How Colleges Use Big Data to Target the Students They Want

This is part two in a three-part series on the role of Big Data in the college-search process. You can read part one on colleges’ year-long pursuit of students here. Check back for part three on data in an era of demographic change.

A decade ago, Saint Louis University found itself in a precarious situation. About half of the university’s 8,600 undergraduates were from Missouri and Illinois, and the demographic forecast for the Midwest looked bleak: the number of high-school graduates from the region was projected to drop by nearly a third by 2028.

So the university started to dig deeper for prospects in its backyard, purchasing more names of prospective high-school students from the College Board and ACT and targeting those teenagers with marketing materials. At one point, admissions officials at Saint