As colleges look for any advantage in the fierce competition to enroll students, hundreds of institutions have turned to algorithms to increase enroll

Enrollment algorithms are contributing to the crises of higher education

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2021-09-17 03:00:08

As colleges look for any advantage in the fierce competition to enroll students, hundreds of institutions have turned to algorithms to increase enrollment—especially for using scholarships to convince prospective students to attend. In a series of interviews, representatives from three different algorithmic enrollment vendors independently noted their goal was to “build a better mousetrap.”

It makes sense that so many colleges, over 75%, use data analytics for enrollment—it’s where the money is. Beyond financial stability, enrollment analytics are necessary for institutional planning, such as preparing sufficient student housing and ensuring course availability.

Yet, as I learned more about how these algorithms are used to award financial aid in higher education, I became quite concerned. The webinars, documents, and academic studies I saw all suggest the same deeply troubling problem: these algorithms intentionally reduce scholarships, and in doing so, may contribute to the crises of student loan debt, college dropout, and racial inequities. If it is not already clear, when industry representatives talk about using enrollment algorithms to build a better mousetrap, the students are the mice.

My review of the vendors, such as EAB, Ruffalo Noel Levitz, Rapid Insight, Capture Higher Ed, and Othot, discovered at least 700 higher education institutions that procure algorithms to allocate scholarships to entice enrollment. While universities have previously used scholarships to persuade students, these algorithms are more effective than their manual predecessors. A recent paper from researchers at the University of Washington shows how implementing this algorithmic process at a large unnamed public university (I’ll let you figure out this riddle) improved out-of-state applicant yield by 23.3%. A simulation study from the Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC) found similar results, and vendor claims echo these statistics. One case study from Othot claims that its analytics enrolled 173 additional freshmen at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) without a corresponding rise in scholarships.

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