The trend is most visible at public universities that have set their sights on out-of-state candidates who pay considerably more than local students — at times three times as much.

Anonymity was granted to 462 top admissions officials to offer candid replies to what they look for in the applicant pool. The survey shows most admissions officials interviewed are sensitive to the economic toll college can have on families, and make their selections eyeing a student’s ability to repay their debts. While aid budgets have spiked during the economic downturn, bolstering the reserves means admissions counselors must juggle access and sustainability:

In Inside Higher Ed’s previous surveys, of presidents and business officers, large percentages of colleges have reported responding to the economic downturn by increasing their aid budgets. This survey doesn’t contradict that finding, but shows between 12 and 31 percent of four-year colleges (depending on sector) saying that they are paying more attention to applicants’ ability to pay in admissions decisions, that they are increasing their discount rate (the percentage off the sticker price that students actually pay), and that the increases in discount rate are unsustainable.

Some ten percent of colleges sampled in the survey report admitting students who could pay full price despite their grades and test scores trailing the results of other admitted peers.

Steps are being taken, however, to expand college education to a greater swath of students. The researchers state “there is near universal agreement among admissions directors” that affirmative action measures, even those that look past lackluster secondary performance, are invaluable. And while 12 percent of admissions officials reported their admissions process does not require submitting standardized test results, closer to 25 percent said scores from exams like the SAT and ACT should be optional.

Still, other aspects of an applicant’s means is corrupting the selection process, admissions officials who were surveyed admitted:

Just over 53 percent of admissions directors, for example, report that coaching by college counselors and parents makes it difficult to truly learn about applicants, and just over 25 percent report a serious problem created by plagiarism in applicant essays.

While a quarter of the time, senior school officials influence the admissions team to select certain applicants otherwise not given consideration:

A significant minority of admissions directors report receiving pressure to admit certain applicants — with 28 percent having experienced the pressure from senior-level administrators, and 24 percent having felt the push from trustees and from development officials.

Other facets of the admissions process scrutinized were percentage of surveyed schools who upped their discount rates, the policy of hiring recruiting agents paid on commission to find international candidates and the type and percentage of students — athletes, alumni, minorities, veterans, men, women and foreign applicants — who are given an acceptance letter despite lower-than-average pool-applicant grades.

Taking into account a student’s ability to weather the financial burden of higher education is an increasingly ethical dilemma. Student default rates, as determined by the two-year cohort rate calculated by the U.S. Department of Education, is at a 12-year high, with 8.8 percent of graduates not paying their college loans for 270 days or more. Using a more comprehensive metric, a report issued (PDF) by the New America Foundation found that 15 percent of graduates defaulted, while 21 percent were delinquent on their payments.

According (PDF) to the College Board, tuition prices have grown an average of 5.6 percent on top of inflation since 2001, translating into a 28 percent jump in tuition costs. While in 2006 tuition at an in-state four-year college was (PDF) $5,804, this year the same stream costs $7,605. Tuition does not include other charges like computers, transport, textbook fees and room and board.

The Morning Call reports that Corbett said districts forced to keep teaching positions unfilled “have their own financial decisions they have to make.”

Corbett concluded, “I would note that many of them took federal [stimulus] money, were told the federal money would go away, made their budgets based on that, and now that money is not there.” The governor’s budget matches state spending levels of 2008-2009.

While the state’s coffers took a beating since the country’s economic downturn, enough money was available to keep funding for Pennsylvania’s mainly lower-income students from taking additional hits, says Bruce Baker, a professor of education at Rutgers who also contributes to the influential National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

After looking at budgeting priorities of various states, Baker noticed that more federal funding fed into short comes in dollar streams allocated to wealthier districts than poor districts. Once Pennsylvania’s share of the $48.3 billion states received in 2009 through the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund (SFSF) dried up, more money was cut from poorer districts while wealthier ones saw no change in state contributions to their education costs. “They’ve hammered the poor districts with [a] warped shell game,” he said.

By analogy, Baker offered this explanation to The American Independent:

For example, let’s say I have a family assistance program, where poor families get a total allocation of $800 per family per year for food assistance, and rich families still get $100 (even though they don’t need it.)   Let’s say we’ve only got two families in the system, one rich and one poor. Because of a recession, my state funding is $200 short this year, but the feds give me a stimulus of $200 to replace it. I could use my $700 in state money for the poor family, and given $100 each in federal money to each family. I’ve still honored my formula which is intended to yield $800 for the poor family and $100 for the rich one.

