Colleges Chasing Potential Students

Some schools are desperate to get more students.

Randolph College in Lynchburg, Va., went coed in the fall to boost enrollment; only a tiny percentage of women consider single-sex schools. The former Randolph-Macon Woman's College had been discounting tuition so deeply for so many students to lure them that the school was no longer financially stable, according to college officials. Randolph has about 665 students this year and needs to get to about 1,000, it says.

This year, applications have nearly tripled, according to John White, Randolph's dean of admissions and student financial services, and school officials are hopeful that recruitment will keep pulling more in for their rolling admissions this spring.

Some schools, such as Georgetown and Brown and Stanford, use recruiting to cast a wider net, reach extraordinary students all over the world and increase the diversity of applicants.

And some schools, even though their application numbers are up, find they need to push recruitment to ensure that enough students enroll. Because many students apply to multiple schools, said Florence Hines, dean of admissions at McDaniel College in Westminster, Md., "what we're seeing is it takes more applications to generate the same numbers."

At Trinity, recruiting isn't a luxury. In 2000, there were 421 students in the university's College of Arts and Sciences. There were nearly 640 at the start of this school year, and applications are up 50 percent over last year at this time.

Trinity mails out glossy brochures, e-mails reminders, creates customized Web pages for interested students, and sends staff to college fairs like the one at Ballou.

There are students who are very bright, McGuire said, but haven't had the advantages of others and haven't been told they can be successful. Some of the most successful future students could be unsure whether to even consider college, she said.

Walls got to the recent college fair at the Southeast Washington public high school more than an hour before the first students arrived. He set up his table, then decided another table was better, then another.

He knew that at least half the students would ignore the college reps and just sit on the bleachers talking with friends. So where he put his Trinity-purple tablecloth and stack of pamphlets was important.

"Here, I can compete with the voices -- and I can be seen," he said. "Real estate is everything."

When Betty Williams, a Ballou counselor, walked by, he told her, "I know you have a lot of young ladies who haven't taken the SAT or ACT yet, but that is not a requirement for applying. . . . Let them know I have fee-waived applications here."