“Colleges Mine Data on Their Applicants,” The Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2019. In deciding who to admit, colleges track when you first came to their website, and consider how long you take to respond to their emails and whether you follow links they give you.
Tracking is the next new thing, or the last old thing. Somebody can see a lot of what you did and when, and use that for their own purposes. While this seems okay on the normal consumer context, does it seem unseemly in a college application? Or is this just harnessing the available information and applying it with diligence?
Hopefully, the colleges don’t share this with each other. They wouldn’t do that, would they? They’re competitors, sort of. Although a software provider sells to hundreds of schools.
But do students know they are being tracked? Is any of this private, or is it all factual information about metrics around a relationship between a person and the college?
So, Information, certainly. Not Compliance, because there doesn’t see to be a law against it. Governance? Does it go to an ethical issue that a school is doing this without disclosing it to their applicants? Is it different that it’s done with technology rather than an admissions officer’s feeling about the depth of an applicant’s interest?
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