By Eric Hoover

Carlisle, Pa.

Colleges name buildings after presidents and dedicate stadiums to coaches, but enrollment managers get no such monuments. When they retire, their immediate reward is to live free from the statistical models they had relied on to shape class after class, year after year.

Robert J. Massa will not miss those numbers. After more than three decades, he is leaving the profession he helped define. This week, Mr. Massa, 57, will step down as vice president for enrollment management and college relations here at Dickinson College, where he has been one of the most outspoken national figures in admissions.

Recently, Mr. Massa decided it was time for a change. Yet he has found that leaving a campus is just as challenging as recruiting students to it.

Like many small, liberal-arts colleges, Dickinson has the whiff of timelessness. The heavy, wooden doors in the old administration building creak convincingly, and Adirondack chairs beckon on a quad framed by stone walls. A statue of Benjamin Rush —a signer of the Declaration of Independence who established Dickinson in 1783 —affirms the college's early American roots.

Over the last decade, however, Dickinson has changed rapidly. For one, the students here are more racially diverse, more accomplished, and, over all, wealthier than they were when Mr. Massa arrived in 1999.

That did not happen by accident. Mr. Massa has led a shrewd branding campaign, which emphasizes the college's distinctiveness, the strength of its top programs, and its global reach (the college sponsors more than 40 programs in 24 countries, and more than half of its students study abroad). He also embraced enrollment-management strategies that enabled Dickinson to become more selective while increasing its net tuition revenue.

It's the kind of story that makes some people squeamish. In various corners of higher education, "enrollment management" is still a nasty phrase for the commercialization of admissions. Gordon C. Winston, a professor of economics at Williams College, told The Atlantic Monthly in 2005 that enrollment management was "a brilliantly analytical process of screwing the poor kids."

Mr. Massa, who rejects that description, has thought a lot about those negative views of his profession. He, too, has often warned his colleagues about the industry's excesses, particularly the use of merit aid to lure top students. Nonetheless, he believes that Dickinson, like most colleges, recruits and enrolls the students it does for good reasons. "Good" as in fair, but also practical.

"You always have to balance institutional needs with student needs," he says. "They are two sides of the same coin."

An Unexpected Calling

Mr. Massa fell into admissions because he had wanted to work with students. After graduating from the University of Rochester in 1973, he planned to become a school psychologist. That fall he enrolled in a master's program at Rochester, accepting an internship in the admissions office to help finance his degree.

The experience changed Mr. Massa's professional course. In 1974, he took a full-time job in admissions at Columbia University's Teachers College. The following year he became the director of freshman aid at Colgate University. It was the kind of place he had known nothing about as a high-school student on Long Island, where he had received little help in choosing a college. But as a young man on recruiting trips to New Jersey, he could talk up a liberal-arts education while helping students see their way through the foggy transition to adulthood.

The term "enrollment management" had yet to enter the vernacular, but Mr. Massa got a crash course in the integration of admissions and aid. He learned to think about higher education as a complex system, about the intricacies of pricing and perceptions of value.

In 1977, Mr. Massa wrote the first of many opinion columns about admissions. Writing in the university's alumni magazine, The Colgate Scene, he predicted that when the institution's tuition rose above $10,000 a year, applications would plummet. He was wrong.

As he settled into his career, Mr. Massa was certain about other things, like the kind of person he did not want to become. Namely, "a self-impressed bureaucrat."

"I always wanted people to leave my office knowing I heard them," he says, "that I had done all I could."

He listened carefully one day when a young woman named Cary walked into the admissions office with a problem. A graduate student, she had missed a deadline for a loan. As it turned out, the university had mailed the required form to the wrong address. Seeing that the mistake was not her own, Mr. Massa offered her an alternative loan. Two years later, the two were married.

By the time Mr. Massa came to Dickinson, he had earned a doctorate in higher education, worked briefly in student affairs, and served as dean of enrollment at the Johns Hopkins University for 10 years. The latter experience taught him how to hold his own in meetings and talk to trustees, whose ranks at Hopkins included a billionaire named Michael R. Bloomberg.

