The way that many colleges connect with prospective applicants is on the verge of an overhaul. Last week, the College Board shared its plans to provide a way for admissions offices to connect with high-school students via mobile app. Starting this fall, the new service, called Connections, will supplement the organization’s existing Student Search Service, which colleges have long used to obtain information about teenagers they wish to recruit.
As a result, institutions must soon navigate a new frontier of student engagement. And a nation full of standardized-test takers will have yet another place to hear from colleges — if they choose not to tune them out.
College Board officials say that the new service will give students more control over their personal information. In an age when standardized testing is going digital, restrictions on data collected online are tightening. “Data privacy has become a major concern for many states and districts, and for lawmakers,” Paul Weeks, vice president for recruitment and enrollment solutions told The Chronicle this week. “We wanted to be proactive in developing a privacy-forward solution. This is better for students, better for schools. We’re trying to balance that with what higher ed has asked for.”
For anyone who’s been stuck in a board meeting for the past few decades, here’s how things have worked for a long time: High-school students can opt into the Student Search Service when they register for or take the PSAT/NMSQT, SAT, or Advanced Placement exams. Each year, nearly 2,000 colleges buy access to, or “license,” troves of student data stored in the College Board’s vast database. Institutions set their own parameters to find, say, Black students from the Southeast who scored at least 1200 on the SAT and who have expressed interest in engineering, or women from the suburbs of Seattle planning to choose pre-med majors. Colleges obtain test takers’ home addresses and, usually, their email addresses, too. And then institutions can bombard those students with brochures, letters, and electronic come-ons. Though inefficient for colleges and often annoying for students, it’s a time-tested way to expand an applicant pool.
What’s changing: Before, there was just one bucket for colleges to draw from (Search). Now, there will be a second (Connections). The difference between them has to do with where students take exams. Starting this fall, the College Board’s in-school assessments — the PSAT/NMSQT, SAT, and PSAT 10 — will be administered online. Students who take one of those exams will be asked to share their cell number with the College Board, which will then text them a link to download an app called BigFuture School, through which they can get their scores and see some general advice about applying to college. Students will then be able to opt into Connections, which will be loaded with profiles of colleges that are — you know it — interested in them.
By opting into Connections, students will not be transmitting any personally identifiable information (PII) to colleges. All that an institution will know about them at that point is which “audiences” they fall into: when they will graduate from high school, which of 29 geographies they live in, and the range in which their test score falls. Colleges will be able to share general messages with students from a specific audience: “And then the student controls it from there,” Weeks says. “They get to scroll through and investigate that institution without turning over their PII.”
Students can then choose when, or if, to share their personal information with a particular college. Doing so will turn on the ol’ recruitment fountain. (The College Board plans to limit the number of messages an institution can send a particular to 10 or less, Weeks says.)
We want this to have personality and to have the personality of your institution. That’s what’s going to get students to want to interact with you.
All of this will be a big change for colleges, which won’t be able to search for prospective applicants in Connections the same way that they do in Student Search Service. In a webinar last week, Kevin Corr, a strategic-initiatives consultant for the College Board, explained how searching by audience in Connections will work. “We’ve always talked about, Hey, when you go into Search, you want to start with the most narrow focus that you can think of, and then go wide,” he said. “Connections flips that paradigm on its head a little bit. We’re going to start with a broad audience. And then when we get to our communication plans, that’s the point where we’re going to narrow down our messaging.”
What will students see in Connections? “There will be text, there will be photos, there will be ways for you to to leverage materials that they already have,” Corr said. “We want this to have personality and to have the personality of your institution. That’s what’s going to get students to want to interact with you.”
It’s too soon to say how colleges will adjust to these changes. “You’re going to have to buy access to a much bigger audience, which may or may not be cost-efficient as Search,” said Jon Boeckenstedt, vice provost for enrollment management at Oregon State University, who offers some thoughts on the College Board’s plans here.
Whether teenagers will really want another way to receive plaintive pitches from colleges remains to be seen. The College Board says that more than three-quarters of students it surveyed recently said hearing from colleges via mobile app would be “very helpful.” If you know any teenagers, though, it’s easy to imagine that many of them will delete it or ignore it after getting their test scores.
Either way, the College Board’s plans will shake up the business of student-recruitment. For many years, Search was a pay-per-name operation (current price: 53 cents). Then the organization introduced subscription-plan pricing, with eight tiers, for the 2022-23 admissions cycle. It plans to sunset the pay-per-name option at the end of August. The subscription plan for 2023-24 will be tiered by the total number of Search records and Connections audiences (One access level, for example, gets you 200,000 of the former, and 60 of the latter, for $105,000). Got that?
Students who take a Saturday administration of the SAT — which will remain a pencil-and-paper exercise, for now — will be able to opt into Search as usual. The same goes for those who create a College Board account or register with BigFuture, its college-search site. Currently, two million juniors are in Search, 1.4 million sophomores, and 450,000 freshmen, according to the College Board.
“Search is very strong,” Weeks says. “Search isn’t going anywhere. Certainly not in the near term.”
But wait, a sharp enrollment leader might ask, won’t some students end up in both buckets, say, by taking the PSAT/NMSQT, and later taking the SAT on a Saturday?
The answer is yes.
“We understand that duplication … is something of concern,” a College Board official said during last week’s webinar. The organization, he added, is working to “minimize any complication there,” and would provide further details soon.
One thing is for sure: The next recruitment cycle won’t be for the faint of heart.
Eric Hoover
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