Pérez knew that if he was going to hit those two numbers, there was one tool that was going to be more important than any other: financial aid. The modern practice of enrollment management was invented in the mid-1970s by a man named Jack Maguire, who was then the dean of admissions at Boston College, and one of his most important innovations was to deploy financial aid strategically, as a way to attract the students he most wanted to admit, whether they genuinely needed financial assistance or not. It was something of a radical idea — giving aid to students who didn’t need it — and it didn’t seem, at first, to make sense. But in the 1980s, other colleges began experimenting with this new strategy, giving these grants the euphemistic name “merit aid,” and they found it worked remarkably well. It turned out that offering grants — even relatively small ones — to students with high family incomes made it significantly more likely that those students would enroll in your college. (If you called the grant a “scholarship,” it worked even better.) And if a well-off student was willing to pay, say, $30,000 of your $40,000 tuition, that was still a pretty good deal for your college.Over the last 30 years, as list-price tuitions have climbed rapidly, this strategy has spread to almost every private college in the nation, and many public ones, as well. And as merit aid has expanded, it has created two big problems. The first, and most obvious, is that if you give more aid to rich kids, you have less to offer to poor kids. American colleges collectively now give more institutional aid to each student with a family income over $100,000, on average, than they do to each student with a family income under $20,000.