HE DOESN'T GET OUT ENOUGH. I'm talking about you, Richard Vedder.

Colleges have viewed restricted admissions as a virtue --a means of raising prestige. Education is the only business I know where success is obtained by turning customers away and snubbing them.

Studio 54 comes to mind. Limited edition collectibles come to mind.

If Yale or Harvard thought like a railroad, it would not apologize for running an all-Pullman, extra-fare, by reservation only Panama Limited (it being no accident that the last such train in the States offered its operator a way to keep the poor and black on the coach-only City of New Orleans, civil rights laws or not.)

I suggest that the administrators of the name colleges are in a no-win situation: raise tuitions to ration spaces, which is what prices are supposed to do, and get mau-maued for adding to their retained earnings, otherwise known as "endowments," or keep tuitions low, and get mau-maued for dashing young people's hopes.

Professor Vedder's suggestion that the name colleges set up branches in other states intrigues, for the likely reaction of the flagship campuses. Imagine Harvard establishing a branch campus in Naperville. Would Northern Illinois or DePaul or Northwestern or Chicago be the first to run to the state board of higher education arguing "the existing service is adequate" and "if additional capacity is required, the existing providers are capable of expanding"?