Facebook, Google, and Amazon track users across the internet for more relevant ads, and now colleges have followed their lead.
“Educational data mining” has grown to gauge student interest and find out more about future student behaviors, according to Quartz.
With college rankings such as U.S. News & World Report accounting for acceptance rates as part of a school’s prestige, colleges sometimes attempt to game the system through limiting the acceptance letters they send or waiving application fees to get more applications.
Students have been applying to more colleges than in the past, and tracking students online helps colleges decide how serious a student is about attending. If a school thinks a student has it as a low priority, it can withhold an acceptance letter and concentrate on high-interest students.
That data mining can save colleges time and resources to engage students truly interested. It’s similar to Facebook showing ads that it thinks will be relevant to a user. Both parties benefit through the user buying something he or she wants and Facebook selling more advertising.
It could also help a college find its niche. Rebranding itself, or fostering a reputation as a certain sort of school, could stabilize or increase its enrollment for the future and could make it easier for prospective students to find the school.
However, exploiting that niche could hurt a school’s diversity. If engineering students flock to a school and crowd out philosophy and finance students, the student body could lose something value in a shift to homogeneity.
The technology, like retail data mining, could also face criticism for its invasive nature. Especially if colleges comb through social media postings to disqualify students, one mistake could cost a prospective student a chance at his or her dream college. The design and assumptions of the software can influence admissions in unintended or negative ways and without the input of faculty, administrators, and students.
It’s also another step forward in changing higher education from an institution to an industry. The “corporatization” of higher education can bring in new thinking that benefits a college, but sometimes, it’s a diversion from its educational mission.
College admissions haven’t been ideal, especially for elite colleges. Educational data mining could benefit students of all sorts by matching and satisfying students with their colleges. That could drive down transfer rates and increase graduation rates. It’s too early to see the results.
However a college conducts the data mining, transparency and openness from administrators on how it uses the technology can go a long way toward maximizing benefits while minimizing costs.
