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A 2005 national survey of incoming freshmen in the US reveals that two out of three college freshmen believe it is essential or very important to help others who are in difficulty, with 83 percent stating they volunteered at least occasionally during their senior year of high school. The survey also finds an increased level of political involvement among students, with more than a third stating it is important or essential to keep up-to-date with politics.

Nearly five months after Hurricane Katrina swept them off their campuses in and around New Orleans, thousands of college administrators, faculty members, and students began a new semester in January 2006. Students came back with a new spirit of determination to adapt to the new realities of New Orleans, and to campuses that are forever changed, with temporary housing and smaller academic programs.

Describes how, as tuitions soar and more students seek money to go to college, financial-assistance companies prosper by selling information that is available for free. (EV)

Discusses how a plagiarism scandal has again "mired" the University of Virginia's fabled judicial system in "trauma" and lawsuits, while some systems that are less well known, such as that of Georgia Tech, may be functioning more effectively. (EV)

Discusses how, as Harvard's Henry Wechsler continues to warn that a "sea of alcohol" threatens many campuses, some health experts wonder whether he is doing more harm than good. (EV)

Explores how, for college students, the events of September 11, 2001, have changed everything; the new directions they have taken vary as much as they do. Presents profiles of several students with differing perspectives. (EV)

Researchers are analyzing the root causes for the universal problem of chronic academic procrastination, which is believed to raise student's anxiety and sinks their self-esteem. Colleges of Belgium, Canada, and Netherlands have begun to develop counseling programs that draw on cognitive and behavioral research to help students lessen procrastination or at least make it more manageable.

Describes how college students are among the reservists whose lives have been put on hold by recent military activation. (EV)

Animals owned by college students are particularly vulnerable to neglect, mistreatment, and abandonment, given the fact that pets are usually prohibited from college dorms and student apartments. Some students, however, persist in keeping pets on campus. (SLD)

Describes how, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, incoming freshmen read and discussed a book about the Koran, despite attempts by a Christian group to halt the seminars. (EV)

Describes how patriotism in the wake of September's terrorist attacks is prompting more students to consider ROTC, but not necessarily to enlist. (EV)

Describes how the Gates Millennium Scholars program uses nontraditional criteria to award grants to low-income minority students. Profiles the first three recipients. (EV)

Describes how ugly incidents involving a fraternity and sororities prompted two campuses to take a hard look at the powerful systems. (EV)

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 also belittle strangers, question their intelligence, and mock their chosen colleges or alma maters. What began as a college-admissions Web site has become a culture with its own ethos, language, and rituals. Many here share a common faith: Where you go to college shapes, even defines, your very existence. An acceptance from the "right" college is your ticket to a rich and happy life. Woe to the rejected. College Confidential didn't invent the anxiety many Americans associate with applying to college, but, like a mile-high megaphone, it amplifies that anxiety 24 hours a day. Even some of the site's longtime members believe it stokes as many fears as it soothes. And so College Confidential, with its many facets, is also a metaphor for the admissions process, in which families have many choices. To freak out or stay calm. To sweat prestige or not. To crank up the big amplifiers or don the noise-canceling headphones.

Nobody wants to be here. In remedial English, earning no credit, stuck. Now--after months of commas, clauses, and four-paragraph essays--students have one last chance to write their way out. Twenty students sit at computers, poised to start the final in-class essay for English 002 at Montgomery College. Anybody can enroll here, and all kinds do. In 85 minutes the students must craft a thesis and clear topic sentences, using evidence to support their opinions. They have to answer one of three questions, about their assigned book, "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian," by Sherman Alexie, or their difficulty in mastering goals for the course, such as "Write and edit sentences that observe the conventions of standard American English." The students in English 002 stand at higher education's threshold. If they make it through, they advance to college-level courses that count toward a degree. Otherwise they must decide whether to try again, running down their financial aid, or give up on college and make do without it. For now, they all belong to the second-chance club known as remedial education. They're here because something, somewhere, went wrong. They didn't care about school, or school didn't care about them. For some, reading or writing never came easily. Maybe they didn't speak English as children. Or they lacked money, guidance, opportunity. Courses like English 002 are supposed to catch them all up. It's a lot to ask. Many students have a long way to go, and their obstacles are hardly confined to the classroom. Nationally, of the students who place into remediation--as many as 90 percent at some community colleges--only about a quarter go on to earn a degree. Here, past failures have worn some students down, and the prospect of success seems to frighten them. Several hope to attend four-year colleges and pursue careers, yet some have struggled to pull clear of bad circumstances or habits. Others are just drifting through.

