A columnist can commit no greater sin than to communicate those pathetic, mediocre words, “on the one hand…”

Where there is a “one hand,” there is, of course, another hand – an intellectual escape for a crusading columnist whose job should be to sort out right from wrong, good from bad.

Write too many “on the one hand” columns and you start sounding like President Obama talking about Afghanistan.

On the one hand, you can appreciate why the University of Massachusetts has announced an aggressive recruitment drive intended to snare out-of-state students, be they craggy-faced farmers from New Hampshire or blond beach bunnies from California.

In-state students blessed by good luck attend UMass at a price subsidized by us all, while the foreigners pay a hefty sum, reflecting the horror of being born and raised somewhere other than the Commonwealth Garden of Eden.

As might be explained in an economics course at UMass, if the school can afford to offer it, the marginal cost of that next student you admit, whether domestic or foreign, is pretty low – so the profit from a high-tuition, out-of-state is enough to pay the salary of a Provost or something.

In the next decade, UMass wants to raise enrollment 15 percent, which is fairly ambitious. To put it in perspective, I would have to write for Banker & Tradesman for 15 years to raise my pay as much as UMass wants to increase enrollment in the next decade.

Presumably, this tuition-fueled cascade of revenue would not only compensate for the dwindling supply of state money, but also allow the institution to hire cool faculty and build pretty new buildings and puff itself up, in the presence of both Ivy competition and snobby little liberal arts schools within a few miles of the UMass campus.

In addition to sticking it to the out-of-staters in terms of tuition, most colleges and universities with any marketing instincts worth talking about will troll for students from as many states and foreign countries and, even Vermont, as possible, so that the schools can brag about their cosmopolitan nature and international appeal.

On the other hand, when I worked on the staff of a New England governor who wanted to expand the out-of state presence at his premier research university, many legislators and constituents got cranky at the notion of forcing their kids to compete for a seat in the classroom with some kid from Nebraska.

Liberal Thinking

One enrollment strategy that raises profit margins without the bother of attending college fairs in Montana is to admit large numbers of liberal arts majors, and fewer engineering and math and assorted science students. Labs and test tubes and atom smashers and mice bred to be sacrificed in the name of science are expensive. Shakespeare scholars, on the other hand, are low maintenance.

The economic and political justifications for snaring out-of-state students for a state university are fraught with contradiction and hype. At the same time state universities crank up the old campaign that the graduating students are more likely to stay in-state and buy houses and pay taxes and live happily ever after, those same universities recruit out-of-state students who are less likely to stay and more likely to move back to Texas, where the taxes are low and the college football is exceptional.

The Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University reported last year that a third of the people born in Massachusetts have already bailed out. What happens if UMass spurns the locals and goes after prime beef from North Dakota?

On the other hand, if UMass attracts thousands of outsiders; conducts a hostile takeover of Mt. Holyoke and Smith, filled with low-overhead poetry majors; and buys a few prestige theoretical physicists whom no one understands; we could attract so much research money to Massachusetts that even newspaper columnists could find a real job.

On the other hand, a survey several years ago by CollegeGrad.com found that most college grads are willing to move away for a good job – including, probably, kids from somewhere else who were tricked into attending the University of Massachusetts. What if we build it, and they come – but then they all leave?