When Mr. Massa arrived in Carlisle, Pa., he believed that an admissions office could not operate efficiently unless it communicated well with other departments. It was no coincidence that Dickinson's then-new president, William G. Durden, an alumnus of the college, put Mr. Massa in charge of various divisions, including communications, alumni affairs, and athletics. Mr. Massa's first message: Dickinson was serious about its goal of becoming one of the nation's top liberal-arts colleges.

Mr. Massa vowed to reduce the college's spending on student aid. In 1999, the college gave financial help to more than 80 percent of its students and spent more than half of its tuition revenue on aid. "We simply do not have the resources," Mr. Massa told Dickinson, the college's alumni magazine, in his first year. "When a college devotes too much money to financial aid, it cannot invest in programs, in infrastructure, in facilities, in library books —essentially, it cannot invest in quality."

So Dickinson invested in new strategies. Mr. Massa helped turn the college's Web site into a more focused recruiting tool and enhanced the campus-visit program. He changed the marketing materials to emphasize Dickinson's strengths, including languages and pre-law programs, and to distinguish the college from universities and other liberal-arts colleges. Mr. Massa wanted prospective students to associate the campus with a "global perspective," a "useful education," and a place where they could "connect ideas."

Above all, Mr. Massa brought science to the admissions office. Mr. Massa used sophisticated statistical models to better predict what its classes would look like —and what it would cost the college. Dickinson became "need aware," considering applicants' ability to pay.

Within a few years, the college had cut its discount rate (the proportion of tuition revenue it uses for student aid) to 33 percent from 52 percent. Mr. Massa believed the college should offer little aid to students with no financial need who were likely to enroll anyway.

So Dickinson put more money into need-based aid and reduced its spending on nonneed awards. The college started using the latter more selectively, to attract top-notch students.

Such changes were part of a larger strategy. "We had to make Dickinson more appealing to those who could pay," Mr. Massa says, "instead of making it more appealing by lowering the price."

'He Was Not a Web Site'

Since Mr. Massa arrived, other numbers at Dickinson have changed dramatically. In 1999, the college received 3,400 applications; this fall, it received about 5,000 (it expects to enroll a total of 610 freshmen and transfers). The average SAT scores of its students have climbed about 100 points, to 1280. Last year, the college spent 34 percent of its tuition revenue on aid; over time, the reduction in aid spending has freed up more than $70-million.

Ten years ago, 22 percent of the college's aid budget went to students with no demonstrated financial need; today, just 7 percent does. About half of the college's students now receive need-based aid, with an average award of $24,000, in scholarships and grants, per student (the annual cost of attendance is roughly $50,000).

Mr. Massa has railed against colleges engaging in "bidding wars" for applicants. To give aid to students with no need, he says, is to buy their loyalty. So, then, why give it at all? "I don't particularly like it, but it's a reality of the marketplace," says Mr. Massa, who has acknowledged that he has given scholarships to some high-achieving (and highly coveted) students whose families asked for more money but did not need it.

Such are the dynamics of enrollment management, which Donald R. Hossler describes as the intersection of "revenue, prestige, diversity, and action." Mr. Hossler, vice chancellor for enrollment services and a professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Indiana University at Bloomington, has written extensively about the evolution of the field. He calls Mr. Massa "one of the best in the business," a compliment as far as he's concerned.

Mr. Hossler also believes that enrollment management is about trade-offs. "You can't simultaneously optimize all things at once," he says.

Mr. Massa believes Dickinson has optimized the most important things, though he acknowledges some trade-offs. Since 1999, for example, the number of first-generation students fell to 12 percent from 22 percent.

While several prominent private colleges have eliminated loans from their aid packages recently, Dickinson has not followed suit. For one, the college could not afford such a move without substantial cuts elsewhere. Moreover, Mr. Massa has long believed that paying for college is a partnership between colleges and families. "Private colleges have a responsibility to make it possible for you to attend," Mr. Massa says. "Not necessarily easy, but possible."

That distinction has become trickier in this tough economy, especially after Harvard University and other wealthy institutions have upped the ante by dropping loans, perhaps raising the public's expectation that students can —and should —graduate debt-free.

