For Sale: Sat-Takers’ Names. Colleges Buy Student Data and Boost Exclusivity
wsj.com
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They have some interesting interviews with college admissions staff and information about Vanderbilt specifically using this tactic to decrease their admit rate (which makes them look better in ratings).
This certainly isn't the only thing driving the massive increase in applications. There are far more students taking the PSATs, more students sending out far more applications (out of paranoia? Pressure?), and more foreign applicants.
To some extent, I think it's a positive feedback loop that doesn't require advertising at all to drive it. If you know the admit rate is low (because of all the applications being sent), then it's in your best interest to send out lots of applications -- throwing spaghetti at the wall. Then the admit rate gets lower...
Personally, I'm not entirely against this trend. Growing up in a rural area with parents who didn't go to college, I had no idea what was out there. I figured I'd probably go to the state university (which was a good school!), but didn't think much about it. When I started getting mail from colleges, it was a huge help and broadened my horizons. I ended up going to a field-specific college across the country, and really loved it.
Not only that, but it was exciting and inspiring that these colleges I had only heard about in movies and books were reaching out to me. I just never thought that would happen. I'm sure I'm not the only kid from middle-of-nowhere West coast who was really inspired by that.
The consequences of this is now it is truly much easier to apply to a bunch of schools for undergrad.
Note, this is not the same for grad schools. I have been applying to graduate schools, and they seem to have their own systems (but there seems to be a common platform called "Applyweb").
The only thing the common app does is standardize the name/dob/address form that's two pages of paper anyway. The essays, which are by far most of the work, are mostly different. Oh, and the schools all still charge full application fees.
Back when I applied to college many years ago, IIRC all the colleges I applied to used Common App as mentioned in a sibling comment (I only applied to five top universities, no idea about the less competitive ones which constitute the majority), but each one had a distinct set of extra questions and/or short-form essays, and no amount of software could save you time on those. I even had to carefully customize the “common” personal statement in order to play to each recipient’s (perceived) interests.
I guess cookie cutter bulk applications could be used for fallback options, but those are not the time consuming ones in the first place.
As for paying the application fee, it's not too hard to get a waiver. All you have to do is get your guidance counselor to sign off on a waiver form. (That is actually not just for the Common App either: nearly every school will accept that sort of affirmation of need and waive the fee)
The primary reason fees exist is to make them high enough that students who aren't all that interested in attending don't bother to apply. Believe it or not, for most schools the application fee really doesn't impact their budget much. Take a mid-size school with 20,000 students and a freshman class of 3,000. They might get 12,000 applications that progress far enough that the student submits a fee. Take away 3,000 for fee waivers, and average a $60 fee, and it adds up to $540,000. Seems like a fair bit of money, Given a staff 20, marketing budget, etc., it's a very minor consideration.
Sure, it's not nothing, but having lots of not-very-interested applicants makes it extremely hard to make a target enrollment goal because you end up accepting so many students that won't attend. So you either come under your goal because you accepted uninterested students, or you accept too many to make up for it, making it look like your less competitive at the same time you risk enrolling more students that the school can handle on such short notice (I've seen that happen, it's not good for the school or the students).
Source: I work in higher ed analytics.
Contrast that with now when so much more information is available immediately, and yet I'm still surprised by how often I have to sell relatives on Rice University, my alma mater. What surprises me the most is how they don't seem to realize how good financial aid can be and just assume a private school is expensive even though they know my parents didn't have much money. Perhaps it's a bit of a branding problem, but it might also be people not digging around the college websites enough to find out how financial aid works and just walking away after seeing the sticker price.
Early 90's, I had just left the military and was thus able to apply for financial aid without recording my parents' income. So I was able to claim having made $15k the year before. I also accurately reported my savings. My total non-loan financial aid package consisted of $500/year of some state matching fund. I was also expected to contribute 100% of my savings in year one. I was told I had made too much money for a Pell grant. Something which remained true the next year when my income totaled $8k.
