Is this a college admissions office, or the NSA?

Last updated on: March 17, 2014 at 8:45 am by Jane the Actuary

Is this a college admissions office, or the NSA? 2014-03-17T08:45:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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That’s the page 4 article in the Chicago Tribune today: “Colleges admissions offices mine data on prospective students.” Yes, I had known that colleges would google a prospective student, or look at a Facebook page open to the public. But this article describes far more extensive data mining, with the sort of invasiveness that we’d associate with the NSA:

Many testing companies, along with the Common Application, forward personal information to colleges. That, along with an IP address, is usually enough to pinpoint identity and track online behavior, experts said.

Such software can aid in the courtship but is also a trade-off, Barnes said. “If you wrote a play for your high school, you might hear from some small college in New Hampshire with a playwright program that you would never otherwise know about,” said Barnes, who studies the use of the Internet in admissions. “But you might also be denied a prestigious scholarship and not know it was because of the sites you visit online. What is missing here is the awareness. Just know that you are being watched … and the standard of consent is using the Internet.”

Ugh. Remind me to add, “ask the prospective university to disclose its practices regarding internet snooping” to my list of to-dos when my kids begin to look into colleges — because if they’re invading my son’s privacy, they’re invading my privacy, too.

And what’s worse is why they’re doing this: this isn’t the old issue of trying to unearth the partiers.

Universities have priced themselves so high that they have to work overtime to try to convince prospective students that the pricetag is worth it, with targeted appeals, finding out a student’s interest via data-mining (a vegan? a would-be world traveller?) and then pitching the ways the college (literally or figuratively) caters to their interests.

The desire for a high “yield rate” — the percent of applicants who accept — for reasons of prestige, has always meant that universities are likely to turn down applicants they think are using them as a safety school and won’t actually enroll, but they’ve ramped up the efforts to identify them.

And the fact that they’ve constructed a system of differentiated pricing and “institutional aid” means they’re now in an all-out search for students who won’t squack at being asked to pay full price, and using data to indentify who should and shouldn’t be offered scholarships, even apart from the family finances data revealed in the financial aid forms. How far this goes isn’t clear, including whether students are denied supposedly “merit” scholarships because the software determines they’ll enroll regardless.

And here’s the final paragraph:

“In the end, it’s still a highly emotional decision made by 17- and 18-year-olds,” said [Vanderbilt University admissions director Thom] Golden. “And it can still all turn on a bad piece of pizza.”

What an awful system we’ve constructed, in which teenagers, who are not old enough, depending on when their birthdays fall, to sign a contract, who are considered too young to drink, who in many ways are still not considered adults, if not legally, then in terms of society’s expectations, are still expected to sign on the dotted line to commit themselves to, in some cases, significant amounts of debt, based on these pitches and the sophisticated marketing of universities, with parents being told to step out of the way.

Now, granted, in this household, my expectation is that we’ll sit down with each son, in turn, and set realistic expectations and a budget, but I do worry that they’ll see their friends headed to any number of private or out-of-state public schools, backed by student loans and the sort of financial aid that’s given to children whose parents don’t save for college, and feel cheated by stingy parents.

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