It is important for parents to ask for information from each private college about the various merit grants, scholarships and other incentives available, as they differ from college to college.

I think the increased demand is partly due to smarter consumers. When information about healthy, gourmet and specialty items increase, demand will follow.

Institutional aid is not guaranteed. Students wishing to be considered for this form of aid must position themselves correctly to be recruited by private colleges.

Grades count more at some, community service at others. Some admissions committees look closely at recommendations, others don't. Athletic or musical talent can sometimes boost your chances. The criteria cover a wide range of variables that often interact in complex ways. But the mysterious admissions process really comes down to nothing more than matching the strengths of the various applicants against the attributes a particular college is looking for.

To help you evaluate how your strengths stack up, you can build models based on statistical profiles of recent freshman classes at the schools, data on their applicant pools, and analysis of other primary sources of information. And of course realism is important. You do not want to place all your bets on colleges where you have little chance of getting in. At the same time, you don't want to be frightened away from colleges where your chances may be much higher than you think.

He had been given a strong faith through his parents. As an adult, in his teen years and early college, he kind of got away from the church, and ended up going to St. John's University in Minnesota. Tom was very intellectual, enjoyed the discourse with monks, had a lot of questions, and I think the monks provided a great insight into the faith he had grown up with and somehow had been missing.