So in 2.5 years of college after the military, I managed to deplete my 4 years of aggressive savings and take on $15k in debt, over the GI Bill.
All of this is anecdotal, but as I prepare for my son to go to college next year, I have no realistic hope of him getting a cent. $200k for four years at Rice seems reckless.
University of Alabama in particular has massively increased the amount of merit aid it awards to out-of-state students, and it now attracts a huge number of students from the Northeast and the Chicago area that would never have considered it before. There are other schools using similar strategies.
As I mentioned in another comment, the cost of any given school is very unpredictable until you actually get accepted and get your financial package. The winning strategy is to research schools which are known for generous financial offers for similar students, and then apply to as many of them as is manageable to increase your odds of a winning "lottery ticket".
Now that I'm older I still get no money, but I don't even get the "merit scholarships."
No one at Rice has asked for my opinion, and I'm not privy to all the numbers behind the scenes, but I'm surprised they can't be more generous with the middle class since we have such a large endowment. They recently announced a big new financial aid initiative, but I wish tuition could be free again like it was until 1965!
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/09/18/health/rice-university-fi...
My parents income was slightly above your income, yet I got Pell grants all four years.
The SATs give college admissions a lot of information, but that information is still only part of the picture. I agree, it would be silly if they were sending out brochures to students with SAT scores lower than anyone they've ever admitted before, but it's conceivable that some of the lower scorers might have otherwise great applications and be admitted.
Many college systems (e.g. UC) have a common application. Applying to more colleges is just checking more boxes. There's another common application I just found on google that advertises "Explore nearly 900 colleges and universities using Common App." If it were me, and it were just another check box, or even checkbox + $50 or something, I'd hit a ton of them. Back in the day, I think I applied to every single UC for that reason.
As it is, it's not quite that simple (different essay questions, etc.), but the barrier to more applications has absolutely gone down.
No, it's actually a rational choice, because no one can accurately forecast what a given school will cost anymore.
At some point (I believe in the late ’00s, but could be wrong), elite schools started to extend their financial aid programs to include students from middle-class families. Prior to this change, a student from a family with middle-class income or above could know with reasonable certainty what a given college would cost: they would expect to pay the tuition, fees, etc. listed on the brochures. After this change, they would have no idea until after they were admitted. They might get a generous financial aid package that brings the cost down to the price of their local state university, or they might get nothing except loans. The systems used to determine financial aid packages are opaque and not well-publicized, so the outcome is unpredictable.
In 2009, I applied to a broad sample of 14 schools on the east coast. They were a mix of “elite” private and flagship public universities. My parents were comfortably middle-class. I was lucky enough to get into most of them, and so I had the opportunity to compare financial offers. In maybe 1 case out of 12, I would have had to pay the full sticker price. The rest would have been heavily “discounted”, but the discount varied widely between schools, from ~5% off the total cost of attendance, to 60% off, to 100% off (full ride). For the private universities the “discount” came from a mix of “need-based aid” and merit scholarships, while for the public universities it was exclusively from merit scholarships.
In this system, you don’t know what the financial offer is until you get in, there are possible windfalls from getting a generous financial offer, and it’s difficult to predict in advance what the financial offer will be until you get in. The incentives here are obvious: student who are conscious about the cost of their education have a strong incentive to “play the lottery” by applying to as many schools as is feasible for them, while biasing towards schools that are known to provide generous financial packages.
Don't colleges charge around $100 per application? Seems pretty expensive for poorer students to have to apply to increasingly more places.
It would be slightly illuminating to also publish the statistics of how many applications aspiring freshmen are submitting. Not to mention, we paid $70-$100 per application.
One day, my dad glanced in the trash. It was a small box with a fighter jet on it. I had assumed it was an Air Force recruiting package (some of the flyers were... robust) and had tossed it.
Turns out, it was from Gillette. "Now you're a man. Use a man's razor." I laughed out loud. Gillette had bought PSAT scores just to get the birthday of males to advertise to them, which I thought was hilarious.
They made a loyal customer that day. (Loyalty of a 17 year old is pretty cheap to purchase but also worthless.)
