The Data Colleges Collect on Applicants | Hacker News Reader

The Data Colleges Collect on Applicants

wsj.com

To summarize,

1. Colleges are using off the shelf email list management programs. (Those all track open rates and click throughs). Sounds like they have per-applicant tracking IDs setup for each email.

2. Colleges are using off the shelf analytics tools for their websites. Sounds like they are tying this to the email campaign IDs from above.

3. The author of this article doesn't mention how incredible fragile and prone to losing track of individual IDs such systems are. Use a different computer (school laptop VS home PC), different browser, or get an ID from visiting the website then click through an email and watch as some poorly configured system gets confused, etc.

And finally, an investigation of if these numbers correlate to student success in any way shape or form would've been a nice bit of reporting.

I work in higher ed admissions, using Slate, which is also used by at least 3 of the 4 schools mentioned. Fortunately or not admissions operations no longer rely on spreadsheets and mailchimp to collate data and score applicants (interest, merit or otherwise), and the software supporting them is getting pretty advanced.

While I agree this tidbit is newsworthy and icky, what's more disturbing to me is the lack of interest demonstrated by those responsible for educating students...faculty. Any university admin can attest to this. The people most qualified to judge an applicant's merits are surprisingly unwilling to do so in a fair, objective and consistent way. Anecdotal evidence, but I've gotten requests from professors of engineering (including CS faculty) not only to print application PDFs but sort spreadsheets by GPA. As if they can't figure out how to do that themselves.

I believe part of this trend is actually a response to that: admin staff look for more tools/metrics to inform admissions decisions. Misguided or not it's a sign of the times.

The word faculty means power, because faculty used to run schools, until the coup by the parasitic Administrator class that has grown like a tumor.

> The score includes about 80 variables including how long they spent on the school’s website, whether they opened emails and at what point in high school they started looking on the website (the earlier the better).

So a student who (wisely) uses browser tracking blocking or disables images/tracking in their email client is negatively affected? That seems like a terrible heuristic.

Most college emails from what I’ve seen use tracking pixels and magic links to track applicants’ activity. The magic links don’t need JS to work, it’s a pure serverside redirect from click.[college].edu (or similar) to the page in question.

Blocking tracking pixels is fairly common I think for privacy conscious folk.

In the email marketing world, not being able to distinguish recipients that are intentionally blocking tracking with recipients who are not interacting is a known issue. It's silly to group them together and use it as admissions criteria. Excluding privacy conscious users... to what end?

Just let the worst college get the worst student. What harm can it make?

I think you're underestimating how many schools use this kind of tracking. It's practically industry standard. Elite schools like Harvard, Stanford, etc. along with smaller institutions all use these techniques.

I understand this knee-jerk reaction. However it is completely wrong. It is foolish to block tracking like this.

Blocking tracking on a university website or email correspondence would be like setting your LinkedIn profile to private prior doing research on a job opportunity.

This is the domain I work in at the moment and I can 100% assure you that anonymous behavior hurts your admission chances significantly.

Don't ever visit a campus without letting them know you are there. Same goes for email and web site visits.

Absolutely not. This sets a dangerous precedent. Students aren’t just trusting their data to your institution, but also all the other entities in between. It is foolish to punish privacy-conscious students. We do not want to create a world where advancement is only possible by giving up one’s privacy.

There are dozens of companies collecting and selling information about high school students. You can't take the sat or act and not be sold. Preventing the very people you do want to take note of your interest is cutting your nose off to spite your face. You can either accept it or not, but as an insider (not affiliated with a college) I can assure you that blocking tracking on email from admissions departments is a huge mistake. But hey, you do what you think us best.

In the grand scheme of things, the tracking data collected is nothing compared to what is collected on college applications and standardized tests. Unfortunatey, that’s the world we live in. Fortunately I am not a high school student, but there are many implications to consider here.

As an engineer, I would take issue with tracking students behavior. However, I am also more privacy conscious than the average engineer.

Don’t visit a campus without letting them know you’re there? Could you elaborate on why that’s a bad idea?

If you visit a campus with your (or as) a prospective student, be sure to take and register for the guided tour. Signals of interest like these are absolutely a factor during admission season. If you go and dont let them know, you are wasting part of the opportunity. Already taken the tour and want to go for a second or third visit then arrange to speak to a faculty member about the departments you are interested in. Your department of interest almost certainly has prospective student days. Try to time your visit with one.

Really unlikely for these kind of stats to ever be a deciding factor. Massive waste of time from an ROI factor excluding the fun in visiting. I can only see it mattering for a mid tier “safety” type school trying to boost their accept/decline rate by denying obvious safety school applicants.