Some students at University of Florida can take classes only during the spring and summer semesters for as long as they are enrolled. Each year they will get a four-month break--the fall semester--when they can take online courses, study abroad, or do internships. Some may opt to work. Despite their schedules, the students are full-fledged undergraduates--not second-class citizens--a point the university has emphasized on and off the campus. At a time when colleges are rethinking their offerings, Florida's move represents a reinvention of the academic calendar. The idea was inspired by growing demand and a dwindling supply of seats. A few years ago, deep cuts in state appropriations prompted the university's leaders to shrink undergraduate enrollment. Although they were wary of limiting access further, they knew the campus was at capacity--at least during the fall. Florida, like many other institutions, has long offered spots to "January admits," first-year applicants who must wait for a semester before enrolling. Over the past several years, the university has quadrupled the number of freshmen admitted in the spring, when it also welcomes about 1,000 transfer students. Officials decided that the spring-and-summer option must come with an enticement, something distinctive. So they developed the Innovation Academy, a mandatory series of courses, including a senior-year capstone project, for all spring-and-summer students. Each student takes six courses--on creativity and entrepreneurship, for instance--as part of a minor in "innovation." The program offers seminars, guest lectures, and service-learning opportunities, all to encourage students to develop solutions to problems in their chosen fields. Participating students also get hands-on experience at the university's new business incubator. Florida plans eventually to enroll 2,000 students on the spring-and-summer schedule.

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 predecessors did not: write a supplemental essay, of up to 400 words, in response to one of four prompts. Although some enrollment officials have nightmares about big one-year declines, John L. Mahoney, director of undergraduate admissions at Boston College, described the numbers as good news. After all, the quality of this year's applicants--as measured by their ACT and SAT scores--did not go down, compared with last year. In an era when many colleges are asking applicants to do less, some institutions have asked them to do more, purposely thinning the ranks of prospective students. If nothing else, Boston College's move reveals the slipperiness of application tallies, widely viewed as a meaningful metric. If the addition of one short essay can drain a quarter of a college's pool in one year, how much did those numbers say in the first place? For the last decade, selective colleges have operated according to their own laws of nature: Each year, applications rise, acceptance rates fall, and the trends seem as inevitable as gravity. In the competition for high-achieving students, bigger applicant pools have long been understood as better. And "more, more, more" is often the mantra of recruitment. The boom has brought plenty of challenges, too. A deluge of applications has made the admissions process less predictable, for applicants and colleges alike. More students applying to more colleges means more questions about who's a serious applicant and who's not. Some of the forces that have long driven application increases were beyond any college's control. The long-term surge in high-school graduates. The rise in foreign applicants. The growth of Web-based communications. Yet colleges do control the content of their applications, and how quickly a student can apply.

