Much of the attention on Purdue University's president these days concerns the all-important number of 9,992. Not only is that the dollar amount an in-state student will pay Purdue for tuition and fees next year, it also is the amount such a student paid Purdue when Mitch Daniels became president in 2013. 

The university also has reduced the price of food services and textbooks. An undergraduate degree from Purdue, in other words, is less expensive today than it was when Daniels arrived.

Inside a small, cluttered office at the high-poverty Howard School in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Nicholas Siler wields a powerful software tool that greatly boosts the odds the students he counsels will successfully complete college.

Siler is at the pointy tip of a revolution so new that many high schools around the country are not even aware a revolution is taking place: combining powerful data with finely honed college match tactics to find a college where the student is most likely to earn a degree. It takes college counseling out of the dark ages where students routinely get sent off to colleges that are little more than failure factories.