Northeastern completely reinvented itself. Here’s what that could mean for higher ed as a whole.

Richard D’Amore was a typical Northeastern student in the 1970s. One of six children from a working-class family in Everett, he didn’t care much about academics in high school. He married young, started college at night, drove a cab, and sold newspapers between classes. His co-op, or paid internship, at an accounting firm helped him afford tuition and support his family. Today D’Amore is the chairman of Northeastern’s board of trustees, most of whom, he said, “like myself, often joke [that] we love Northeastern, but we couldn’t get in today.”

These days, Northeastern admits students more like Neoli Das, the daughter of Indian immigrants living in Silicon Valley, who finished high school with a 3.8 GPA and a resume of internships. She fell in love with Boston during a summer Harvard Extension School program, and with Northeastern because of its distinctive co-op program and cosmopolitan vibe. “I feel like I fit right in,” Das said after her July orientation program for incoming first-year students.

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