The handyman has a tool for everything, but the admissions dean is not so lucky: He must make do with just a few. Every year, presidents and professors expect freshmen who are curious, determined, and hungry for challenges. The traditional metrics of merit, however, can't reveal such qualities. Standardized-test scores may or may not predict a given student's long-term potential. Grade-point averages present only a partial view of an applicant's talents and work habits. And so, some admissions officers say, it's time for a new set of tools. Over the last decade, a handful of colleges have designed "noncognitive" assessments to measure attributes--like leadership and the ability to meet goals--that content-based tests do not. Succeeding in college often requires initiative and persistence, or what some researchers call "grit." Noncognitive measures are an attempt to gauge such qualities. If the SAT asks what a student has learned, these assessments try to get at how she learned it. Long an afterthought in academe, alternative indicators of student potential have captured the interest of instructors, testing companies, and enrollment chiefs. As science unspools the secrets of how one learns, it inspires new approaches to assessment. The way most colleges have long evaluated applicants reflects beliefs about what counts most. If those beliefs evolve, it follows, so, too, should the admissions process. Imagining a new system, however, is easier than building one. What should the 21st-century college consider? How much can noncognitive assessments--typically in the form of self-evaluations and short essays--really tell a college? And are they reliable? Admissions officials plan to weigh those questions this week at a national conference sponsored by the University of Southern California's Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice. The conference, "Attributes That Matter: Beyond the Usual in College Admission and Success," will include experts in noncognitive aspects of learning, which represent the next frontier in holistic admissions. Jerome A. Lucido, the center's executive director, predicts that new measures of student potential will eventually become fixtures in higher education, allowing admissions officers to conduct more-robust reviews of applicants, while giving colleges valuable data on those who enroll.

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 graduates, up from 38 percent in 2009. In short, the number of white and black graduates will decline, and the number of Hispanic and Asian-American/Pacific Islander graduates will rise significantly. Those projections appear in the latest edition of "Knocking at the College Door," a regular report on demographic change published by the commission, which is known as Wiche. The updated report includes national, regional, and state-by-state projections for graduates of public and private high schools through 2027-28, revealing the enrollment challenges colleges must adapt to. "Knocking at the College Door" has long been a touchstone for those who recruit students. Rich in data, it portends a future that both inspires and worries enrollment officials, who must chart short- and long-term courses for their institutions.

Among the traditional measures of student quality, class rank is widely described by admissions officers as the fuzziest. That is why some colleges no longer use it in their evaluations of applicants, while many others do not consider it very important. The measure once had greater appeal. For one thing, it had the whiff of fairness. Seeing how an applicant stacked up to his or her peers seemed like an essential way of running the Darwinistic realm of selective admissions, where talk of competition is ubiquitous. And the highest-ranked students in a given school, admissions officers often found, had the best odds of success in college. In that sense, class rank could tell evaluators more than grade-point averages do. As more and more students take more and more advanced classes, grade-weighting has become common. Grading scales have gone haywire, varying from school to school and resulting in 5.2 GPA's and multiple valedictorians, as well as students with all A's and a few B's who rank below the top tenth. Also, grade inflation has become a major concern for colleges. Meanwhile, worries about the effects of ranking--on students' psyches as well as admissions chances--have led many high schools to cease their calculations. Outside of admissions committees, however, the metric has a life of its own. Trustees and prospective students alike tend to view class rank as an important measure of institutional merit, and "U.S. News" factors class rank into its ratings of colleges.

In this digital age, teaching has transcended the classroom. So why should school walls confine college counseling? The question is driving innovation that could change the way students prepare for college and careers. Just as learning is now a hybrid of face-to-face and virtual interactions, the transmission of college know-how is fast becoming a blended enterprise. To fulfill the nation's ambitious college-completion goals, however, counseling must travel many paths, and some of them lead far beyond school walls.

Hazing is the beast in academe's basement, often lurking unseen and unreported, only to rise again and again despite countless rules and zero-tolerance policies. It takes many forms, some physically violent, some emotionally cruel, some booze-soaked, some silly. Since 1970, colleges have seen at least one hazing-related fatality each year, and the annual tally of reported injuries and abuse is long. Despite its prevalence, hazing remains somewhat mysterious. It's been the subject of relatively little research, and relevant studies are longer on the "what" than the "why." Nonetheless, recent data suggest that hazing affects more students--and starts much earlier--than college officials may have previously thought. Several scholars have also examined how hazing rituals tend to vary among students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Lawrence C. Ross Jr., author of "The Divine Nine: The History of African American Fraternities and Sororities," has written that hazing among white students often involves excessive alcohol consumption, whereas hazing among black students typically involves "brutalizing pledges." But make no mistake, hazing is an "equal-opportunity disgrace." That phrase comes from Hank J. Nuwer, an associate professor of journalism at Franklin College and author of four books on hazing. On college campuses, the ritual infects athletics teams, honor societies, glee clubs, and drama clubs.

