Colleges Use Facebook Ads to Target Applicants, Parents, and Lawmakers

The ads showed up in the feeds of thousands of Facebook users, and the timing of the sponsored posts — less than two months before the University of Virginia’s application deadline — was no accident.

“UVA offers one of the best values in higher education,” read one post last November, seen by both potential students and their parents. Below the words were the Cavalier colors of orange and navy blue.

The students might have assumed each post had appeared because of their Google habits. But it was in their feeds because the University of Virginia has spent about $10,000 to send targeted Facebook ads to various groups, including prospective students, parents, donors, employees, and state lawmakers.

Other colleges, too, have spent millions of dollars on targeted Facebook marketing, one advertising agency told The Chronicle. It’s an emerging battleground in higher education’s competition for students, whether at elite public flagships or for-profit colleges.

UVa’s ads were fueled by the personal information, such as names and phone numbers, that students had provided on their applications for admission. Through the use of Facebook’s Custom Audiences advertising tool, that personal information was matched with user accounts, and resulted in microtargeted promotional ads or videos — sometimes strategically timed for the crucial period when an admitted student was deciding whether or not to enroll.

The approach is relatively cheap and often effective. At the same time, it has raised concerns among privacy advocates.

“I don’t think that’s what students expect, and even less so, the parents,” said Joel R. Reidenberg, a Fordham University professor who teaches courses in information-technology law, privacy, and cybersecurity.

UVa’s chief marketing officer, David W. Martel, said the university promotes itself through Facebook because, “as a leading public university, UVa has a tremendous story to tell.”

“And in today’s cluttered information landscape,” he continued, “it can be difficult to break through to interested audiences.”

UVa has a published privacy policy that mentions the possibility of Facebook ads but does not specifically warn about the potential data mining of applications for admission.

Elsewhere, Georgia Institute of Technology officials also acknowledged using student information from admissions applications for Facebook ads. Laura Diamond, a spokeswoman for Georgia Tech, said that was done “only during the last academic year, to evaluate the platform.”

She said applicants are not told they might be contacted through Custom Audiences ads, but the university has received no direct criticism about the practice.

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The Berklee College of Music, meanwhile, is touted on Facebook’s business-advertising website as one of its marketing “success stories,” with Custom Audiences and other Facebook tools providing the Massachusetts institution with benefits that included a “40% increase in applications for the Music Therapy graduate program.”

Berklee, too, uses student-application information to precisely target its Facebook ads, along with email addresses that may have been submitted by people curious about the college’s offerings.

“Someone who has asked for more information may see an ad saying ‘Start your application today’ or ‘Berklee will be holding auditions in Dallas next month,’” said Magen Tracy, the college’s associate director of digital marketing and social media, in an email to The Chronicle. “Someone who has already started an application might see ‘Complete your application’ or ‘Early Action deadline approaching.’”

Regarding student-privacy concerns, Ms. Tracy said the college limits its targeted advertising to people who have “voluntarily given us their information in order to receive admissions-related communications.”

“Our intention is to get people the information they’ve asked us for on their preferred channels,” she said, “not to sell them something they weren’t looking for.”

‘The World We Live In’

Facebook’s Custom Audiences tool is under fresh scrutiny because the social-media giant has acknowledged that the targeted ads were weaponized during the 2016 election campaign by Russian groups that sent political ads to voters in key battleground states, such as Michigan and Wisconsin.

While Facebook has struggled to manage the postelection public-relations fallout, Custom Audiences continues to be a key marketing strategy for all sorts of advertisers, including business and colleges.

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a digital-rights organization, said colleges’ use of Custom Audiences is “not an admissions Russia-gate.”

“But the fact is,” he continued, “that reputable colleges and universities are engaged in basically the same practices that these Russian operatives used to change the outcome of the election.”

“Clearly the stakes are lower, whether or not a student goes to UVa or George Washington University,” he said. “But the practices are the same, and they’re inappropriate.”

Legally speaking, experts said, colleges may use student information for Facebook ads, even with no disclosure to families.

“They haven’t promised not to do it, so they can do it,” said Benjamin Edelman, a Harvard Business School professor who teaches about the economics of online markets. “That’s the world we live in.”

A Facebook spokesman referred The Chronicle to the social-media network’s Custom Audiences terms and conditions, which require advertisers to “have provided appropriate notice to and secured any necessary consent from the data subjects” whose personal information will be used to create targeted ads.

UVa officials responded to questions about privacy concerns by stating that the university “values privacy and maintains publicly posted privacy policies on institutional sites and digital platforms.”

