The College Board has long reigned over the high-stakes student-recruitment business, but several competitors are vying for a greater share of it. Among them is CollegeVine, which runs a popular college-search website and helps institutions connect with prospective applicants online. On Monday, the company released a new data tool that, it claims, shows the scale of a potential drop in the number of student names that colleges can license from the standardized-testing giant due to recent changes in its business model.
The estimated decline over the next few recruitment cycles? Nearly 40 percent, according to CollegeVine.
Vinay Bhaskara, the company’s co-founder and head of college counseling, said enrollment leaders will need to rethink their recruitment strategies as a result: “I don’t think they see this, for lack of a better word, second enrollment cliff that’s staring them in the face a couple of years down the line.”
To understand what Bhaskara is talking about here, let’s review a bit. As The Chronicle reported in April, the way colleges connect with prospective applicants is on the verge of an overhaul: Recently, the College Board shared details of forthcoming changes to its Student Search Service, which colleges have long used to purchase information about teenagers they want to recruit. The first thing to know is that College Board’s SAT Suite of Assessments, including the SAT, PSAT/NMSQT, and PSAT 10, will all be administered digitally starting in 2024. In the post-pencil-and-paper world, College Board officials have said, state privacy laws will bar the organization from selling access to the names and other personal information of students who take in-school exams offered for free by their district (known as school-day testing).
That means teenagers who take only in-school exams — and who don’t opt into Search some other way, such as by taking the SAT on a Saturday — won’t end up in the big ol’ name-buy bucket like they did in the past. To account for that change, the College Board is creating a second recruitment bucket, called Connections. Starting this fall, students who take a school-day exam will be asked to share their cell number with the College Board, which will then text them a link to download an app through which they can get their scores and see some general advice about applying to college. Test takers can then opt into Connections, which will include profiles of colleges. And students can choose when, or if, to share their personal information with a particular institution.
In a recent interview with The Chronicle, Paul Weeks, vice president for recruitment and enrollment solutions at the College Board, downplayed the impact of the changes on the organization’s traditional recruitment service: “Search is very strong,” he said. “Search isn’t going anywhere, certainly not in the near term.”
Bhaskara said that’s not quite right: “The thing that allows them to get away with saying, ‘No, Search is still strong’ is that there’s a lagging effect here. If you look at the kids who are going to enroll in college in fall ’24, all of those kids have already taken a PSAT or have taken a school-day SAT in 10th grade or 11th grade.” They’re among the last of the pencil-and-paper cohorts, though.
According to CollegeVine’s projections, the impact of the changes to Search will grow larger over time, as more and more students will have taken only digital exams. The company estimates an 11-percent drop in Search availability of names for the fall of 2025, relative to the fall of 2023; for the fall of 2027, it projects a 38-percent drop. The potential impact will vary from campus to campus, Bhaskara said: “For a college that’s got a small endowment, where it’s kind of an operating-at-break-even sort of place, this is setting up for them to be a financial apocalypse. For other schools, it’s going to be, you know, business as usual. And then some schools are somewhere in between.”
Recruitment strategies vary from campus to campus. Therefore, the potential impact of the changes in Search surely will vary according to the states and regions an institution tends to purchase names from. CollegeVine projects that for the fall of 2027, there will be 54 percent fewer names available for students living in California and 37,000 fewer Search inquiries from Hispanic students in Arizona.
I don’t think they see this, for lack of a better word, second enrollment cliff that’s staring them in the face a couple of years down the line.
An important fact to consider: Even in areas where most colleges remain test optional or test free, many students, especially affluent ones, will continue to take (and re-take) the SAT on Saturdays and opt into Search. But what about students who participate in school-day testing but see no reason to take the SAT a second time? Bhaskara anticipates that changes to Search will have significant consequences for underrepresented students and colleges striving to enroll more of them: “Generally speaking, the school-day test is where more students of color, more low-income students, more rural students, more students who face structural challenges in their communities — that’s where they are taking those tests.”
Enrollment leaders who are curious (and, perhaps, in the mood for some heartburn) might be tempted to try out CollegeVine’s new tool — the College Board Search Impact Calculator. All they have to do is enter some basic information about their institution, including how many names it buys through Search, as well as its rates for applications, admission, and yield, the percentage of admitted applicants who enroll. Entering those numbers will allow them to see a projection of how changes to the name-buying service could affect the number of inquiries from students it receives, as well as estimated changes in first-year enrollment and net tuition revenue. (CollegeVine said its projections are based on various sources of data on test takers, news reports, and a survey of more than 20,000 users of its website; read more about the methodology here.)
The College Board declined The Chronicle’s request to share its own projections for how changes to Search might reduce the availability of student names available to colleges. In a written statement on Monday, the organization responded to the release of CollegeVine’s data tool: “CollegeVine did not engage with us to create these projections, and they are not using College Board data. Search remains strong with 2.1 million juniors, 1.4 million sophomores, and over 460,000 freshmen currently participating. We will continue to provide students with opportunities to learn about college options through both Search and the new Connections tool, which will specifically engage those students participating in in-school assessments.”
College Board officials have described Connections as a complement to Search, a sensible workaround in an age of tightening restrictions on the use of student data, and a meaningful way to give test takers more control over their personal information. But the success of Connections as a recruitment tool will depend on how many teenagers choose to engage with colleges through an app on their phone.
“Connections is a very different product offering than Search,” Bhaskara said. “It’s essentially a set of display ads. … First and foremost, it’s not super-clear that students will even stick around on the app once they have access to their scores. Even if the student does for some reason stick around, you’re going from 100 percent of those students being available for licensing within Search to whatever the click-through rate is going to be on those display ads, at best maybe 2-3 percent. Given those two elements, Connections can’t really do much, if anything, to offset the decline in Search participation.”
It’s too soon to say that enrollment leaders are about to witness the end of student recruitment as they have long known it. But the College Board’s revamp of Search represents a major shift in how the industry has long operated. And CollegeVine represents something relatively new: A LinkedIn-esque platform allowing students to create their own profiles and accept requests to connect from colleges that are interested in enrolling them.
“We tried to borrow as many mechanisms as we can from how this generation of students interacts online,” said Steve Patrizi, chief revenue officer at CollegeVine. “They don’t love seeing ads on their phone. They don’t love getting unsolicited email, if they even check their email, or getting a random piece of direct mail. They connect. That is their interface on all their social platforms, right? Connecting. Two parties should be consensually connecting with each other. That’s where the magic happens.”
Forging those connections is a major industry. And it’s becoming even more competitive.
