The End of All the Mail from Colleges?

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Bill Royall?passed away in 2020. Now, the traditional college marketing practices Royall brought into American homes might die off by 2027.?For many parents and students, who have been inundated with snail mail and email from?hundreds of colleges, that might be a good thing.

First some background: I met Royall in 2018 while reporting my book,?Who Gets In and Why. By then, he was mostly retired after selling his company twice for hundreds of millions of dollars. But back in the day, starting in the 1980s, Royall transformed direct marketing for college admissions offices by rethinking how institutions used the names of high-school students they licensed from the test makers (the SAT and ACT). Bill Royall, as you can read in Chapter 1 of the book (or in?this excerpt in?Fast Company), was the one who got colleges to buy more names of test takers to fill their admissions funnels with prospective students.

The selling of those names to colleges has been a big business for the College Board (which likes to remind reporters to use the term “license” instead of “sell”).?As of 2019, a student’s name was sold to colleges, on average, 18 times over her high school career, and some names have been purchased more than 70 times—all at a cost now of 53 cents. Search changed during the pandemic as fewer students took the tests, and during this past admissions cycle, the College Board introduced subscription-plan pricing on top of per-name pricing.

Now the student search business is about to change again—in a much bigger way that might be good for students, but maybe not so good for many colleges.

The change is coming because the PSAT is going digital this fall, followed by the SAT in the spring.

How test-taker names will then be shared with colleges depends on?where?students take the test. According to the College Board, 60% of all students who take the SAT do so during the week in school. When students used a No. 2 pencil to take the test, as long as the students opted into marketing when filling out the SAT questionnaire, their information could be?sold to colleges.

But once the test shifts to digital means and is administered during the school day, privacy laws in a bunch of states come into play.?As a result, the College Board can’t simply pass names on to colleges without essentially a second opt-in by students. So, the College Board created another search product called "Connections."

As Eric Hoover recently explained in?The Chronicle of Higher Education?(registration required), here’s what will happen:

"Students…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.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.”.

Students who take a Saturday SAT will be able to opt into the traditional search?like they did in the past. So, too, will those who create a College Board account or register with BigFuture, its college-search site.

As?The Chronicle’s?Hoover noted, students could end up in both buckets (traditional search and Connections).

Confused yet? Wait until college marketing offices start to work through this thicket next year.?The impact on how colleges recruit—and thus how much marketing teenagers get and then where they apply and enroll—could be significant.

I got a call last week from Vinay Bhaskara and Steve Patrizi. Bhaskara and Patrizi are at CollegeVine, a networking platform where high school students connect with colleges and counselors. They’ve estimated the potential drop in names, inquiries, enrollments, and net tuition revenue for colleges resulting from the change. They're sharing that data with institutions through a tool CollegeVine created called the?"Search Impact Calculator,"?which will allow colleges to see customized projections “based on their historic name-buying strategy and enrollment funnel dynamics.”

Overall, CollegeVine estimates somewhere around?a 40% reduction in the number of student names available to license by the time the high-school class of 2027 is in the funnel—which, by the way, is also the time of a?demographic cliff?in the number of high school graduates.

Get ready for a double-whammy colleges.

Estimate?is the key word there because no one really knows how students will react to this new marketing funnel.?Bhaskara and Patrizi told me their tool is based on data from who takes the test, opt-in rates, and a survey of CollegeVine users. CollegeVine is also not a disinterested observer here either since part of its business is connecting colleges with students.

Still, as even Eric Hoover put it in?The Chronicle, if you know teenagers “it’s easy to imagine that many of them will delete…or ignore” the College Board app after getting their test scores.

“If colleges don’t start diversifying their sources for student recruitment, this will have negative downstream impacts,” Bhaskara told me, especially for underrepresented students, who are more likely to take school-day testing.

Perhaps knocking the College Board from its dominant position in student search might not be a bad development.?For one, it will likely reduce the number of mailings and emails that students get from colleges they have no interest in applying to—or those institutions that have no intention of accepting them. It could also accelerate alternative ways of connecting to students, such as?direct admissions.?

No matter what, students and colleges should get ready for a major upheaval in how they find each other?not seen since the days of Bill Royall’s direct-marketing approaches in the 1980s.

Can Higher Ed Grow the Rural Economy?

The digital economy has been driving job growth across the country for much of the last decade-plus.

• But those jobs have not been evenly distributed nationwide. Nearly all of them last decade—some 96% of the tech jobs created—were in major metro areas.
• Even with the rise of remote work during the pandemic, rural and smaller metropolitan areas are lagging when it comes to tech employment.

Why it matters:?Tech jobs contribute to higher household incomes and have a ripple effect in rural communities.

• “A lot of people assume that tech jobs are limited to software development or programming but?there are actually many different types of tech jobs available,”?Brēyana Ray, director of the Rural Innovation Network, told me and Michael Horn on a recent episode of?Future U.?about higher ed’s role in growing the rural economy.
• Much of the economy, even in rural areas, is driven by tech jobs. Think of John Deere dealerships, which repair million-dollar farm machinery filled with dozens of computers, or manufacturing where most factory floors are now run by technology.

By the numbers:?A?study?last year from the Center on Rural Innovation found that based on national employment patterns, rural employers in non-tech industries should have about 81,000 more tech workers if they were hiring at the same rates as the national average for those industries.

• More than 40,000 of those missing jobs are in manufacturing alone.

What to do:?While there are many educational avenues to skilling up to those jobs, one road remains the four-year bachelor’s degree.

• But to get rural students interested in going to college, they must see a direct connection to the job market, Dawn Jordan told us. “They can snuff out nefarious intentions from a mile away,” said Jordan, who started at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio in 1997, but left short of a degree. Now, she has returned to finish her degree.

What else:?Many regional public colleges and small private institutions, which dominate in these rural areas and are critical to the local economy, are also struggling.

—The?Philadelphia Fed has developed?a tool?showing how much different regions depend on health care and higher education.

• The cities at the top of the dependence list are those you expect with well-known universities—such as Durham-Chapel Hill, NC.
• But the top of the list also includes a place 30 miles west of where I grew up: Bloomsburg, Pa. It is home to Geisinger Health and Bloomsburg University, which together make up 18% of regional income.

?? Listen to the entire?Future U.?episode?here.

?? DATA POINT

The latest on the state of the American college presidency?from the American Council on Education: the tenure of college presidents keeps getting shorter.

?? Full report can be found?here.

Until next time, Cheers — Jeff?

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