What is the goal of this service?
The goal of this service is to give Colleges and Universities a way of better understanding recruiting trends. This information is offered as a downloadable csv file, as well as offering time series charts for each school, and bar chart visualizations for each zip code. This makes it easy to integrate the information with other sources of data, or get quick visualization of key regions for your institution of higher learning. This makes for an easy and flexible monthly report, which should provide you information on recruiting.
How can I ensure I’m not giving away information?
For each month, only institutions of higher learning who have uploaded their dataset before the report date are eligible to receive that month’s report. This ensures that only actively participating institutes of higher learning may access your data for a given month.
Furthermore, using outlier analysis, institutional reporting research, and other tools to detect potentially fake data, institutions of higher learning which are found to be likely to be giving fake reports are suspended or permanently banned from our service. We will publicly notify all participating parties if this is if we are considering a ban, along with our evidence for why we think a ban is justified. We understand the trust you place in us, and we aim to ensure that we keep that trust.
What data is required to upload?
Our goal is to keep the data uploading process as simple as possible, and so that data uploaded is entirely compliant with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. We take that very seriously, as we are sure you do as well. We simply want the number of applicants and prospects by each United States county and recruitment type in a csv file format. We have an example csv file available on our website. Please ensure that county names are spelled correctly. For any further questions regarding uploading data, please feel free to contact us.
To qualify, the applicant and prospect data for the previous month must be uploaded by 11:59 pm central daily time on the 10th of the month. The new month’s report will be available the next day at 6am central daily time.
What are recruiting types?
This service offers different reports for both incoming freshman, transfer students, and graduate students. Incoming freshman includes all applicants and prospects who have not previously attended an institution of higher learning. Transfer students include all prospects and applicants who have a semester or more of enrollment in an institution of higher learning. Graduate students include all students who have a bachelor’s degree, and are specifically applying for a graduate program. At this time, our service does not differentiate between masters and Phd applicants. If any of the student applicant types are not applicable to your institution of higher learning, that is fine. Just upload the csv file with the student type you recruit for, and your institution will only receive reports relevant to you.
What are the definitions of applicants and prospects?
Applicants are any prospective student who has officially submitted an application. For monthly reports, this includes all applications where the submission date is between the first and the last day of the prior month. The Prospect student type include all potential recruits who have explicitly expressed interest, and filled out a form expressing that interest. This does not include those who are part of a mailing or other recruitment related list who have not expressed interest. That form, or associated data if the prospect is known through a recruitment list, should include a home mailing address. For both prospects and applicants, we only want the number of prospects and applicants per county and state. This ensures that any student’s individual privacy is not violated. If the county level data is not known for certain prospects, that is acceptable. An unknown column is available.
Who has access to this data?
Only institutions of higher learning may access this data. Up to four accounts per institution of higher learning are available with the basic subscription. Additional viewing accounts may be purchased. All institutions must keep in compliance with their own data reporting in order to be eligible to view other institution’s data. We promise to never sell this data to third parties, or to let other third parties view the information for any reason.
Is this FERPA compliant?
Yes. By only collecting county level data, there is no way to identify individual students, ensuring their privacy. This is informative enough to be able to see changes in recruitment and interest at a granular level, allowing for detailed analysis that is beneficial to schools, but not enough that an individual prospect or recruit could potentially be identified.
Do I have to upload the data?
Due to many differences in CRM’s and other database reporting, as well as issues related to data privacy, we do not support automated extraction from your data repository at this time. If there is confusion regarding how to generate a correctly formatted dataset from your recruitment data repository, please contact us. We have many data experts, who can walk you through data aggregation and sorting steps if needed. In most cases, most report generation can be automated, saving you and your analysts valuable time. Many of us have worked in both SQL and Salesforce platforms, and would feel comfortable giving advice on how to generate an appropriate report if we are given some information about the data schema.