Work on financial indicators for colleges and universities aimed at clarifying perception and making judgments of financial distress more credible is seen as deserving serious attention. But the use of indicators as a management tool is seen as questionable. (MLW)

A report examining the conditions facing Williams College in the 1980s is excerpted. The committee was to emphasize strategies to serve two major institutional goals: maintaining a large pool of well-qualified applicants, and maintaining a faculty that is talented, well compensated and professionally committed. (MLW)