Admissions without applications

Stories like this make me happy that I am cynical, especially about higher ed.

Davis & Elkins College is a small institution (a little more than 700 students) in a beautiful part of West Virginia, surrounded by the Allegheny Highlands. Like most colleges, it admits most of those who apply. This year, the college admitted about 700 students of the 975 applicants, aiming for a class of 250 to 300.

I'd treat this more like the tree falling in the forest (of the Allegheny mountains) that no one would ever have heard of had it not been for IHE-like coverage. Or maybe the death rattle of a school that has been dead for some time, as Danny DeVito claims in Other People's Money: (https://youtu.be/62kxPyNZF3Q) "You just heard the prayer for the dead....[but] don't blame me. It was dead when I got here." Mark has long predicted the closing of hundreds of colleges. Many of them are trying just about anything to forestall the grim reaper and a sympathetic (not professional) IHE is all to happy to grab eyeballs with stories of attempts to forestall death. I'm just surprised that Leslie Stahl and Sixty Minutes weren't there. Stahl years ago did a 60 Minute piece on her kid's experience (yes, this passes for research) at Arizona State where -- shock of shocks -- the kid had no professors teaching his classes. My concern was that anyone who chose to send their kid to Arizona State in the 1980s's, with or without professors in the classroom, was sending their kid to a Playboy party school and not a credible academic institution. Back then, Playboy rankings were perhaps the leading national influencer of student college choices, ahead of USN&WR.

In any case, Harrison feels like heaven. I'm still trying to make sense of today's gospel. And boy is it GTBG.