How to Own a Yacht: Collect Student Data and Sell It. | Missouri Education Watchdog

How to Own a Yacht: Collect Student Data and Sell It. | Missouri Education Watchdog:

How to Own a Yacht: Collect Student Data and Sell It.

inShare

Selling personal student information from data mining can buy you a yacht. So what’s the problem?

Here’s a nifty way to make a small fortune: Set up a service selling personal student information to colleges to use in their admission procedures or to establish a college’s ranking.  Do you still believe education reform is really ‘for the kids’?  From Inside Higher Ed and Predicting Where Students Go:

A trio of senior college enrollment officials gave a peek into how they decide which students to recruit. The process now involves number-crunching students’ demographic and economic information — not just sending chipper ambassadors to every nearby high school, mailing glossy books to students’ homes and relying on gut instincts.

The discussion, during a session at the annual meeting of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, was one of many to take place here about how to hunt for students. The search for students involves a web of data points, formulas and consulting firms that perhaps few parents and students are aware of.

Don Munce, the president of the National Research Center for College and University Admissions, or NRCCUA, offers a modeling service meant to predict which high school students are most likely to enroll at a particular institution. The center sells data on students to college admissions officials.

Munce moderated the panel of three college admissions officials who use his predictive modeling service. One of the college officials joked he bought so many student names from NRCCUA that he probably paid for Munce’s yacht.

What does the above link detailing the web of data points reveal?

Now, it’s easier for recruiters to use millions of high school students’ personal information to target them for certain traits, including family income or ethnicity, or even to predict which students will apply, enroll and stay in college.

These tactics, which are beginning to resemble the data-driven efforts used by political campaigns, have already prompted internal discussions at the College Board. Advisers to the College Board — which has data on seven million students it sells to about 1,100 institutions each year – met early this summer and talked about doing more to police how colleges can use the board’s student data, but a committee decided not to change the current policies.

The new tools to micro-target students could help some colleges attract tuition-paying students amid a shrinking pool of high school graduates.  A scramble — first for students to enroll and second for students who don’t need institutional financial aid – has forced college officials to rethink how they fish for students and put more pressure on them to find students of a certain kind.

“Everybody wants to go to the magic island of full-pay students, but it’s rapidly shrinking real estate,” said Bill Berg, an enrollment management consultant at Scannell & Kurz.

Did you catch the reference to The College Board, now headed by the architect of the Common Core How to Own a Yacht: Collect Student Data and Sell It. | Missouri Education Watchdog: