Hi David
First off (and I know I'm preaching to the choir here) but that's completely silly they won't let you look at WMT!! Seriously?! You're not going to BREAK anything just by looking!!
Arggg...
OK... now that we got that out. Let me give you some ideas.
- The homepage is missing from the sitemap - http://www.collegeplus.org/googlesitemap
- Also, shouldn't the sitemap end in .xml - as in /googlesitemap.xml ?
- The worst is I think what you point out from robots.txt - **Disallow: /.php$* Isn't this asking it to block all pages with the file extension .php??? IF so... your homepage does load with the php extension - http://www.collegeplus.org/index.php
- In general, Google's preferred method of keeping pages out of the index is with a meta robots noindex tag - as opposed to the robots.txt
- ALSO - look at this site search - **over 27,000 pages indexed for /**events?state - i'd say not good!\
- You're not using any canonical tags
- The homepage is NOT indexed in Bing either.
- The robots.txt file does look more messed up the more I look at it - for example they're blocking a forums subfolder, yet none exists on the site. It sits on a subdomain, and is still in the index as you can see here
So there's a lot going on here, and anything could be contributing to the deindexation of your homepage. But I'm <sarcasm>pretty sure</sarcasm> its not your title tags.
Hope that helps get you in the right direction. Either way you've got some on-site stuff to clean up.
-Dan
PS - Meant to say, on a happier note, it was nice to meet you at LinkLove Boston