Hello,
My son is going through the college admissions process now (rising senior). He has signed up for email lists of several colleges. Many of these same colleges claim strongly that they don’t track demonstrated interest.
My son is very technically saavy and showed me some emails that he recently received from well known colleges. Within each of the emails are several innocently placed hyperlinks, with the goal of providing more information. While this is admirable, I was surprised to see hidden underneath all of these hyperlinks are dynamic URLs and cookies.
A screenshot of recent emails that my son received from Penn, Harvard and Yale is provided below in the dropbox link. Hovering over the hyperlink shows the very long URL that is generated. It is clear that the URL is used as a means to track. Does anyone know what the colleges use this information for? Is it for testing the effectiveness of each marketing campaign? Or do they track down to the level of each individual student? Why would they claim that they don’t track when they clearly do? Does the admissions office of each college keep track of individual level responses?
While I understand that some colleges clearly place value demonstrated interest, I was surprised to see that Harvard, Yale and Penn do this. Many of the kids don’t know that they are being watched when these emails are sent out. Lack of a response or delayed response on these tracking URLs might give admissions officers a clue on whether a student was “truly interested” or not, especially in the case of a highly sought after candidate. Would love to hear your thoughts.