ABSTRACT
Let’s start a hypothetical college. I’ll be president. (I have a Ph.D. that I paid quite a bit of money for and I want to put it to good use.) You’ll be the admissions director. We’ll call our institution Wassamatta University. Wassamatta U. is private, fairly small, on an attractive piece of real estate, and headed for trouble. The problem with our college (which, as admissions director, is now your problem) is that, despite my stellar leadership, the university has nothing special going for it. It doesn’t have a big name, the test scores of the freshman class are pretty low, and we’ve gotten the unfortunate reputation of being practically an “open admission college”—meaning we take anybody with the cash to pay the tuition. We need good students, good students who also have money, and we need them right away. We’re competing for the same pool of students with five or six nearby schools with marginally better reputations, bigger endowments, and better-looking cheerleaders.
