a class. Schools with low yields must extend lots of acceptances, knowing many accepted students will go elsewhere.

One way to increase yields is to draw heavily from the pool of applicants who chose to apply through early action, or to encourage early decision, which is binding. At the University of Pennsylvania, for instance, nearly half of the spots in the freshman class are filled through the university’s binding early decision process.

Penn is hardly alone in leaning heavily on early decision. Many schools accept early-decision applicants at a higher rate than students who apply later. American University, for instance, accepts about 75 percent of early-decision applicants, though its overall acceptance rate is far lower.

One other thing to note: Because early decision involves committing before any financial aid is offered, it generally attracts wealthier families. Students who need financial aid or want to be able to make cost comparisons between different schools are typically advised not to apply early — which can hurt their chances.

4) Rejecting good students universities think are just using them as a backup

While opening up early-decision and early-action programs is a way for colleges to force students to demonstrate that they’re their top choice, schools use a variety of ways to divine the same information from regular-decision students as well. This is perhaps the most common — and in some ways, common-sense — method used by colleges to improve yield: simply to admit only those students who they perceive as likely to enroll.

“There are so many silent electronic footprints they’re leaving nowadays,” said Sundar Kumarasamy, vice president for enrollment management and marketing at the University of Dayton.

Kumarasamy said that his institution tracks many of these subtle signals of interest from applicants: They can tell whether individual applicants clicked to open email communications, logged into the system to check the status of an application, and not only whether they called the school, but how long that phone call lasted. If the school gets the sense that an applicant isn’t interested, that’s factored in. Kumarasamy calls it “recruiting for fit.”

The interest — or lack thereof — can ultimately mean that the school rejects some candidates who on paper are more than qualified but failed to demonstrate interest.

5) Making tests optional

One admissions trend within the past decade has been the test-optional movement. Colleges that have stopped requiring standardized test scores often cite equity and diversity as reasons to make the move, noting the strong correlation between socioeconomic status and test scores.

But going test-optional can also help universities’ stats. Critics note that in addition to attracting more applicants, the move ultimately skews the average test scores that institutions report: Lower-scoring applicants are the most likely to withhold their scores and higher-scoring applicants are the most likely to submit them.

6) Making stuff up

Some colleges actually cross the line with their creative number-crunching. Since the start of last year, five colleges have acknowledged overstating their admissions statistics: Bucknell University, Claremont McKenna College, Emory University, George Washington University, and Tulane University’s business school.

Admissions data is self-reported and no outside party is responsible for verifying it. The recent scandals involving falsified data have only come to light after colleges disclosed the problems themselves.

U.S. News‘ Robert Morse has said there is “no reason to believe that the misreporting is widespread.” But a survey by Inside Higher Ed last fall suggests that even admissions directors are skeptical of the reporting, with 91 percent of those surveyed saying believe they believe there’s more misreporting than has been identified.

Of course, some colleges resist the pressure to pump up admissions numbers. Doing so is unusual enough that it attracts notice and media coverage.

Boston College made “a strategic decision” this cycle to raise the admissions bar by adding an essay. It got the expected drop in applications — and a recent write-up in the New York Times. A handful of others, including Ursinus College, have done the same. In addition to requiring essays again, they dropped the fast app.

But for many other colleges, what’s been called the admissions “arms race” is on — with these strategically achieved statistics as the scoreboard.

by Marian Wang,ProPublica.

At the University of California Santa Cruz, where tuition runs to nearly $35,000 for non-residents, students every year pay more than 30 additional fees — including a small charge for what’s billed as “free” HIV testing. Students at Oklahoma State University pay a handsome sum to attend one of the state’s flagship schools, but they are also responsible for covering 18 different fees, including a “life safety and security fee.”

The $100 “globalization fee” at Howard University is listed — without explanation — in the school’s tuition and fees brochure. A school spokeswoman said the fee “supports internationalization initiatives” such as study abroad. Students pay the fee even if they have no intention of studying abroad themselves.

Worcester State University in Massachusetts, however, might have one of the most arresting fees. Students fortunate enough to be admitted face the challenge of paying the required tuition. But before they step foot on campus, they also will be hit with a fee to, well, step foot on campus. A portion of the school’s “parking/pedestrian fee” goes to the upkeep of the sidewalks on campus.

Student fees have been something of a known irritant for years, often criticized as a kind of stealth, second tuition imposed on unsuspecting families. But such fees are still on the rise on many campuses. And though their names can border on the comical — i.e., the “student success fee” — there’s nothing funny about how they can add up.

“It’s a way for colleges to increase the cost that may not be as apparent to as many students,” said Mark Kantrowitz, a financial aid expert and the founder of finaid.org and fastweb.org. “You focus in on tuition and when you get the bursar’s bill, there are lots of little lines for all these fees, but because each is a relatively small amount, you may not notice it as much. You focus in on the big figure but not on these little figures that collectively add up to a lot.”

This week, anxious high school seniors will be opening letters and emails of acceptance or rejection. For them, there will be a mix of joy and disappointment. But for those students and their parents, there will also be an initial reckoning with the expensive, often opaque issue of college fees.