This article discusses Sundar Kumarasamy and how he is remaking the rituals of recruitment at the University of Dayton. For years Sundar Kumarasamy walked through the lobby of the University of Dayton's admissions building and daydreamed about changing every inch of the place. Mr. Kumarasamy, the university's vice president for enrollment management and marketing, recently got his wish. Higher education's global borders are eroding, and Mr. Kumarasamy's career proves that people's destinations often defy prediction. Twenty years after leaving his native India, the former engineer has become one of the admissions profession's most daring innovators, redefining recruitment at a Catholic college long defined by its modest style. He has greatly expanded Dayton's domestic and global reach, all the while earning a national reputation for dissecting data and embracing wild-card ideas. Some of Mr. Kumarasamy's counterparts attribute his success, in part, to his unconventional background. Through the ever-evolving science of enrollment management, Mr. Kumarasamy reinvented himself. Five years after coming to Dayton, reinvention continues to define his work, which has been a series of data-driven experiments and imaginative risks.

Jean M. Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, says gadgets and online social-networking sites have stoked the self-loving tendencies of modern students. Twenge revealed her findings from a study that describes this wired and coddled generation, known as Millennials, as the most narcissistic in recent history. Twenge, who conducted the study with four other researchers, defines narcissism as excessive vanity and a sense of entitlement. In their report, the researchers warn that a generation of swollen heads could harm American society. Twenge blames this apparent scourge, in part, on the "self-esteem movement," pushed by parents, educators, and the media--all of whom, she says, have tried too hard to build children's confidence. One prominent researcher scoffs at Twenge's description of today's students. William Strauss, co-author of Millennials Go to College, says her characterizations are harsh, unfair, and unsupported by the data.

Explores how perceptions of quality turn students' heads toward certain campuses, but that price often determines their final choices. (EV)

Discusses a national survey suggesting that college students could be a key demographic force in the 2004 elections. (EV)

Alcohol, drug, and weapons violations were up at colleges around the country, according to an annual analysis of data from almost 5,000 colleges. (EV)

Describes how educators on both sides of the admissions process are devising ways to motivate high school seniors after they have been accepted by colleges. (EV)

Discusses how new studies indicate that high achievers indeed influence their peers academically, but that it is not always clear how. (EV)

Describes the increasing interest in high school debate teams among minority group students. Participation in debate, no longer the province of white students alone, can result in increased college admissions, thanks in part to the Urban Debate League. (SLD)

Discusses criticism of early admissions decisions, including claims that it heavily benefits colleges, puts too much pressure on some students, and hurts those who need financial aid. (EV)

Explores how many colleges have changed their enrollment strategies to focus more on local and regional students in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks and recession. (EV)

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)

Describes how pro-Palestinian sentiment is growing rapidly on American campuses, with rallies and anti-Israel campaigns springing up around the nation. (EV)

Describes how a group of female columnists who write about sex in college newspapers is attracting quite a following, and some controversy as well. (EV)

Discusses how, as the College Board prepares to make changes in the SAT, experts debate how fair the new exam will be. (EV)

Describes how colleges are struggling to find ways to head off the worsening phenomenon of postgame rampages. (EV)

Describes how the refusals of Princeton and Brown to follow restrictions on early-admissions programs have put the universities at odds with a national admissions association, and left applicants in the middle. (EV)

Describes how the College Board will stop flagging the scores of test-takers who were granted extra time on the SAT because of disabilities. (EV)

Describes how colleges are exploring new Web-based strategies for successful roommate pairings. (EV)

Describes how the College Board has approved a series of changes to the controversial SAT; a writing test will be added, along with new approaches on reading and math questions. (EV)

Discusses a new study which found that even as the number of high school graduates fell over the past 20 years, competition for college applicants increased. (EV)

Describes how a small but increasing number of students who are admitted to competitive higher education institutions are spending a year traveling or volunteering before enrolling. Some institutions, such as Harvard University, encourage this break to avoid burn-out and provide students with perspective. (EV)