The university's defence and the students' accounts are both worth taking seriously, and they collide in one specific place.

The facts first. Howard unenrolled 502 incoming first-year students over payment and documentation deadlines. After the outcry, more than 200 have been re-enrolled. More than 2,200 students and families met the deadlines [1] - the population the university is implicitly protecting, since a school that lets obligations slide for some is being unfair to the majority who paid on time.

Interim President Wayne A.I. Frederick's defence has a real principle in it: 'We really are trying to do our best to make sure that when students start, they can finish' [1].

Howard's four-year graduation rate is under 70 percent [1], and a student who begins a term they cannot fund often ends up with debt and no degree - the worst outcome higher education produces. Enforcing the deadline at the door is, on this logic, kinder than letting a student fail out financially in year two.

Who got back in is where the logic shows its edge.

Frederick says re-enrollment turned on students 'who were able to give us the documentation we were asking for in the first place, such as evidence of an external scholarship' [1].

The ones with paperwork.

Then there are the accounts from the other side of the desk.

Nikiyah Clark is 17, from Ohio: 'I tried to hold back tears as I walked out of the building. I tried to compose myself, but I couldn't' [1].

Dwayne Irvin, 19, from Missouri, describes being told by the university 'to wait to enroll into that payment plan until that scholarship has been deposited into my account' [1] - and then, on his account, being unenrolled for the waiting.

If that account is accurate, at least some of the 502 were not students who missed a deadline. They were students who followed instructions into one.

That is the collision. A deadline policy defended as protecting students from starting what they cannot finish, applied in at least one reported case to a student doing what the university told him - and resolved, so far, in favour of the ones who could produce documents fastest.

Roughly 300 students are still out. The university has not said how many of them were ever told to wait.