Throughout the 1980s, the marketing of American colleges and universities became both more aggressive and more sophisticated. Colleges created new administrative posts with titles like vice president for enrollment management. Videotapes gave way to CD's and DVD's and, eventually, to virtual tours and e-mail messages and YouTube and all of the other communications tools that the Internet had made possible. The higher-education equivalent of data mining emerged as a way for colleges to focus their financial-aid resources most efficiently. In this article, the author explains the evolution of aggressive marketing in college admissions.