Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.</p>
<p>The French novelist and editor Jean-Baptiste-Alphonse Karr penned that famous aphorism (“the more things change, the more they stay the same”) in 1849, purportedly as a comment on the legacy of the French Revolution. But the sort of paradox to which he alludes is also applicable to the current state of college admissions in America.</p>
<p>The first edition of the Fiske Guide to Colleges was published in 1982, at a time when the last of the baby boomers (b. 1964) were entering higher education, and admissions directors had begun losing sleep over the prospect of empty seats in their classrooms. Their response was to increase their marketing efforts to assure that they got their necessary share of the declining number of high-school graduates.</p>
<p>As education editor of The New York Times during that period, I had a wonderful time covering the new aggressiveness on the part of college admissions offices. By today’s standards, the techniques look quaint – four-color brochures appearing in mail boxes, videotapes, carefully timed direct-mail campaigns – but there were enough over-the-top attempts at innovation to keep our copy interesting.</p>
<p>For example, when a heavy rainstorm created a huge puddle in the center of one Midwestern campus, an alert public-relations official grabbed his camera, recruited some students to sit by the water’s edge, and got himself a picture of a nonexistent lake to embellish the next viewbook. What he failed to notice, although some prospective students certainly did, was that one of the students appeared to be smoking a joint.</p>
<p>Then there was the state university that put some scholarship offers inside balloons with the idea of releasing them in a nearby urban recruiting area and with the promise that anyone who retrieved one of the lucky balloons would receive a tuition discount. They were forced to scuttle the project at the behest of public-safety officers, who heard that local teenagers were arming themselves with bows and arrows and other means of bringing down the balloons.</p>
<p>The adoption of aggressive marketing techniques by colleges and universities in the early 1980s had some important, if unanticipated, consequences. For one thing, it created an opening for people like myself to weigh in on the side of students and their parents and to provide an independent take on what was going on at various colleges. Thus was created the Fiske Guide to Colleges, which was briefly known as the New York Times Selective Guide to Colleges before it was deemed too controversial to carry the name of the Gray Lady.</p>
<p>Oblivious to Newton’s Third Law (the one about actions and reactions), college officials were shocked, yes, shocked, at the thought that anyone would be so bold as to resist their aggressive marketing efforts. Shortly after the guide was published, attendees at a panel discussion at the National Association for College Admission Counseling (or whatever Nacac called itself at the time) convention in Minneapolis bitterly scolded me. I was able to escape from the ballroom with my teeth, if not my dignity, intact only because Richard Moll, the dean of college admissions directors, calmed the crowd with some avuncular remarks.</p>
<p>Little did we understand at the time what forces had been unleashed.</p>
<p>Throughout the 1980s, the marketing of American colleges and universities became both more aggressive and more sophisticated. Colleges created new administrative posts with titles like vice president for enrollment management. Videotapes gave way to CD’s and DVD’s and, eventually, to virtual tours and e-mail messages and YouTube and all of the other communications tools that the Internet had made possible. The higher-education equivalent of data mining emerged as a way for colleges to focus their financial-aid resources most efficiently – at least from the institutions’ point of view.</p>
<p>But students and parents and a growing army of their allies fought back. U.S. News & World Report discovered the gold mine to be found in ranking colleges, even by criteria that do not make a lot of sense. Specialized guides appeared for every conceivable niche, from African-American students and tree huggers to students seeking a political-correctness-free campus. How-to books appeared (some authored by Bruce Hammond and myself) on how to navigate the admissions process or write an effective essay.</p>
<p>And, of course, new services sprang up. Thousands of families turned to private consultants to help them build their résumés, write the perfect essay, and otherwise select and gain entry to a college that would put an acceptable decal on the back of the family SUV. And we saw the emergence of the multimillion-dollar test-prep industry – which is certainly here to stay.</p>
<p>While all that was going on, no one seemed to be noticing the Karr-like paradox inherent in the demographics. Although baby-boomer enrollment had bottomed out by the early 1980s, the many children of the first baby boomers (b. 1946) were already beginning to enroll in colleges. The number of high-school graduates began climbing steadily in the early 1990s and, depending on whose numbers you accept, will peak either this year or next at an all-time high of about 3.3 million and then decline somewhat.</p>
