When the highly respected Burr College of Business fails to enroll enough students, its director, Oliver Dunbar, gets a frightful call from his superiors: fill the classrooms or be fired!
But Burr’s specialty is teaching secretarial skills, and now, in the 1990s, fewer women are applying. Desperate, Oliver hires Lily Espirito as his new admissions director, even though Lily’s previous schools were closed by the Department of Education. Beautiful and ruthless, Lily is willing to cheat, scam, and beguile to make her enrollment goals, a strategy that could destroy the Burr College once and for all.
Within the halls, offices, and classrooms of the Burr College, integrity clashes with primal passions, and ideals conflict with a never-ending need for revenue. A male teacher routinely beds the prettiest girls in his class. A work-study student gleefully manipulates the rivalry between Admissions counselors. A high school dropout struggles to acquire the education she needs to escape Philadelphia’s most dangerous housing project. And at the center is Oliver, a twenty-year champion of education, who feels his school’s soul slipping away and doesn’t know how to stop it. His fate turns on an unexpected late-night encounter, and a chance for love that he never knew was possible.