With 78 percent of our revenue derived straight from tuition, each person we let into Guilford is more than a student – they’re an investment.

Recruitment is central to the college’s survival and a time consuming, labor-intensive process. Digging up students willing to shell out $30,000 a year for a liberal arts education is an epic task, especially in a southern state with a superb public college system.

The Colleges That Change Lives (CTCL) program is a huge boost to recruitment efforts. It brings in interested students, and it puts a brand name to a college that sells itself on reputation. CTCL does for our recruiting what Roger Ebert’s right thumb does for movies, what Bob Seger’s “Like a Rock” did for Chevy Trucks, what country music did for the war in Iraq.

Dropping the program entirely would be a huge mistake, and if that ever happens, please storm New Garden Hall with pitchforks and torches.

Unfortunately, the tour is expensive. Each tour has an upfront fee of $2,000 and consists of five mandatory cities. An admission counselor racks up days of overtime and several thousand in hotel rooms and flights just to put up a booth in an Embassy Suites lobby for a few hours to sell us alongside 40 other schools in a city we may have no recruits from.

With the college a million in the hole in one year, the administration – God, this hurts to say – might have been right to cut back on the expenses of recruiting through CTCL. Guilford is still on the Web site, still in the “Colleges That Change Lives” book, and still can use the program as a source of advertising and recruiting. We’ve cut back on the tours for this year, not the whole program, and can tour at our discretion at any time in the future.

Moreover, CTCL is not our only admissions effort, and it would be a shame to see other, potentially more effective admissions programs have to be cut to keep us on all of the tours. This could lead to a demographic shift in Guilford’s population, or worse a shortage of qualified students.

And really, paying for a brand name isn’t the Guilford way – for goodness sake, we’re trying to kick Pepsi and Coke off campus. It’s nice to have a label that fits our style, but the key focus of admissions is bringing in students, at cost. CTCL is expendable if it becomes a drain on that effort.

The handbook defines Stewardship as “(being) committed to making decisions that will ensure the long-term survival of this situation of this institution. We must maximize the value of our human, financial and physical resources in ways consistent with our Quaker heritage.”

The Admission Department’s decision to cut back on CTCL follows these guidelines, even if it comes off as a callus decision. If Randy Doss drops the program entirely, then break some windows and set some fires. But in all fairness, let’s do the same if enrollment puts us back on all the tours before we’re out of debt enough to where it wouldn’t be just as irresponsible.