Adrian's freshman enrollment is up to 365 this fall, and it is confident that it can compete with such traditional rivals as Kalamazoo ("The Kalamazoo Plan") and Olivette ("The Olivette Experience").

Such was one approach to the most traumatic change now under way in American higher education: the shift from a seller's to a buyer's market. The demographic curve that has been playing havoc with elementary school enrollment for a decade and is now forcing consolidation at the high school level is about to hit the colleges, and panic is beginning to set in. Some colleges are turning to desperate new promotional techniques, such as handing out Frisbees on the beaches of Fort Lauderdale. Others are importing Iranians, Venezuelans, and Kuwaitis (and looking wistfully at mainland China) to fill their dwindling ranks. Still others are, like Adrian, turning to the business world for the techniques to keep themselves among the survivors of the academic squeeze to come, and a whole industry of admen, headhunters, direct mail experts, and marketers has popped up ready to meet their needs.

Some will argue that, at long last, non-profit colleges have joined the real world—one that computer, truck-driving, and other proprietary schools have inhabited for a long time. But many colleges now use promotional tactics that are downright dishonest. A number of students—especially foreigners—are being deceived and getting hurt. Before we reach the point where Harvard is advertising on matchbook covers, we should probably consider whether selling education is significantly different from selling cars or soap.

College recruitment and admissions is big business. The total costs are impossible to calculate under standard college accounting systems, since such expenses are not centralized in the salaries and other direct costs of the Admissions Office, but are spread across a variety of cost centers, from the Alumni Office to the publications budget. Most public universities spend from $200 to $500 to recruit every freshman who sets foot on campus, while private schools may invest from $500 to $800.

Robert Kirkpatrick, vice president of Wesleyan University, estimates, for example, that "we spend about $600 on every freshman, including the costs of publications." For colleges with enrollment problems, these costs can go much higher. Theodore Marchese of Barat College in Chicago notes that many high school seniors get 200-300 pieces of direct mail from colleges, each of which can cost the sending institution as much as a dollar.

Thus, a school enrolling as many as 1000 freshmen might easily spend $500,000 to acquire its entering class. Overall, college admissions is a $500 million-a-year enterprise.

The threat of declining enrollment is real. The Bureau of the Census estimates that between 1979 and 1992 the number of eighteen-year-olds will drop from 4.3 to 3.2 million, a decline of one quarter in the group that comprises the bulk of entering freshmen. Ominously, college enrollment has dropped from 11.5 to 11.1 million during the last year, even before the effects of the population decline have been felt. With roughly 3000 colleges and universities in the country, and, allowing for the fact that much of the contraction will take the form of consolidation rather than closings, as many as 300 to 500 institutions may have to close their doors before the population again turns upward.