What I hope to do in this book is show you that college admissions is a business—a big one—that you have very little control over. Top colleges are inundated with more well-qualified applicants than they can accommodate. “Colleges are a business,” Richard Whiteside, the former admissions dean at Tulane, told me before he died in 2019, “and admissions is its chief revenue source.” While many people initially enter the admissions profession to serve the needs of students, they soon find out that selling the college is a necessity in an increasingly competitive industry. Admissions counselors are salespeople pitching a product to students, employed by colleges that need to meet a bottom line.