Southern Illinois University (Carbondale) was the most persistent in my day. They sent a 45 rpm record extolling all of their fine programs. In a moment of weakness, I put it on the turntable and was serenaded by the chance to study mortuary science on their campus.
It was a great tension release for the rest of the college cycle. Anytime an over-curious relative asked me about my college outlook, the answer was: "I'm going to Southern Illinois to study mortuary science."
That ended the conversation nice and quick.
Most of what I get is useless (though as national merit results get processed, I've started getting serious scholarship offers). What I don't like is that most of them are just send stuff to drive up application numbers and drive down acceptance rates, because yes, that's a thing (even though it sounds horrible, and every rejection makes a kid feel like garbage). Mail is cheap, I guess, but I wish colleges would relegate their communications to those they actually wanted.
This globalized world seems to give many an international perspective on things, and it's hard not to want to live in a place with cultural diversity and influences. Places like New York, Seattle, LA and SF feel way more international and diverse, and once you're there, you don't imagine yourself going back to, say, a place like Dallas. Nothing intrinsically wrong with it, but different strokes for different folks. I'd personally feel like I had traveled back to the 20th century if I had to move there.
People are leaving California and NY to live in Texas for a reason.
My girlfriends parents are hyper liberal beach bums from California who moved to Dallas and said they will never move back.
Not trying to be mean to Texas :) I just like green trees and plants, and sub 100 degree summers! Only my personal preference, I get others preference differs. I don't fault people who enjoy Texas :)
I agree austin is an exception, but dallas will be soon as well. I can't count the number of insanely liberal people I know who moved from California to Dallas.
Was only in Dallas briefly but I wasn't very impressed. I didn't get a great feeling there.
Never been to Huston, but a friend of mine grew up there and always spoke highly of it. I just have a hard time with super hot climates, I enjoy a more moderate temp :)
We've already had to warn you before about not breaking the site guidelines, and unfortunately it seems like you've been breaking them a lot. That leads to getting banned here, and I don't want to ban you, so would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended from now on? The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
IIRC, it was the third-highest scholarship tier they offered at the time (started Fall 2003). Tuition + mandatory fees + a few hundred a month (forgot the exact number) credit for Waterview rent. No stipend, though, that's only in the two highest tiers.
If it's any consolidation, it's been like this for at least 20 years. I'm 33, and when I did well enough on PSAT to become National Merit Finalist, I got similar amount of inbound mail from colleges. By the end of the process I had 4 banker boxes full of the stuff. It's very similar to what happened last year when I went for a car quote...
I ended up taking a full ride at a state school. While the school wasn't the best experience and I've gotten some "why didn't you go to an ivy league school?" comments, not having any college debt has been worth it. I don't regret the decision at all.
Guess the world for the high-SAT scorers and the rest of us is pretty different.
The identically formatted materials are because there are a dozen or so higher ed marketing companies that serve most of the market, and they are themselves competing with each other in a similar way, converging on a handful of templates they've tested to be the most successful. Once one of them comes up with something more innovative, the very next marketing cycle will see their competitors mirror it.
I checked the box and had a steady stream of mail from colleges I had no interest in.
In addition, it wouldn't surprise me if there are some sort of merit and/or other type scholarships for folks wanting to go back to schools. You just have to look.
That said, SF residents can get a Associates from City College for free. Elsewhere I know less about it, but there community colleges are still very cheap in some places.
My email is in my profile if you have any questions about Vanderbilt. (Biomedical Engineering class of 2010)
> Most of what I get is useless
That’s basically a fact of life these days. Better get used to and learn to cope with it.
Then there's about 100 second-tier very, very good schools that are similarly clustered. After that, something like 1000 schools are good, solid schools with little tangible difference between number 900 and number 300.
Ordinal rankings throw all of this out the window, and students & families end up worrying about choosing between a school in the top 25% or top 27% etc.