Lauren Vaughn, a senior at UMass Amherst, is also an organizer for the UMass Students Against Debt coalition. She said appreciating the collective cost of additional school fees is often critical to determining whether any particular school is, in fact, affordable.

“It does seem as though we are not informed about these fees often until it is too late,” Vaughn said, noting that such fees “can be the thing that puts some students who are financially strained over the edge.”

The federal government has made efforts in recent years to make true college costs more transparent. U.S. Department of Education data shows that in more than half the states across the country, degree-granting institutions reported that fees comprised a greater portion of combined tuition and fees in the 2010-2011 school year than they had in 2008-2009.

But fees for specific programs and courses typically get left out of that data. The same goes for fees that apply to specific pockets of students, such as honors students or international students.

Many school officials say they do their best to make sure the necessary information about tuition and fees is clear to students and their parents. But there’s no one definition that schools stick to when deciding what’s covered by tuition and what falls under fees, and the very structuring of tuition and fees can vary wildly between different schools.

“It’s all smoke and mirrors in some ways, the issue of tuition and fees,” said Terry Meyers, a professor of English at the College of William and Mary. “It seems to be one area of the academic world where no one is looking and no one wants to look too closely.”

To best appreciate how confusing — even upside-down — the world of college costs can get, consider this: At state schools in Massachusetts, where the state board of higher education has held tuition flat for more than a decade, “mandatory fees” wind up far outstripping the price of tuition. At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the flagship of the UMass system, mandatory fees are more than six times the cost of in-state tuition.

And that isn’t the end of it: Students are then hit with still more charges — the $300 “freshman counseling fee,” the $185 “undergraduate entering” fee, and several hundred dollars more if your parents or siblings attend freshman orientation. Honors college and engineering students face still more fees.

A number of forces are driving fees upward. For public institutions, declining state support has left many schools scrambling to find other types of revenue. As well, since the notion of straightforward tuition hikes is often politically toxic, there is considerable appeal to using fees to make up shortfalls.

But it has all required ever-greater attempts at creativity. In the last few years, a number of public colleges across the country have added fees with vaguely pleasant names — “academic excellence and success fees,” or “student enhancement fees,” for instance.

Some school officials admit openly that these fees aren’t all that different from tuition.

Since 2009, students at Georgia’s public colleges have been paying hundreds of dollars a year in what are called “special institutional fees,” separate from tuition. The fees vary, depending on the campus; at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which charges the most, they now top $1,000 a year. All of it goes straight into schools’ general funds.

“The special institutional fee goes to the exact same things your tuition goes to,” said John Millsaps, spokesman for the state Board of Regents.

The charges are simply called “fees” instead of “tuition,” he said, because at a time when the state slashed funding, several classes of entering students had already been promised that their tuition would be locked in at the same rate as part of a “guaranteed tuition plan.” Calling any increase “tuition” would break that promise. The intent was also that the fee would be temporary, Millsaps said. Instead, the fees have grown on every campus.

College administrators also acknowledge that sometimes a “fee” is easier for students to stomach than a “tuition” increase — even if the difference is more about semantics than substance.

“Unfortunately, the word tuition is a little bit of a lightning rod these days,” said Colette Sheehy, vice president for management and budget at the University of Virginia. “And not just here, but in other places as well.”

This year, the university began imposing two new charges on students taking engineering courses or enrolled in the nursing school in order to better reflect the higher costs of running those programs. But rather than take the step of raising tuition on certain students, the school opted to implement the new charges as fees, as many other schools have already done. For an engineering major, the new fee typically adds up to an extra $750 per year, Sheehy said.

Within the 23-campus California State University system, six schools have adopted some form of what’s called a “student success fee” since the beginning of 2011. The annual fees, which different campuses have been using to cover a broad array of things from technology to mentoring programs to athletics, range from as little as $162 to as much as $430 a year depending on the school.

At Auburn University in Alabama, mandatory fees have been steadily increasing for several years. They now make up 16 percent of an in-state student’s combined tuition and fee costs. Part of this increase stems from self-imposed fees that students voted for because they wanted a new recreation center, said Mike Reynolds, executive director of student financial services.

But a major component of the increase is Auburn’s new $400 “proration fee,” also introduced in 2011 to make up for a loss of state support. Reynolds said the charge was labeled a fee because it was intended to be temporary.

“That fee could go away. Whether that will happen, I don’t know,” Reynolds said.

Critics suggest that some schools likely keep their fee costs fuzzy as a way of seeming more financially attractive to prospective students. But if students are still paying for the additional costs in the end, any marginal marketing benefit on the front end may engender bad feelings after the bill arrives.

“It is hard not to feel a little misled,” said one parent of a student at UMass Amherst who did not want to be quoted by name. “Yes, they are on the web somewhere, but they are not always easy to find. Unless you dig out the list and closely analyze it, you don’t realize there are all these extra expenses. Schools don’t go out of their way to publicize it.”

School spokesman Ed Blaguszewski said in an email that the school makes an effort to be clear about total costs.

“In publications and [on] our website, extensive details about the tuition, fees and the estimated overall cost of attendance are shared with students in advance,” Blaguszewski said. “Our admissions and financial aid staff believe prospective students are well informed about cost, and the info is publicly posted.”