Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You? Off-Campus Recruiting by Public Research Universities
Ozan Jaquette
About the research
Award
NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship
Award Year
2017
Institution
University of California, Los Angeles
Primary Discipline
Sociology
Unequal access to college is a persistent barrier to social mobility. Policy discourse often casts access inequality as a student achievement problem (e.g., the “achievement gap”) or a student decision-making problem (e.g., “under-matching”). An alternative explanation is that some universities do not place a high priority on access for low-income students, suggesting that access inequality is an institutional preferences problem. While formal university policies to increase access (e.g., “holistic admissions”) may be public relations efforts, knowing which schools and communities are targeted by university recruiting efforts can yield concrete data about university enrollment preferences. Many universities advertise off-campus recruiting events on Twitter. This project streams data from Twitter to collect data on off-campus recruiting events. Specifically, I collect Tweets from hashtags and handles associated with undergraduate admissions, including Tweets from regional admissions recruiters. The analysis sample consists of 40 public research universities. After cleaning and processing, recruiting data will be merged to secondary data (e.g., high school, community college, and community characteristics) in order to investigate which communities are favored by admissions recruiters and which communities are being ignored.
About Ozan Jaquette
Ozan Jaquette is an assistant professor of higher education at UCLA. He studies the organizational behavior of colleges and universities, with a focus on the nexus between finance and enrollment management. His empirical research program analyzes how colleges and universities change behavior to grow enrollment from desired student populations. One line of research analyzes the causes and consequences of out-of-state enrollment growth at public universities. An emerging line of research uses “data science” methods of data collection to understand which students colleges actually recruit.