<p>Exerpt from important new COHE article about how colleges are collecting more information about potential students than ever before, and are relying on computer models to determine who will apply, and who, if admitted, will be most likely to attend.</p>
<p>"As colleges become more like businesses, with strict bottom lines, quantifying a potential applicant's interest in a particular institution has evolved into a science. Almost all colleges are scrambling more than ever before to meet net tuition-revenue goals, increase the geographical and racial diversity of their applicants, and lower their acceptance rates by attracting more applicants.</p>
<p>Until about five years ago, only a handful of colleges used sophisticated statistical formulas. But now there are few four-year institutions that do not.</p>
<p>Many admissions officials now rely on databases like Bearhaus to help them recruit and enroll each new crop of students. The use of statistics is vital in admissions, but it forces officials to walk a fine line between meeting quantifiable objectives and preserving their commitment to judging each student on his or her individual merits, which numbers do not always capture...."</p>
<p>As recently as 10 years ago, colleges tracked only a few statistics, including the grades, test scores, and geographic locations of prospective applicants. They would wait until students applied, then plug that information into a simple statistical model to get a reasonably close estimate of how many of their admitted students would enroll. Closely tracking data on high-school sophomores and juniors before they applied was unheard of at all but a few institutions.</p>
<p>During the last five years, however, the way many students apply to colleges has changed drastically, making the models most institutions use much less reliable than before. The number of high-school students applying to college is the largest in history, and those students are applying to more colleges than their predecessors did. And some admissions officers now struggle to predict their enrollment numbers because more students are acting as "secret shoppers," giving no hint of their interest in a college until they submit an application.</p>
<p>The less admissions officers know in advance about their final enrollment numbers, the more challenges they are likely to encounter. If they admit too many students, faculty members and residence-life officials will complain about strained resources. And if fewer students than expected matriculate, trustees and administrators will bemoan the lack of tuition revenue.</p>
<p>Those pressures have led colleges to identify the students they want to pursue long before colleges receive the students' applications...."</p>
<p>After drawing up their initial list of thousands of names, admissions officials begin to track who responds to their materials, how they respond, and when they respond. Eventually, colleges separate students into smaller, more stratified groups. Officials assign high scores to prospective applicants who respond early and enthusiastically, signifying that such students are likely to apply and enroll. Just because certain students do not respond to a mailing does not mean that an admissions office will stop pursuing them, however.</p>
<p>In many cases, colleges aggressively pursue students with high test scores or good grades. Those students may receive telephone calls from professors in academic departments in which they have indicated an interest. Or a college might send them a T-shirt.</p>
<p>Such gestures are the result of strict calculations, but are supposed to give students the impression that the college cares about them personally. This practice is known in the industry as "mass customization...."</p>
<p>After all the prospective students have been funneled into their various categories and have submitted their applications, colleges have the closest possible approximation of the number of students who are definitely interested in their institution. At this point, the data is at its most refined, and the statistical models used to interpret it are most sophisticated.</p>
<p>These final numbers are the ones colleges are most likely to use unscrupulously.</p>
<p>(Some say) it is unethical for a college to use the data on phone calls, e-mail messages, and campus visits to make admissions decisions. Some students may not know that such information is collected, and others may not have the wherewithal to make campus visits, for example. Instead, he says, admissions officials should read each application carefully and judge the candidates on their individual merits. Only after officials have decided whether to admit or deny each student should they turn to the models to see what adjustments they need to make to the number and type of students they have accepted...</p>
<p>"It's like balls running through a pinball machine," says Mr. Lundquist(of Union College). "We put in our picks and run the model to see what the head count looks like, and if it spits out a number that's higher than our financial-aid target, or has too many engineers, or whatever, we have to go back and take some people out and put others in."</p>
<p>In recent years, Mr. Lundquist has had to make some difficult decisions. He has, for instance, told his application readers to pull out names of financially needy students that they had planned to accept. Why? The statistical model had predicted that Union's net tuition revenue would be lower than expected given the students he had chosen to admit.</p>
<p>Although no admissions official interviewed for this article would admit to using statistical models to make admissions decisions, one who asked not to be identified said he was fired twice for refusing to employ such criteria. The official, who has worked for two highly selective colleges, is now employed at a less competitive one.</p>
<p>"The pressure from the rankings guides and the need to meet tuition-revenue targets drives a lot of manipulation of data in ways that are very ethically questionable," he says. "If colleges have information that tells them how to tweak their admissions numbers to accept more students who enroll and can pay the full price, it's very hard to stop them from using it."</p>
<p>Other officials say that while they cannot name any institutions that use such tactics, they believe the practice is ubiquitous. That many admissions officials assume the worst of their competitors reveals the cynicism in the field. And as that cynicism grows, so does the appetite for numbers...."</p>