I'm the customer!

(No, you're the product.)

O.K., I said yesterday that I would write about something specific today. So here it is.

Imagine that you had a thriving business with far more potential customers than you could possibly serve. Imagine, if you will …

• … that no matter how you priced your product, or the hoops you created for potential customers to jump through, you couldn’t tamp down demand if you tried.

• … that people were so desperate to buy from you that they hired consultants to make themselves look more attractive to you, in fact even broke the law sometimes to try to move ahead of others.

Imagine, in other words, that you were an admissions director or other high administrator at an elite U.S. college or university!

Aspiring U.S. college students now apply to an average of 8 to 10 schools each, up significantly from a generation ago. The number of seats at elite American colleges have barely changed despite significant population growth.

The result is that admit rates are much lower now than they once were. But, it turns out that the increase in number of applications per student is not all organic — or even just a function of the Common App that I mentioned yesterday.

In fact, The Wall Street Journal reported a while back that many colleges tried to drive their admissions rates down by buying student leads from The College Board (at 47 cents each) so they could encourage those students to apply (at $50 each) despite near-certainty that they’d be rejected.

The results were even lower admissions rates, which in turn result in higher rankings on the annual college guides—which leads to still higher numbers of applicants.

The Journal used the example of an Illinois high school student named Jori Johnson, who took a practice SAT test and soon received brochures from Vanderbilt, Stanford, Northwestern and the University of Chicago.

She applied to all four; all four then rejected her.

“I just stared at my computer and cried,” said Johnson, who wound up attending New York University.

One of those colleges, Vanderbilt, bought “between 100,000 and 200,000” student leads from the College Board, according to the report, thus tripling its number of applicants between 2002 and 2017, while its admit rate fell from 46 percent to 11 percent.

That’s still nearly 4x the admit rate at Harvard (3.2%), which has also seen its number of applications more than double since 2006: 19,527 to 40,248.

I get it. But I don’t get it.

I have a radical idea. Elite colleges should expand. The thriving ones should (maybe) acquire the struggling ones.

It’s what would happen in virtually any other industry. Any other business.

If you had more customers than you knew what to do with, either you’d find a way to serve them or your competitors would.

But I sense there’s a factor missing in the equation. It reminds me of a classic line that supposedly originated at another elite institution: Harvard Business School.

An MBA student was arguing with someone in the administration: “Why are you treating me like this? I’m the customer!”

“No you’re not,” the administrator supposedly said. “You’re the product.”

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7 other things

• The Russian Defense Ministry said on Tuesday that it defeated a Ukrainian ATACMS attack in the western Bryansk region, shortly before the Kremlin updated its nuclear weapons doctrine to allow for nuclear strikes in response to foreign ballistic missile attacks. This came after President Joe Biden approved Ukraine's use of the long-range American-made missiles to hit targets in Russia's western Kursk region. (ABC News)

• An unidentified hacker has gained access to a computer file shared in a secure link among lawyers whose clients have given damaging testimony related to Matt Gaetz, the former Florida congressman who is President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice to be attorney general. The file of 24 exhibits is said to include sworn testimony by a woman who said that she had sex with Mr. Gaetz in 2017 when she was 17, as well as corroborating testimony by a second woman who said that she witnessed the encounter. (NY Times)

• Theory behind why Trump is pushing hard for Gaetz along with Pete Hegseth as defense secretary despite sexual misconduct allegations (which they both deny!): "The thinking in Trump World is that the Senate won’t be able to reject more than two of his nominees. So even if Gaetz ... is rejected, and perhaps Hegseth as well, everyone else gets through." (Fox News)

• The U.S. Justice Department will ask a judge to force Google to sell off its Chrome browser, so as to dismantle the monopoly it has over the internet search market, in a major intervention against one of the world’s biggest tech companies. Competition officials, along with a number of US states that have joined the case against the Silicon Valley company, also plan to recommend that the federal judge Amit Mehta imposes data licensing requirements. (The Guardian)

• McDonald’s says it will invest over $100 million to aid franchisees heavily impacted by the E. coli outbreak tied to slivered onions in Quarter Pounders. The outbreak led to over 100 illnesses and one death. Roughly $35 million goes to marketing programs that can help drive traffic; the remainder will go to supporting impacted franchisees. (Restaurant Dive)

• Scientists discovered a mummified saber-toothed kitten remarkably well preserved in Siberian permafrost for 35,000 years. The mummified kitten was found in 2020 in the Badyarikha River in eastern Siberia with its whiskers and claws still attached, but revealed in a recent article in the journal Scientific Reports. (Vice)

• Would you buy a banana for a million dollars? If you have that kind of money to spare, you can bid on one that's part of an artwork by Italian-born Maurizio Cattelan titled "Comedian." No, it's not a banana made of solid gold; it's your regular old edible banana, affixed to the wall with a piece of duct tape. It's being auctioned by Sotheby's New York, which estimates that it will sell for $1-1.5 million. (DW News)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Declan Sun on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this Inc.com. See you in the comments—I really do hope people join in!