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Dr. John (Jack) Maguire is the former Dean of Admissions and Dean of Enrollment Management at Boston College, where he pioneered the field of enrollment management in the 19705. In 1981 he founded Maguire Associates, a market research and consulting company based in Bedford, MA that specializes in higher education. Along with his continuing work at Maguire Associates, Dr. Maguire is currently a trustee of New England College and Millikin University, and a member of the board of directors for Boston College Ireland in Dublin.
What is your education and career background?
I graduated from Boston College High School in 1957 and Boston College in 1961, and then went on to get my doctorate in theoretical physics at Boston College in 1966. After that I did a post-doc at Rice University for a year and a half, and then came back as a senior research fellow at BC. I then got the first available tenure-track position as an assistant professor of physics, my background being mathematical physics.
Just to complicate things, I was also involved in politics at that time. I ran for the school board in Lexington, MA, and had, some would say, the misfortune to get elected. At the age of 29 I was elected to the board, and at the age of 30, I was the chair of it. One of the people who supported me in that endeavor was John Mahoney, Sr., who received an honorary degree from BC this year. Now, unbeknownst to most of us at the time, BC was going through a major financial crisis that involved, among other things, enrollment. John Mahoney went to the president of BC and said "there's this guy in Lexington, he just got an assistant professorship in the physics department at BC, he's chairman of the schools committee, he's 30 years old, and he could be the next dean of admissions."
So they conspired with the chairman of the physics department, and the three of them basically just told me "you are going to be the new dean of admissions." I told them I didn't have a clue as to what that would entail, but they said they would teach me. So I ended up, against my will and better judgment,...