In the golden decades that stretched from the end of World War II to the 2010s, there was almost no better business to be in than higher education.

What’s that you say? A university is not a business? Well, I take the point, but just the same, universities were certainly operating more and more like businesses, with glossy marketing campaigns, sophisticated plans to ensure more admitted students actually enrolled and elaborate price discrimination schemes designed to squeeze every last dollar out of students. Increasingly, they also adopted that classic business maxim: “The customer is always right.”

© Washington Post