<p>So, the paradox: Colleges became aggressive marketers in the late 1970s because they saw they were in a buyer’s market. Now they are operating in the mother of all seller’s markets, but they have become more aggressive than ever. What’s going on?</p>
<p>Much of the explanation lies in the consumerist orientation of American culture. Such an orientation, of course, is by no means limited to the way we think about higher education. Compared with the values of other countries, this focus on consumerism tends to define American values in general. To cite an education-related example, my wife and I are about to embark on a study of education in the Netherlands, which for nearly a century has allowed parents to choose the public or private school that their child will attend at state expense. Significantly, whereas Americans tend to think of school choice in market terms, the Dutch do not. They embrace it as an opportunity to foster cultural pluralism.</p>
<p>Thus, while the context is complex, it was colleges and universities that, by adopting aggressive marketing techniques in the late 1970s, first sent out the message that higher education was a consumer item. That was a message to which students and parents responded quickly and easily. If there is anything that Americans instinctively know how to do well, it is to behave as consumers.</p>
<p>Once college admissions had been redefined – in consumerist rather than educational terms – there was no way to control the escalation of marketing actions and reactions. Once out of the bottle, the notion of higher education as just another item to be sold and purchased took on a life of its own. The fact that the demographics had turned around was irrelevant.</p>
<p>One can argue, of course, that the notion of higher education as a consumer item is not inherently new. Harvard College and the other early colleges in America were trade schools – first for preachers, then for teachers. Moreover, given the rampant consumerism that now permeates so much of American society, it would be odd if higher education did not move in the same direction.</p>
<p>Still, I’m nostalgic enough to think that there is something special about the mission of higher education. When I was reporting on the surge in marketing in the early 1980s, I had countless conversations with admissions officers who would lecture me along the lines of, “Ted, you’ve got to understand. We’re an educational institution, but we’re also a business. We’ve got to be hard-nosed about what we’re doing.” Maybe it’s time to turn this admonition around. “Yes,” I want to tell them, “it’s true that you are a business. But don’t forget that you are also an educational institution.”</p>
<p>In recent years, the United States has taken the gospel of unregulated markets about as far as possible, and the results are turning out to be catastrophic – not only in the obvious areas of banking and the rest of the financial world, but also in social areas as diverse as disaster relief and health care. I fear the same outcome in higher education.</p>
<p>When all is said and done, the aggressive marketing of higher education that began a quarter-century ago has degenerated into a gigantic price war. Millions and millions of dollars are spent not to bring more young people into higher education, but to influence the way those already in the system distribute themselves among the various colleges and universities. Need-based aid – once a tool for opening access to higher education – has given way to merit aid, which in turn has degenerated into a weapon in the admissions wars. Needless to say, the defining interests are those of the institutions themselves – not the students and certainly not the welfare of society as a whole.</p>
<p>We are often told that there is a quality problem in American higher education. In fact, we face an access problem. The United States, which up through the 1970s provided more education to more of its young people than any other country, now ranks in the middle of developed countries in high-school graduation and collegegoing rates. We are, for all practical purposes, failing to give about a third of our young people the education that they will need to function in a global economy.</p>
<p>Faced with the challenge of enhancing participation in higher education, colleges and universities are choosing instead to squander precious resources competing against each other. The narrow self-interest inherent in such behavior has not been lost on an increasingly frustrated and disenchanted public or on policy makers.</p>
<p>No matter who becomes president of the United States next January, it is likely that we are entering a period of increased regulation of industries vital to national security, economic prosperity, and social stability. The loan industry is a likely target. So are colleges and universities.