Each day, admissions counselors at Northern Vermont University receive emails alerting them to who has been visiting the college’s website. The messages include which pages prospective recruits have browsed, how many visits they’ve made, and any personal information – names, emails, addresses – these visitors have previously provided to the school.
Faced with an ever-shrinking pool of potential applicants, college admissions officials are increasingly turning to tracking software to hit enrollment targets. These technologies, proponents say, have the potential to help colleges in a constricted market more easily identify interested recruits. But prospective students browsing college websites in the privacy of their homes may not realize they’re being watched in return. And some worry trackers could further distort a process that already favors the affluent.
VTDigger visited the websites of every college in the state using Privacy Badger, a browser add-on that blocks third-party trackers. The plug-in flagged cookies placed by advertising and consulting firms on at least nine college websites – a majority of Vermont schools.
“It seems like the majority of colleges are tracking students, and the tracking becomes more prevalent and sophisticated every year,” said Laurie Weingarten, an independent college admissions consultant based in New Jersey.
At NVU, a public college with campuses in Johnson and Lyndon, officials have contracted for a second year with Capture Higher Ed, a Kentucky-based firm and leading company in the industry.
The company’s services helped NVU drive up enrollment in its new business industry program last year, said Dean of Enrollment and Marketing Mike Fox, because NVU officials were able to deliver targeted information about its offerings to prospective applicants. And school officials say Capture has also helped them be more strategic in how they spend recruiting resources.
“It helps us to know which students we should concentrate on, so that we’re not spending time on students that aren’t showing interest,” said Sylvia Plumb, a spokesperson for the college.
Tracking technology works like this: upon visiting a website, a small piece of data, called a cookie, will be installed on a user’s computer. That cookie will allow the website to recognize that user, and compile a history of their browsing habits on that site over the course of subsequent visits.
Companies like Capture will also match information prospective applicants voluntarily hand over – say, when they fill out an inquiry form – with previously anonymous visitor data. That means admissions officials can build detailed behavioral profiles on students before they even apply.
These technologies aren’t cheap. NVU will pay Capture $110,000 this school year for its services, according to a contract provided by the school.
Privacy advocates and independent college admissions counselors say they’re sympathetic to schools that turn to these technologies. The stakes are high. Admit too many applicants, and your school can find itself scrambling to book motels to accommodate an unexpectedly large freshman class. Or – as is increasingly the case – admit too few who ultimately choose to enroll, and your institution can find itself in existential trouble.
“Filling a class is much more art than science. And that can be very nerve-wracking for both admissions officers and students,” said Sara Collins, education privacy policy counsel for the Future of Privacy Forum.
And the companies selling these services are well aware of these anxieties. In fact, that’s their pitch.
“Let’s face it, working in this $11 billion higher education recruitment market is challenging. In fact, the industry is experiencing what economists call the law of diminishing returns,” a narrator in a video on Capture’s homepage tells the viewer, noting that advertising budgets at schools across the county have exploded at the same time as college enrollment has steadily declined.
Cookies perform a slew of essential functions on the internet, many of which are innocuous. They enable website visitors to log into their user accounts, for example, and give website administrators information about site traffic patterns.
At Middlebury College, where the privacy plug-in flagged a tracker from Pardot, a leading marketing automation firm, a school spokesperson said the company’s services allow the school to create a request-for-information form and send automated emails about programs of interest to prospective students.
“We do not use predictive models to score students,” Sarah Ray, Middlebury’s director of media relations, wrote in an email.
Schools typically disclose, in a pop-up, that they use cookies when a visitor first comes to their website. But the privacy and cookie policies that schools post online don’t always go into detail about which cookies their website uses, or give clear instructions about how to opt out.
NVU’s policy, for example, does list the cookies its website uses and describes – though briefly – their basic purpose. It warns visitors that if they “choose to disable cookies, there may be loss of functionality in the webpages you are visiting,” and links to a third-party website’s explainer on how to change browser settings to prevent tracking software.
At St. Michael’s College in Colchester, the school’s privacy policy gives people navigating the site the choice to opt out of targeted advertising from the college. That’s advertising – enabled by tracking software – someone would see for the school elsewhere on the internet after having visited its website. But the policy makes no mention of Capture Higher Ed cookies, which a privacy extension picks up on the St. Michael’s website. A spokesperson for the college did not respond to requests for comment about how it uses cookies in its recruitment efforts.
And critics say things get particularly thorny when this technology is leveraged to score or profile potential applicants, especially if those people don’t understand that the manner in which they’ve interacted with a school’s website could play into how aggressively they’re recruited or even whether they’re ultimately admitted.
“Make it clear what you’re judging students on. Students are going to assume it’s the four walls of the application,” Collins said.
And while tracking technologies have the potential to help schools better home in on those students most likely attend, they’re also built using assumptions some say could disadvantage certain types of students. Or simply be wrong.
For example, one of Capture’s products, its “behavioral engagement” software, tracks visitors to a school’s website and assigns an “affinity index” to prospective applicants based on their engagement with the site. That can help colleges predict who is most likely to accept an offer of admission.
“If they are not coming to your website, they are not coming to your school!” Capture explains on its website.
But that could disadvantage poor or rural students with uneven digital access at home. Or even privacy-conscious ones, who make an effort to surf the web using browsers or extensions that don’t allow third parties to track them.
“The way that technology is allowing colleges to make assumptions about students on a whole myriad of things is definitely concerning,” said Jill Madenberg, an independent college consultant based in New York.
Weingarten said she now tells her clients that colleges are likely tracking their online engagement with the school, and advises them to act accordingly. From conversations with admissions counselors, she thinks these technologies have helped colleges more easily meet their enrollment goals. But students who aren’t aware of how they’re being watched could lose out.
“Students who might be very interested in a college, but not realize that they should open emails, click on things that interest them on the website, might be at a disadvantage,” she said.
And of particular concern is whether this practice could even further skew the college admissions process in favor of the wealthy.
The same cookie that can tell an admissions official that a prospective applicant keeps returning to a page advertising the college’s new nursing program will, after all, also flag that they’ve lingered heavily on financial aid information. And Capture itself advertises one product, its “Envision Predictive Modeling,” by telling colleges it is the “first model to predict student-level financial aid, helping our partner universities increase net tuition revenue.” (NVU’s contract with Capture does not include this service.)
“I haven’t seen any evidence that schools are using this in an overtly discriminatory manner, but targeting wealthier students – if I’m a cash-strapped college, that’s what I’m going to do,” Collins said.