Some college rankings place importance on vanity metrics like acceptance and matriculation rates. This is a reality. Top colleges are typically more sensitive to and interested in optimizing for these measures.

If you think that signaling intent as a student is not important, you are of course welcome to your opinion.

High school senior here.

Just wanted to point out that while demonstrated interest is certainly a component in college admissions (like it or not), but varies from institution to institution on its importance.

Quick tip: if you're wondering whether a school actually considers demonstrated interest, you can Google up "[school] common data set" (without quotes). Look for Section C7, which indicates the relative weight of the various admissions factors. Just throwing it out there.

That sounds miserable. Your job is to help institutions make bad decisions that deny educational opportunities to children who aren't clued into how to game the system?

The only mitigating aspet is that I suspect that this system isn't used at schools that deliver educations worth paying for.

Actually, we do the exact opposite.

We help students make good decisions to optimize their chances of getting into a top 100 university. I don't work for any institution.

We help candidates appear in their best light and once they have received an offer we actively work against the interest of the college to help the student get the best aid package possible.

Although the software mentioned is pretty good at scoring, a fair percentage of applicants to any university have had no prior interaction with that institution ("stealth applicants"). Moreover the jobs of admin staff are literally dependent on a high volume of qualified applicants. I doubt any admissions operation would use the absence of a score to preclude or penalize otherwise qualified applicants.

https://outline.com/LG4kHd

My kid took psat (preparatory SAT exam) and she had to register with College Board (SAT admins). Now she’s getting tons of spam from all kinds of schools, both email and US post. They say they got the address from College Board. :(

Yep, College Board has been selling your info pretty much since founding in the 1950s.

There used to be checkbox on the PSAT form that enables/disables this. Not sure, however, if this is opt-in or opt-out.

High school student here. The box is opt-out (your are opted in by default)

You opt in for this, and it's kind of the whole point of the PSAT. You're taking the test so that colleges will send you discounted offers. There isn't much other reason to take the PSAT.

It's the PSAT/NMSQT, which means it's also the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, which is an excellent reason to take it besides increasing your spam burden.

95% of test takers know before they start that they aren't in the running for the NMS.

I have at least 20 pounds of college mail over the course of three years. As a high school senior who is almost done with the college app season, I kind of miss the incessant spam.

When my high school friends and I finished the process, we had a giant bonfire. Good for the story, but the fumes were pretty nasty b/c so much of it was on glossy, heavily inked papers.

Someone actually flipped the tables around and used the eagerness of the colleges to get a bunch of t-shirts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNki8vIBXpE

College Board is but one vector. Everyone from Naviance and SAT (college board) to grade 12 personality and career testing sells your children to aggregators who then resell to colleges.

This is the domain I work in, and while I empathize that getting spam sucks (digital and physical), in this case I think you can likely leverage it.

Every student should have a set of safety colleges. My guess is that among the detritus, there are some colleges that might fit the bill. Finding a set of reasonable safety colleges is a good thing. [Heads up, your child absolutely needs a safety college both as a fallback and as a bargaining chip]

Secondly, and more importantly, some (but not all) colleges can be bargained with using offers from these colleges. Some colleges will respond with counter offers if you you can show them a better offer even from a college you are not all that interested in.

My recommendation is to look through the junk and make sure you have colleges of interest in three buckets "safety", "comfort", and "reach". If they are sending you junk mail then they are already interested in you. Select a few and see if it can work to your advantage.

The company I work for deal exclusively in this area and our negotiation tools and strategies save candidates $5000 a year ON AVERAGE.

Or skip the nonsense and attend an affordable public college and let these junk third teir private colleges die.

We don't help students apply to junk for-profit colleges. They are almost always open admissions colleges anyways so there is nothing to help with.

On the other hand, the UC Berkeley sticker price (just tuition and fees) is more than $38k a year should you happen to be from someplace other than CA. They reject 83% of their applicants. This is a great college, with a high price and high selectivity. We help students optimize their chances of admission and aid packages.

I was cleaning out stuff from my parents' house and found a bunch of college admission crud from 1981. Funniest was a postcard I was apparently supposed to write my name, height and weight on and then mail to Yale.

I remember a few applications from that time period required a picture. Well, they didn't require a picture, but you know...

Remember how every application was different and needed different essays and things? Nowadays it's one common application (My kid did it a couple of years ago).

The old system was self-limiting in the number of schools you could reasonably apply to but now you can apply to as many schools as you have the application fees for.

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