Episode 163: What High Schools Do Colleges Visit?

Welcome back to our new series entitled Looking to Next Year.  Today, we want to look at a well-known college recruitment practice and its ramifications.  That practice is the visiting of high schools by college admissions staff.  Maybe our discussion today won't come as a surprise to you; but, whether it does or doesn't, it's a sad commentary on the U.S. in 2018.   

1. A New Study

Just a few episodes ago, we quoted from an article in Inside Higher Ed by Scott Jaschik, and today we find ourselves doing that again.  This article is forebodingly titled "Where Colleges Recruit . . . and Where They Don't." 

Here is the story:

[F]or many colleges, reaching out to students in person at high school events is a key part of the recruitment process. And even for the [elite colleges], this is an important part of outreach and regularly results in applications from those who might not have otherwise applied. But where do the [colleges] go to recruit?

A new study being presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association suggests that these visits favor those who attend high schools where family income is high. And these high schools are likely to be whiter than the population as a whole.

Two of the researchers--Ozan Jaquette, an assistant professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Karina Salazar, a doctoral candidate at the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona--published a summary of their findings in The New York Times. (quoted from the article)

So, let's look at that opinion piece in The Times by Mr. Jaquette and Ms. Salazar.  They wrote about their findings, based on data from college visits--not any other kinds of student recruitment--made in 2017 by 150 colleges.  Here are some of those findings in their own words:

The clearest finding from our study is that public high schools in more affluent neighborhoods receive more visits than those in less affluent areas.

Only about a third of households across the country earn more than $100,000 annually, but nearly half of high schools receiving visits by private colleges and universities were in neighborhoods where average incomes were higher. Connecticut College visited neighborhoods with an average median household income of $121,578. Private colleges also disproportionately visited private high schools over public high schools.

Andy Strickler, dean of admissions at Connecticut College, said the school targets high schools that have historically provided students, or other schools that have a similar profile.

He said there was a good reason Connecticut College doesn't always visit other areas: "There's a trend for these students to stay closer to home for college." (quoted from the opinion piece)

I get that colleges understandably visit high schools that have sent students in the past or schools with demographic characteristics like those high schools.  I get that colleges need to recruit as cost-effectively as possible.  I get that kids in high schools in less affluent neighborhoods probably do "stay closer to home for college," for better or worse.  But I still am a bit disappointed by all of it. 

Nonetheless, let's not single out Connecticut College.  There is a chart in the opinion piece that shows that plenty of other colleges do exactly the same thing--that is, visit high schools in neighborhoods with higher median incomes than high schools they don't visit.  And, what's worse, lots of those colleges are public universities.  Let's look back at what Mr. Jaquette and Ms. Salazar write about that:

While public research universities visited rich and poor neighborhoods nearly equally when recruiting in their home states, they visited the same affluent high schools targeted by private colleges when recruiting elsewhere. Most public colleges also visited far more high schools out of state than in-state. The median income of areas where the University of Pittsburgh recruited out of state, for example, was $114,000, compared with $63,000 for areas that were not visited. . . .

The attention public universities lavish on wealthy out-of-state schools is