How colleges aggressively use big data to target potential students
When Hayley Tessler signed up to take the SAT a couple of years ago, she almost immediately started receiving about five or six emails and postcards a week from prospective colleges. “Honestly a lot of them were colleges I never even heard of, so a lot of them I threw out,” she said.
By the time she started receiving acceptance letters, the pitches took on a new urgency. One college sent her special glasses and a viewfinder with her offer of admission and followed up with a calendar and a copy of a book written by the college’s president. “When I opened it I thought it was kind of unnecessary,” said Tessler, 18. “I felt like this little book is not going to make me change my mind about coming to your school. I saw this as a waste of money and time.”
Needless to say, Tessler chose a different school, the University of Miami, which as it turns out, sent her the least amount of mail — although she did get a folder and a postcard of the Miami skyline from the school. And that other college is still sending Tessler surveys asking her why she chose not to attend, she said.
Many high school seniors and their families will spend the next few months pulling out whatever stops they can to impress their top choice colleges. But what most may not realize is that colleges can get desperate too.
“It’s like the hardest of hard core direct marketing for any weight loss product or any cooking device,” said Andy Lockwood, a Long Island-based financial aid counselor. He cautions students to be wary of any marketing a college sends, particularly before they’ve applied. “Just understand that their job is not to admit you, they’re job is to get you to apply,” he said. “That’s a very common conversation we have, literally almost every week.”
College marketing is more sophisticated and intense
The urge to market to students and families has only intensified over the past several years as technology made it easier for schools to reach more students and demographic shifts upped the pressure on colleges to fill their classes. What’s more, colleges now have more sophisticated ways of collecting and responding to data about students, so they can target them in more specific ways than ever.
“For students this can be a little dizzying,” said Peter Farrell, the managing director for enrollment services at EAB, a Washington, D.C. -based company that works with colleges on their applications and admissions strategy.
Access to student data has helped to make those efforts more sophisticated, said Mimi Doe, a Boston-area college consultant and the co-founder of Top Tier Admissions. “The amount of marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, direct to kid, as well as paper marketing, changes the more they know about the student.”
A school’s approach and messaging will change depending on who the student is, where they are in the application process and how they engage with communications from the school, said Emily Bauer, the managing director of program marketing at EAB. Often, schools that work with EAB start with a minimal amount of data they buy from standardized testing companies and then EAB will create a landing page where students can provide more specific information about themselves.
At the beginning of the process, EAB may help colleges design marketing strategies to appeal to specific groups. For example, students from under-represented groups, such as first-generation college students, may respond better to text messaging. Making their families feel comfortable in the process may also be a priority for this group, so the materials will focus on engaging the family as well.
