This article discusses admissions policies to higher education during the Communist regime in Bulgaria (1946-89). It argues that under the conditions of the Bulgarian Communist regime, admissions policies were not only a component of the higher education system--viewed as an institution--but part and parcel of the process through which power was exercised and maintained. Their most basic goal was social engineering through the deliberate transformation of the intelligentsia's social profile. Discrimination and privileges were the main mechanisms at work. The article outlines the results of social engineering with regard to the expansion of higher education, the evolution of the student body, and the policies' moral effects on Bulgarian society. A short discussion of the Bulgarian case in comparative perspective is also included.