Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Colleges track demonstrated interest online

Colleges Mine Data on Their Applicants
To determine ‘demonstrated interest,’ some schools are tracking how quickly prospective students open email and whether they click links
By Douglas Belkin
Wall Street Journal
January 26, 2019
Some colleges, in an effort to sort through a growing number of applications, are quietly tracking prospective students’ online interaction with the schools and considering it in deciding whom to admit.

Enrollment officers at institutions including Seton Hall University, Quinnipiac University and Dickinson College know down to the second when prospective students opened an email from the school, how long they spent reading it and whether they clicked through to any links. Boston University knows if prospective students RSVP’d online to an event—and then didn’t show.

Schools use this information to help determine what they call “demonstrated interest,” or how much consideration an applicant is giving their school. Demonstrated interest is becoming increasingly important as colleges face a rising number of applications and want to protect or improve their yields—the percentage of accepted applicants who enroll.

Gregory Eichhorn, vice president for admissions at Quinnipiac in Hamden, Conn., said the technological sophistication of the analysis has ramped up considerably.

“If we ask someone for an interview, we look at how they respond, how quickly they respond or if they don’t respond at all,” said Mr. Eichhorn. “It helps us make a decision.”

At Seton Hall University, in South Orange, N.J., students receive a score between 1 and 100 that reflects their demonstrated interest, said Alyssa McCloud, vice president of enrollment management. 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).

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This is actually an area that I deal with as part of my work. We usually refer to it as engaged audience. Pretty much every email you receive that isn't a personal communication is tracking your behavior.

Here's a sort of layman's version of what is going on and the limitations.

When an email is sent out through a system that can do tracking a unique ID is added to it. It could just be an integer (e.g. this is email #431312). That unique number is associated in the database with your email address.

A 1x1 pixel transparent image is included in the email. When the server serves that image to you, the link includes your ID and the timestamp from the server is the open time.

If images aren't loaded then the open isn't actually recorded.

It's not possible to know someone read the email (unless there's a quiz.) Click throughs usually stand in for reading even though reading is not required.

The clicked links work in a similar fashion. The links in the email actually go back to the website sending the email to record the click and are then redirected to the final location. You can see this happening in your browser's address bar.

Event registrations happen online and some organizations use the same system for email and event registration, so the data goes into the same database. People running events often have tools integrated into those systems to check in people at events and thereby know if they attended.

It's actually unusual to be able to track the habits of a specific person on a website. If you don't log in, then the website is likely only able to track behavior to IP address or as an aggregate. The exception would be sites where you create an account and log in. For example Amazon knows exactly when and what I'm doing on that site as long as I'm logged in. So if you create an account on a college website, then they could get a history of your activity.

The demonstrated interest sounds exactly like an engagement score which is sort of a hot topic right now. People want to concentrate their efforts on a highly engaged audience. This is one of those 80/20 or four quadrants things.

I think this behavior is less about scoring students and more about prioritizing resources. Schools use basic data analytics tools to optimize work isn't really a lead that gets the clicks.

Thanks for sharing another great article, Bostonian!

It is good to raise awareness of this type of admissions consideration, increasing transparency of how one's college application may be evaluated. That said, online clicks may be a poor proxy for genuine IRL interest in a particular institution.

For example, students with limited access to technology may delay in clicking and may make fewer clicks. Those who have demanding time commitments such as work, babysitting siblings while parents work, volunteerism, etc, may also earn lower scores on their "engagement" when that is based on clicks.

Meanwhile other students could easily game the process with multiple clicks. Those with college coaches, mentors, etc may begin to click a lot without genuine interest... and may amass high scores for "engagement" at multiple institutions simply by being coached to click. If this occurs, then an institution's yield may not increase (as they may offer admissions to students who've signaled high interest to multiple institutions).

Hopefully the engagement score based on clicks is a small consideration among other factors.

The college admissions game is ever-changing. Once it's widely believed that selective schools want X, lots of applicants try to display quality X, depriving X of some of its meaning. Then schools look for another attribute, and when this becomes known, the process repeats itself.

Well said.

Like fashion. Once they have exhausted the cycle, they go back around again.

My daughter took the PSAT recently, and the bumph from colleges has started rolling in. The majority of the stuff she gets doesn't actually provide information about the college. Instead, she opens the envelopes to find chirpy letters asking her to "take our personality survey! " to see "how well you'll fit in" at college X or university Y!

Their goals are transparent, even to a 14-year-old, and she throws all those letters away immediately. She has kept a couple of mailers that provide actual information about actual programs that interest her, however.

I honestly wish all of this would just stop. Failing that, which I know won't happen in the foreseeable future, I just counsel my kids as best I can. I will say that these personality survey letters are nurturing a newfound and healthy cynicism in my daughter. This is probably not what college X and university Y intended.

If my son hadn't ticked the "leave me alone" box on his PSAT form, he might very well have logged on with his personal ID code and filled in all kinds of nonsense just to mess up their analytics. But he was showing signs of cynicism at a young age, and it is now full-blown in 11th grade.

I think that two different types of college tracking are being mixed up here - the article is about tracking applicants, not those to whom random, unsolicited emails were sent.

This type of tracking is not new. If you search for it, I think you'll find some articles from a few years back (maybe 5-10 years ago) about admissions committees considering if an applicant had logged onto their portal. In one case that I recall, it was a good college, but one that tippy top students might use as a "safety". The committee noted that a tippy top student had submitted their application, but never bothered to go onto the college portal to confirm all items were received, and had no other interaction with the school other than submitting the application.

The committee either rejected or waitlisted the student. Such stories serve as a good reminder to students to follow up on their applications, and if they are asked to log onto portals, send a brief update after January 1st (MIT comes to mind), etc., they should do it.