But, what [Corbett] did was to say that the poor family got $200 in [federal] money and $600 in state money and the rich family got $100 in state money. So, when the fed money is gone, the rich family still gets $100 in state money and the poor family gets $600 in state money – but $200 less than the previous year.

The next twist was to give the rich family $102 in state money the next year, and give the poor family $612 the next year, so each got a 2% increase in state money, but the rich family actually gets a $2 increase and the poor family gets a $188 cut in total funding.

Corbett, in his defense, maintains his budget provides more for education than what the previous governor, Democrat Ed Rendell, called for in 2009. Morning Call reports Corbett’s defenders say his budget should be interpreted as an increase in funding

Pennsylvania, like most states in the union, could not have steered through the recession without the stimulus funding. Jennifer Cohen, an education policy analyst at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., wrote in an email that states were allowed to roll back their education contributions to 2006 levels, with SFSF dollars filling in the void.

Formula Funding Issues

Baker’s second contention is how those additional 2 percent increases were calculated. Like many aspects of public budgeting, schools receive funding by a formula, known as “formula spending.” As Cohen explains, “most education funding formulas take into account lots of things in addition to population like poverty [and] cost of living,” to impact the communities that have lower income levels and small tax revenues.

Baker says Corbett, and other state leaders like Governors John Kasich in Ohio and Andrew Cuomo in New York, aims to provide any increased aid in a flat, “off the formula” distribution. “That is,” he says, “any increases would be a flat percent and not driven through the formula calculations that would drive more funding back to poor districts.”

The implications of going off the formula can be a mixed blessing, says Raegen Miller, an education funding analyst at the Center for American Progress. Depending on how progressive or regressive state funding mechanisms are, “that can either improve equity or exacerbate inequity,” he says. When funding decisions are made irrespective of socio-economic indicators, the money is a lump sum that is evenly distributed by the number of students — small communities can end up with more aid.

Regardless of the jargon, however, Miller warns that,  “off the formula funds aren’t subject to whatever other checks and balances you have in state and local funding.”

But a forthcoming study, led by Brian Glyn Williams, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, finds that the civilian death toll from the drones is lower than most media accounts present. “We came to the conclusion that the drones have a unique capability for targeting militants, as opposed to civilians,” Williams said in an interview.

Williams’ study, which he provided to The Washington Independent, has yet to be published. A writer for a blog affiliated with the International Herald Tribune, Farhat Taj, blogged some of the key details of his research today, but prematurely stated that the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point will be publishing Williams’ work. Erich Marquardt, the editor of the center’s journal, said that he hasn’t even begun to review Williams’ submission yet.

Much like the New America Foundation study, Williams’ team relied on English-language media accounts of the drone strikes in Pakistan to compile a data base of how many civilians and militants were reported to be killed. He conceded from the start that such a reliance is a “serious limitation” of the study — news reports can, after all, be incorrect — but the tribal areas of Pakistan where the strikes occur are often off limits to Western researchers, and even their Pakistani counterparts. (Still, Williams plans on traveling to the tribal areas on June 10 to attempt a poll of local attitudes about the strikes.) His team took measures to mitigate that limitation: they only considered strikes that had been reported by multiple independent outlets and they erred on the side of treating the deaths of people in disputed militant status as either civilians or “unknown.”

Williams’ results, which he said have been peer-reviewed, are as follows:

According to our database, as of 1 April 2010, there have been a total of 127 confirmed CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, killing a total of 1,247 people. Of those killed only 44 (or 3.53%) could be confirmed as civilians, while 963 (or 77.23%) were reported to be “militants” or “suspected militants.”

That leaves just over 19 percent of reported deaths out of either category, as their status as civilians or combatants can’t be rigorously determined under Williams’ methodology. But he writes that “even if every single ‘unknown’ is assumed to in fact be a civilian, the vast majority of fatalities would remain suspected militants rather than civilians – indeed, by approximately a 3.4:1 ratio.”

Williams insists that he went into the study with an open mind. “We didn’t know what to think” about the drone program, he said, and he considers his research agnostic on the wisdom of the drone strikes (to say nothing of their legality). “We’re not necessarily trying to alter policy on this,” he said.

Both of the principle authors of New America’s drone strike survey, Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann, are on vacation, but they both still (generously) addressed my questions. All three researchers — Bergen, Tiedemann and Williams — appeared to agree that New America was more methodologically aggressive than Williams in counting as civilians all who could not be clearly identified as militants, which perhaps accounts for the variance in their results.

Bergen observed in a Blackberried message that although his civilian death tallies are higher than Williams’, he has observed that the drone program has increased its accuracy over time, “so the later the the date that the study begins the lower the rate [of civilian deaths] will be.” That’s in line with Brennan’s intimation (he never actually uses the word “drones”) that the drone strikes “are more precise and more accurate than ever before.”

Accordingly, Bergen now pegs the civilian death rate from the drone strikes at 20 percent. Williams pegs it at 3.53 percent. What no one knows, however, is how many outraged Pakistanis take up arms against the U.S. or its allies as a result. There are media reports suggesting that Faisal Shahzad, the naturalized U.S. citizen of Pakistani origin accused of attempting to detonate a car bomb in Times Square, claimed to investigators that his attempted terrorist act was vengeance for civilians killed by the drones. Leaving aside the question of the legality of the drones — which the State Department’s legal adviser claims to result from a September 2001 act of Congress that doesn’t mention the program — only policymakers can determine if the benefits of the drones outweigh the risks of blowback.

But on Wednesday, Mudd will speak for the first time since his Homeland Security confirmation debacle, on a subject well within his area of expertise. He’s scheduled to give a lunchtime speech, “Al Qaeda: The Domestic Threat,” at a panel assembled by the New America Foundation. Presumably Mudd will talk about the prospect of domestic infiltration or radicalization of American Muslims like Najibullah Zazi. Almost as if his intelligence experience could have come in handy at the Department of Homeland Security…

Bergen and Tiedemann got their report by tallying up media reports on the drone strikes. They explain:

Our analysis of the drone campaign is based only on accounts from reliable media organizations with substantial reporting capabilities in Pakistan. We restricted our analysis to reports in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, accounts by major news services and networks–the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, CNN, and the BBC–and reports in the leading English-language newspapers in Pakistan–The Daily Times, Dawn, and The News–as well as those from Geo TV, the largest independent Pakistani television network. (Links to all those individual reports can be found in Appendix 1 of this paper.)

They don’t pretend their material is “accurate down to the last civilian death in every drone strike.” And they’re probably right that this is the best that can be compiled through open-source material. (I would go so far as to suggest that the CIA probably doesn’t have much better methodology, either.) But how to account for the variance in what a “militant” is? A lot of times, the way these press reports generate their descriptions of “militants” are through phone calls made from stringers to people in the vicinity of a strike. “[O]f those killed in drone attacks from 2006 through mid-October 2009, between 500 and 700 were described in reliable press reports as militants, or some 66 to 68 percent,” the authors write. Not the most precise measurement.

After all, who’s a “militant”? A cook in a village known to be swarming with Taliban? Someone who pays taxes to a shadow government? How do we judge the complicity of a given population? There’s a spectrum here, running from insurgent to civilian effectively held hostage. As a result, it’s probably fair and sensible to read Bergen and Tiedemann’s report as a low estimate for civilian deaths from the drones.

I asked the CIA about the report, even though it typically doesn’t comment on anything Pakistan-drone-related. To my surprise, agency spokesman George Little responded, “The CIA employs lawful, highly precise, battle-tested tactics and tools against al-Qaeda and its violent allies.  Al-Qaeda and its sympathizers, though still very dangerous and determined, have seen both their leadership and their fighting capabilities eroded.” So nothing specifically on the New America report one way or the other — I can’t tell if that quote supports it or undermines it, truth be told.

Update: I mistakenly called Katherine Tiedemann “Kathleen” in an earlier draft of this post and for that I beg forgiveness.

Contrary to recent assertions that one in seven, or 14 percent, of the former prisoners had “returned to the battlefield,” our analysis of Pentagon reports, news stories, and other public records indicates that the number who were confirmed or suspected to be involved in anti-U.S. violence is closer to one in 25, or 4 percent.

Worth remembering: this matches the figure that Defense Secretary Robert Gates gave in congressional testimony in January.

Luckily, the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank, has an all-day program set up to discuss the way forward against a mutating Al Qaeda threat.

I’ll be here, drinking coffee, avoiding detritus and posting about the proceedings.