How Colleges are Using Big Data to Determine Admissions

How Colleges are Using Big Data to Determine Admissions

Recent media reports are highlighting some very interesting trends in college admissions. Big data is playing a larger role than ever. A PBS report detailed processes by which Ithaca College determined which applicants would get into its school. While the college still looked at SAT and ACT scores, another important factor was social media – not just number of friends but also pictures and other entries.

Colleges are not looking for a popularity contest, they are using data science to crunch all this information and help predict which students have a greater chance of succeeding in school and graduating.

The idea here is not to be exclusive or exclusionary – colleges are already that by default. The idea is to increase graduation rates by using big data to determine which students are more likely to stick it out. And, even in its infancy, the process is showing solid results. At Ithaca, more students are sticking around after their freshman year. The data for subsequent years is unavailable because the program is so new.

The benefit is good for both the school and the students. When a student cannot or will not do the work necessary to continue in school, it hurts everyone. The school has invested in a student that it has lost, and another student who might have done well was passed over for a kid who didn’t have what it takes to make it. Worse, now the kid who quit has debt with nothing to show for it, and the school has an empty spot in its sophomore class that should have been filled by an advancing scholar.

According to PBS, Ithaca has been collecting data since 2007, but conclusive trends could not be immediately established. First, because so many fewer data points existed. In 2007, there was no real social media dominating youth culture, and very few college kids had phones that were constantly connected to the ‘net. Today, the data points and collection opportunities are much bigger and more integrally connected to the prospective student’s day-to-day life.

Combining the ever-increasing data points with the trends noted by years of data collection and mining has allowed colleges like Ithaca to draw solid conclusions and make actionable predictions. And, as noted previously, they are beginning to get it right on a regular basis.

Another telling factor for the schools, the students most likely to score well in the data analysis are also least likely to be bothered by the data collection. Most assume the schools are looking at their social media profiles anyway. So they are proudly posting about their hopes and dreams of attending Ithaca – or other schools – as well as what they plan to do when they get there. That sort of pre-enrollment buy-in is just one of many nuanced factors colleges can use big data programs to mine when considering a candidate or applicant.

Without big data, this sort of program would be unthinkable, and the benefits enjoyed unreachable. Since the success enjoyed by Ithaca, other universities are looking into the practice and beginning their own data collection and processing. Give it a few years and what’s “new” now will likely be as common and ubiquitous as the entrance exam.

David Milberg is an investment banker from New York.