This address focuses on the topic of open admissions and its implications for policies and procedures. A discussion, defining terms like excellence, equality, and open admissions, initiates a brief examination of issues such as institution-based and individual-based barriers to posesecondary schooling, the organization of college admissions--its trends and pressures--and the widening of access to further schooling. The results of this discussion are subsequently utilized to examine a single institution's policies and procedures. In Roosevelt University, a case study for open admission is presented through a detailed description of the setting, organization, admissions overview, admissions and barriers, and a measurement of the degree of openness. Roosevelt University is said to represent a notable example of a private college doing its part to effect dramatic social change in the opening of admissions, by showing that policies can be fair, and procedures both humane and efficient--while at the same time accomplishing the goals for which they are established. The key to the opening of admissions is said to consist in the guarantee of mobility, not in the promise of placement into a program that is beyond the scope of one's training and grasp. (Author/AM)