Abstract
In the mid-1980s, as the man lugged the 29-pound machine on the express bus out of St. Louis for his commute home each night, fellow passengers would often ask if he was a tailor. The question was understandable. The rectangular case he carried looked as if it housed a Singer sewing machine. In fact, it was an Osborne Executive 2 " portable " computer; inside the white plastic case was a detachable keyboard, two floppy disk drives, and a seven-inch screen. David Kalsbeek used that $2,500 computer to build the early datasets that would help give shape to the nascent world of enrollment management. Kalsbeek had been a philosophy major who liked to ponder deep questions. He was also an early-adopter computer nerd who found meaning in data. He schlepped his expensive personal computer back and forth to work so he could crunch his numbers day and night, refining measures to assess student experience. Kalsbeek worked in institutional research at Saint Louis University, a nearly two-century-old Jesuit school sitting just west of the Mississippi River. Like most universities in the 1980s, Saint Louis was made up of lots of siloed departments keeping their own records and doing business the way they always had: Admissions over here, Financial Aid over there; the Registrar over in that corner, the Housing Office over in the other. For many years, SLU and nine other midwestern Jesuit colleges had participated in an annual survey, sharing information about their admissions efforts and outcomes....