Theoretically, colleges aren’t supposed to recruit applicants who have put down deposits elsewhere.

However, with declining enrollments and tight budgets, its every school for itself.

Students who earn good grades in high school, or who score well on standardized tests, get used to the barrage of pitches from colleges that want them to apply. But in theory, after May 1 of senior year, when the student has turned in a deposit to enroll at a specific college in the fall, the pitches should end.

Colleges should “not knowingly recruit students who are enrolled, registered, have initiated deferred admission, or have declared their intent, or submitted contractual deposits to other institutions,” says the Statement of Principles of Good Practice of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. (The statement does not have legal power, but is a respected ethics code for the admissions profession.)

So more than a few admissions officers and high school counselors did a double-take when they read in The New York Times Friday that Loyola University in New Orleans this summer “made a flurry of calls to students who had been accepted but had decided to go elsewhere, and had even paid deposits to other colleges.” Loyola is among a number of colleges that this year were seriously below their targets for a freshman class for the fall, and the Times cited that strategy (which would seem to directly violate the NACAC statement) as one being tried. And so counselors did what they generally do when they learn of violations of their code of conduct: they asked NACAC to investigate.

Loyola says that its officials were misquoted by the Times (more on that later) and that it strictly abides by the NACAC guidelines. But it also turns out that some other colleges have been going after students who have made deposits and commitments elsewhere, in violation of the NACAC guidelines.

Tom Weede, chair of NACAC’s Admissions Practices Committee, and vice president for enrollment management at Butler University, said in an interview that the committee would investigate the complaints made Friday about Loyola and that, in the past, it has found a number of colleges to be engaged in the practice.