Tracking Software for College Admissions

We all know that Amazon and Google track our internet activities – we see ads targeted at us based on our searches. It’s a brilliant marketing strategy but kind of creepy that there’s a cyberworld out there that knows more about us than our families and friends. Well, college admissions officers just entered the secret tracking world, and we’re starting to learn what they’re looking for and what they’re doing with the data.

The top colleges and universities in the world compete to enroll the brightest students with the most potential for success. They accept more students than they could actually enroll just to ensure that they have a full freshman class every fall. Having only a finite amount of scholarships and grants to offer students, colleges want to know if they are your safety schools. In other words, why bother making enticing offers to students who will never enroll because you have your heart set on your reach colleges.

Colleges are now checking your web-browsing habits to see how many times you’ve visited their website and how many pages you checked out. With tracking software on their college website, they can see all the pages you visit and how long you spend on each page. They also map your geographical location, among other things. By analyzing all of the data collected by your browsing behavior, colleges create an “Affinity Index” to estimate your level of interest in attending their college.

Not surprising, colleges are also getting access to your family’s financial history to see if you have the funds to help them reach their revenue goals – in other words, will you be able to pay tuition without their aid? They have been doing this for decades when choosing which high schools to send their recruiting teams to.  You’ll rarely see any of the top 200 colleges at college fairs in low-income schools.

Whatever happened to colleges admitting students who are the smartest and most talented? With an undergraduate degree costing almost $300,000 at private universities, looks like the colleges are squeezing middle and lower class students from obtaining a bachelor’s degree. Tracking students’ web browsing and financial histories should be illegal.  I can only imagine how they’ll be watching students’ online relationships, social media, and other private spaces if we don’t stop them now.

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