Kaydin Ford '24
In recent years, the college admissions landscape has begun to adopt a new facet to their applicants’ profile, an aspect that goes largely unknown by high school students and their families.
Some colleges and universities are now tracking their applicants “expressed” or “demonstrated” interest in their schools. This newfound practice involves colleges monitoring and analyzing prospective students’ “engagement” with their school through different online sources like social media platforms, email, university websites, and virtual tours or alumni sessions set up through the university.
Colleges are investing in this practice because they desire to gauge the level of “genuine interest” and commitment a prospective student has in their school. As the college admissions process becomes more and more ridiculously competitive, with more and more applicants to each school, universities are looking for simple ways to cut down the time it takes to go through an applicant’s profile. By tracking expressed interest, schools can easily predict their likely yield rates- the percentage of admitted students who choose to enroll in that school- and base admissions on that demographic accordingly.
Multiple methods are employed by different colleges and universities to track expressed interest online, such as social media monitoring, i.e. tracking how often and much applicants interact with the social media profiles of the university or their associated groups, website analytics (tracking applicants’ behavior on the school’s website like pages visited, duration of visit, and frequency of return visits), as well as student interaction with email correspondence and virtual event attendance.
Tracking these interactions provides colleges insight into prospective students’ enthusiasm and commitment to their school, supplying them with supposedly more accurate data for their admissions profile.
As most incredibly busy high school students aren’t aware that the colleges they’re applying to are tracking these interactions, many don’t pay active attention to the time they spend on university websites and often ignore the barrage of admission emails they receive on a daily basis. This practice turns the seemingly victimless act of clicking an unwarranted email into the trash into a decision that could impact where a student spends their college experience.
As so many high school students are unaware of this new piece of their application profile, it’s unfair to continue using the method in official student applications unless schools announce to all prospective students that they will be tracking “demonstrated” interest to level the playing field.
However, as this trend continues to evolve and colleges don’t show any sign of discarding this method, colleges and universities need to strike a balance between leveraging digital data to inform their admission strategies and ensuring transparency and respect for their applicant’s privacy. As more and more students become aware of this tactic, hopefully they will keep considering how their digital presence might influence college admissions, probably in new ways.
SCOURCES:
https://thecollegecurators.com/list-of-colleges-that-consider-demonstrated-interest/
https://www.appily.com/guidance/articles/applying-to-college/demonstrated-interest-in-college-admissions
https://www.ivywise.com/ivywise-knowledgebase/resources/article/ten-ways-to-demonstrate-interest-in-colleges-over-the-school-year/