Like other private colleges that lack big endowments, Dickinson depends heavily on tuition revenue. Last year, nearly half of its students paid the sticker price.

"To be diverse in all respects, you need to have a critical mass of students who are willing to pay the full price," Mr. Massa says. "If that's a sin in enrollment management, so be it."

As the college began to attract a wealthier crop of students, Mr. Massa and his staff also built relationships with inner-city high schools and programs like the Posse Foundation, which helped the college recruit more lower-income and minority students. Since 1999, the college's enrollment of minority students has risen to 16 percent from 4 percent.

Ten years ago, the college had hardly any foreign students, but today 6 percent of students come from other nations. Since 2003, Mr. Massa has personally recruited many of the 27 students who came here from Argentina and Uruguay. Each has received a full-tuition scholarship through a program seeded by one of the college's major donors.

Clara Sanguinetti, a senior, remembers meeting Mr. Massa at her high school in Buenos Aires. He was the first and only admissions official from the United States she ever met. She recalls that he explained Dickinson but stopped short of selling it. "He listened," Ms. Sanguinetti says. "He was not a Web site."

The Book of Bob

Around here, Mr. Massa is known as Bob. Recently, his colleagues presented him with the "Book of Bob," a compilation of various columns he wrote and news articles that quoted him. A blurb on the cover reads, "Enraging the World Is Massa's Aim." It's a big book.

In print, Mr. Massa has touted the benefits of test-optional policies (Dickinson does not require the ACT or SAT). He has described the recruitment of legacy students as crucial to Dickinson's "lasting strength and character." He has defended early decision, used in moderation.

In recent years, he has offered frank descriptions of Dickinson's efforts to recruit qualified male students. After seeing men dwindle to just one-third of the freshman class in 1999, the college altered its marketing materials. Pastel colors gave way to bolder ones in brochures, which featured more photos of male athletes (yes, Dickinson has a football team) and stories about successful male students. In evaluating applicants, Mr. Massa also gave more weight to standardized tests, on which men tend to score higher than women.

The changes have since helped Dickinson achieve a more balanced gender ratio (about 45 percent of the students are male). Although some admissions officials have called "affirmative action for boys" unfair, Mr. Massa believes the moves have enhanced the college's appeal to men and women alike.

"He was fired up," Mr. Durden, the president, says of Mr. Massa's interest in discussing controversial issues. "He was willing to commit to help the public understand something that was not black or white."

Dickinson has emphasized the importance of media hits, and the college tracks its mentions carefully. Mr. Massa has talked to reporters constantly, giving them information that many of his colleagues hesitated to discuss. He would return calls after hours, if necessary, even when he was as far away as Ecuador.

Although he is leaving admissions, Mr. Massa probably has not written his last column. Later this summer, he will become vice president for communications at Lafayette College, in Easton, Pa., where his son, Daniel, recently earned a bachelor's degree. Mr. Massa, who says his son had a "transformative experience" at Lafayette, feels a strong connection to the college.

Carlisle is a small town, and Mr. Massa had pondered leaving it since his wife died in 2006. Another enrollment job, he figured, could not match the one he had here. Recently, he began dating a woman who lives about two and a half hours away from here, and he wanted to live closer to her.

During his last full week at Dickinson, Mr. Massa gave a reporter an impromptu tour of the campus. As evening fell, he described the renovation of an old building, beside which stood a bulldozer and a mound of earth. Overhead were banners bearing the college's logo, a compass rose whose design he had helped choose. He stopped at the bronze statue of the college's founder, Benjamin Rush, a doctor, writer, and educator whose story Mr. Massa helped incorporate into Dickinson's own.

As he has packed his boxes, Mr. Massa has weighed many questions. As the recession drags on, will fewer families want to pay for a liberal-arts education? Will some small, private colleges spend themselves to death in competing for students? Will the number of applications to Dickinson, which dipped last year and the year before, continue to decline?

There was, however, some good news. Recently, Dickinson shifted its strategy for identifying prospective applicants, including those in "emerging markets." The move has paid off: as of late June, the college had received nearly three times as many inquiries it had at the same point last summer.

"After 35 years," Mr. Massa says, "I'm satisfied." And there is no metric for that.