“The policy includes language about Facebook,” wrote Mr. Martel, the university’s vice president for communications and chief marketing officer, in a statement provided to The Chronicle.

The privacy policy on the university’s website does not specifically mention data mining from admissions applications. It does cite “Facebook Conversion Tracking” and states that “third parties may use cookies, web beacons, and similar technologies to collect or receive information from your website and elsewhere on the internet, and use that information to provide measurement services and target ads.”

In email correspondence with UVa, obtained by The Chronicle through public-records requests, Facebook wrote that it uses a “hashed matching process” to scramble the data provided by colleges and match it with users’ Facebook accounts. Spencer Swan, identified as a Facebook agency strategist, wrote that the social-media network does not use such personal data for any other purpose.

“It actually never touches our servers,” Mr. Swan wrote in a December 1, 2016, email.

Sandra Rand, vice president for marketing at OrionCKB, a Boston-area advertising agency, said her firm had about a dozen higher-education clients who use Facebook marketing, and those clients have “conservatively” spent $40 million since 2014 — much of it on Custom Audiences ads.

Ms. Rand said the colleges she works with, most of them for-profit institutions, would prefer not to be identified publicly. She defended targeted ads as a way to make advertising more relevant to consumers.

“On a personal level,” she said, “I prefer it to be creepy and big brothery, because I’m actually getting advertising that I pay attention to.”

Early Results Pleased UVa

Simply browsing a college’s admissions page can make sponsored ads for that university pop up in your Facebook feed.

Some colleges equip their admissions pages with a “pixel” that recognizes when a Facebook user visits. The colleges can then buy targeted ads to send to that prospective student, even if they don’t know his or her name. Berklee College officials confirmed they have used pixels with some of their Facebook ads.

At the University of Virginia, public records show that administrators debated adding a pixel to the admissions website. Anthony P. de Bruyn, a university spokesman, said the college ultimately decided against doing so.

Records also show that UVa sent targeted Facebook ads to its own employees. Mr. de Bruyn said that “faculty and staff are key audiences. This is about sharing news and information with a community that may not otherwise see it.”

UVa’s chief marketing officer, Mr. Martel, noted that Facebook users have the option of hiding a sponsored post, and can choose to no longer receive such posts from a particular advertiser.

“Audiences are interested in this content; we’ve had a positive response to these sponsored posts, by way of readership, social engagement, and video views,” he wrote in a statement. “The university has not used Custom Audiences to directly ask prospective students to apply or enroll, or to solicit gifts from donors. Instead, we sponsored stories and videos about the university with a goal of informing interested audiences about what’s happening at UVa.”

Mr. Martel said the university had not decided whether the ads, begun as a pilot project last year, would continue. “We are evaluating both its performance and how best to proceed for this academic year,” he wrote.

Privately, records show, UVa officials were at times excited about the ability of Facebook ads to reach specific users — at a relatively affordable price.

In a February 17, 2016, email, Jeannine C. Lalonde, associate dean of admission, wrote: “On our first boosted post, we spent $50, and our list found 1,566 of our [early action] admits. 1,110 of them viewed the video we boosted. Of the 10,000 parent names we had, we got 4,400 matches.”

“Not bad for $50,” she wrote.

A few weeks later, Mr. Martel wrote: “The underlying premise of this work is brilliant.”

Along with the thousands of UVa-sponsored posts targeting students and parents, records show that more than 100 posts appeared in the Facebook feeds of state lawmakers in Virginia.

The lawmakers received an “affordability video,” an update on the university’s research into the relationship between the immune system and brain function, and a post about the U.S. News & World Report college rankings (which rank UVa as one of the 25 best colleges in the nation).

“I have seen some ads in my Facebook from higher-education institutions,” said R. Steven Landes, a Republican state delegate who is chairman of the education committee in Virginia’s House of Delegates. Mr. Landes said he couldn’t recall which colleges specifically had appeared in sponsored posts, but he wasn’t bothered by such targeted ads, which he said come with the territory of being a public official. Colleges, he said, are going to reach out to him.

“Whether they do it on Facebook or a member of the Board of Visitors or a president of the university contacts me, it’s no different,” he said.

But Mr. Landes said he was less comfortable with colleges that mine admissions applications for information that could be converted to Facebook ads — unless it’s made clear to families that this could happen.

“There ought to be a way for the student or the parent to say, ‘I don’t want you to have that information, or use that information for promotional purposes,’” he said. “People ought to have a choice.”

Michael Vasquez is a senior investigative reporter. Follow him on Twitter @MrMikeVasquez, or email him at michael.vasquez@chronicle.com.