What can a student’s “demonstrated” interest tell you about their enrollment odds?
Reported by Inside Higher Ed, more and more institutions are evaluating a student’s “demonstrated” interest by their online behavior, including email open rates, click throughs, time on site, etc.
But more than just creating better enrollment forecasts with this additional predictive data, potentially institutions could use “interest” as a weighing factor when making admittance decisions, believing that a more engaged student is one more likely to persist once enrolled.
And could that weighting incentivize students or even parents to try to game that system by opening and clicking through on every email just in case – well, yes, reports are that this is already occurring.
The takeaway? Using all available data to improve your financial modeling is great. But scoring digital activities as weight factors can be problematic and misleading.
May you continue to fight the good enrollment growth fight at your institution today, and we’ll see you again tomorrow.
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