April can be a cruel month for Elise Seraydarian, the admissions director at Goucher College.
She has spent the last year wooing thousands of high school students, trying to entice them to enroll at Goucher. They've been showered with mail, courted through phone calls, even treated to an excursion to the Inner Harbor.
Now Ms. Seraydarian must wait to see how many will choose Goucher.
"During the day I feel pretty upbeat," says Ms. Seraydarian, who is in her seventh year at Goucher. "At night, I break out into a cold sweat. My livelihood depends on the whims of 17-and 18-year-olds. That's a frightening thought."
Those decisions are also crucial to Goucher. After all, those teen-agers will end up being the Towson college's customers, each paying as much as $21,000 a year in tuition, room and board.
If Goucher's efforts yield a class of 250 instead of its goal of 275, the college will lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.
Across the country this month, admissions officials are fretting over the size, quality and demographics of the freshman classes that are taking shape.
Because the number of college age youth has dropped almost 20 percent in the last 15 years, emerging high school graduates are being sought like never before.
Elon College in North Carolina sends T-shirts and shorts to its recruits. Other colleges have hired telemarketing firms to make nearly daily contact with prospects.
Some undecided high school students are even receiving home visits from college representatives hoping to close the deal.
Nowhere is the pressure more acute than at private liberal arts colleges, which depend heavily on student tuition.
"We live and die by enrollment," said Thomas E. Scheye, acting president of Loyola College in Baltimore. With an undergraduate enrollment of roughly 3,000, Loyola is the second largest private college in the state, behind the Johns Hopkins University.
If Loyola's freshman class drops off significantly from the goal of 750, Dr. Scheye said, maintenance and construction will have to be put on hold.
At Western Maryland College in Westminster, staff and faculty have gone without a raise for three years. The best way to bolster the campus' finances is to harvest a bumper freshman crop.
These days, the admissions office has pressed the whole campus into the recruiting business.
While some professors were initially reluctant, attitudes changed the budget tightened the last few years and now many instructors call and meet with prospective students.
"They figured it out pretty quickly," said Martha O'Connell, director of admissions at Western Maryland.
College use different strategies in their recruiting battles.
Candlelight dinners
Western Maryland, which accepted roughly 80 percent of its applicants in hopes of attracting 400 new freshmen and transfer students, has staged candlelight dinners for admitted students this month.
At Hood College, prospective students and their parents have been taken on horse-drawn carriage rides through Frederick.
Washington College, which is in Chestertown on the Eastern Shore, brought its president, dean, several faculty and board members across the Chesapeake Bay to a reception last week at a Baltimore County hunt club. Some two dozen prospective students and their families attended.
All of the colleges are after the same targets: academically solid students with at least middle-class means to afford a private college education.
Consider Rebecca Marsh, a 17-year-old from Laurel who received honorable mention in the state's distinguished scholar program last fall.
She applied to only three colleges but has been flooded with mail and attention from numerous schools, thanks to her academic record and scores on standardized tests.
"It got really tiring. These were schools I wasn't even interested in," said Ms. Marsh. "It got to be there was somebody calling every other day from some school."
Despite all the solicitations, Ms. Marsh said she isn't ready to leave home and will probably attend community college. If she does, she will pass up a $10,000 scholarship offer from Western Maryland.
The college aggressively sought winners of the distinguished scholars program, offering handsome scholarships to the students as soon as they were named last fall, whether or not they had applied. The tactic paid off and several enrolled, Ms. O'Connell said.
Overall, Western Maryland gives 80 percent of its students some sort of financial aid, based either on a student's financial need, academic credentials or both. On the average, the college's financial aid knocks the actual bill down to 63 percent of the stated tuition of $14,510, according to Ms. O'Connell. Many of those students also get aid and loans from other sources.
Such a strategy -- known in the trade as "discounting" -- has its limits. A college can boost its enrollment by "buying" students with large scholarships, but the bottom line suffers.
Adding to the problem are students who have figured out that a college's published tuition is akin to a car's sticker price.
"The students and their parents have become canny consumers, and they're learning the art and science of comparison shopping," said Loyola's Dr. Scheye.
Some students, he said, tell Loyola it must increase its financial aid offer to match a competitor's. Loyola will oblige "very rarely," he said.
But before colleges can massage their financial aid offers to students, they have to find them.
A Goucher recruiter, for instance, swept through schools across Europe last year. And the admissions staff visited some 400 high schools across the United States, schmoozing guidance counselors and meeting with interested students. Sometimes there weren't many.
'Cold sales calls'
"In a new area, it's about like making cold sales calls," Ms. Seraydarian said. "You may go a week without seeing a student."
Goucher has worked hard to boost its enrollment to 850, after it slipped to a low of about 750 in the last female-only days of the mid-1980s. The college, for example, did a major renovation of its admissions office -- snaring a splendid Tiffany stained-glass window from another college building in the process -- to make a good first impression on prospective students and parents.
This year, Goucher officials were cheered when some 920 students applied. Of those, about 70 percent were accepted. Officials hope that of the 645 admitted, 275 will pick Goucher.
To make sure that happens, students who were accepted have been receiving at least one contact a week from the college, including letters, phone calls and a videotape.
Those who came to campus last week were also bused to the Inner Harbor and given vouchers for free food.
Even at Johns Hopkins, one of the top-ranked institutions in the country, officials have to work hard to fashion the freshman class.
After receiving some 7,700 applications, their concern is not finding 890 freshmen but finding the right 890.
"The question for us is what do they look like," said Richard M. Fuller, Hopkins' director of admissions. "Are they bright enough? Is there diversity?" Hopkins admits about 40 percent of its applicants.
Mr. Fuller is somewhat optimistic about the next few years, when the number of high school graduates will begin to creep back up.
But studies show that a growing proportion of high school graduates are minority students, who have typically shied away from traditional, predominantly white liberal arts schools.
"It will never be like it was," Mr. Fuller said.
HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES
Here are the most recent figures (in thousands) available for graduates in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Beginning with 1993, totals are projections.
Year Total
1979 3,101
1980 3,043
1981 3,020
1982 2,995
1983 2,888
1984 2,767
1985 2,677
1986 2,643
1987 2,694
1988 2,773
1989 2,727
1990 2,586
1991 2,506
1992* 2,502
1993 2,514
1994 2,526
1995 2,648
1996 2,669
1997 2,763
1998 2,890
1999 2,955
2000 3,009
2001 3,039
2002 3,066
2003 3,096
2004 3,116
*Estimate