Non-ordinal ratings instead of rankings would be better, and better show this sort of clustering, but it would still ignore extremely important differences. For example, there may be a school that's fairly middle-of-the-road, okay but not great on an all-around basis, but their proximity to New York City makes their performing arts programs a stand-out top 5 program in the region. But all you get from a US News ranking is that they're rated #768.
Cambridge for astronomy would be one example.
And I recall back when I started work there where only four or so good UK Uni's to do Compute related degrees at.
This is often a problem with Ordinal variables, they don't convey the true distance between the "observations". Think of class rankings in High School: The Valedictorian and Salutatorian (2nd place) almost always have practically identical academic records: 4.0 GPA, challenging courses, etc. The difference can come down to hundredths of a point, or the fact that #1 took 8 AP courses while #7 took 7 AP courses and 1 Honors course. There isn't much meaningful distance between them.
I don't think most people interpret rankings like this. It's generally understood that the distribution of large ranked lists is not linear, and that there's more room between the entries at the top than in the middle.
I would hope a K-11 education even in the US would prepare you to realize that a ranking of schools must be subjective.
The problem isn't that ratings exist. It's that relative rankings are hyped so much among perfectly good schools. I don't care if the University of Washington is five schools above or below Georgia Tech. I just need to see that both are "great," and a little breakdown of their pros and cons.
Maybe even get a VOIP number for the same reason.
https://studentsearch.collegeboard.org/about-your-data
If you previously opted-in and change your mind opting back out is simple.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/is-harvard-leading-on-... Is Harvard Leading On Black Applicants? By ROBERT VERBRUGGEN National Review November 5, 2019 10:39 AM
MBA programs were disproportionately common in the advertisements I received. I can guess a few possible reasons. I fit a demographic profile (returning to school after 8+ years in industry). MBAs are profit centers for universities. Business programs ought to be able to optimize business things like advertising reach and market segmentation.
Most email blasts were short-lived, but a few schools still email me on the regular, a year after I finished the program I originally took the test for.
The application and admission process is difficult to navigate and not transparent, and ends up disproportionately impacting the chances for immigrants, minorities, and first-generation college students of finding a good match.
Our hypothesis is that by surfacing available aid earlier, in smaller amounts ("microscholarships"), and allowing students to explore less-well-known colleges, and opt-in to having their information shared, engages students throughout their HS career, pushes them to achieve academically, and nets them a college better suited for them. We found this to be the case over the last 5 years, given our 300+ college partners and usage in 3 of 4 US high-schools.
Our college partners find spending their acquisition budget with us to access (opted-in) rich student data to find interested students that match their profile results in a greater ROI than spending their budget on spamming students and parents with glossy brochures.
(We've also found there to be opportunities to help transfer students navigate the transfer process, and help enrolled undergraduate students from dropping out.)
By the way, we're hiring.
But it costs the institution nothing: the recruited, unqualified applicant pays an application fee which presumably completely, or more than completely defrays the cost of dealing with the application (a significantly under qualified applicant can be removed from the pool very quickly, at low cost).
The applicant not only pays the cash fee but invests some actual time (and emotional energy)*
Really little different from popular contemporary business models such as Amazon not paying for the time spent in loss prevention queueing, Macdonalds and Walmart paying "wages" so low that their employees need government financial support, not paying drivers wait time or door dash et all stealing their employees' tips. Now these colleges are shifting the externality onto people they don't plan to do business with!
* Perhaps the new common application reduces or eliminates the wall clock time?
While I think this practice should definitely have an opt-out, I'm not really sure if I think it's a problem that colleges market themselves aggressively. This is probably hard to rigorously study, but my hypothesis is that application rates (particularly to better schools) are going up because applicants are realizing that there is extremely little financial cost to being rejected from a "stretch" school relative to the total cost of a degree and substantial upside, should one get in.
Conversely, if each applicant simply applied to a single school (the final accepting school), it could produce the same attendance result, but with a 100% acceptance rate for every school.
This makes me think that acceptance rates are fairly meaningless.
"To boost our exclusivity" seems like a poor answer.