Facebook and privacy

Oops, this blog post isn’t about Facebook at all!  Here goes:

Records and interviews show that colleges are building vast repositories of data on prospective students — scanning test scores, Zip codes, high school transcripts, academic interests, Web browsing histories, ethnic backgrounds and household incomes for clues about which students would make the best candidates for admission. At many schools, this data is used to give students a score from 1 to 100, which determines how much attention colleges pay them in the recruiting process.

Admissions consulting companies charge schools tens of thousands of dollars a year to collect and analyze the data of millions of students. In emails reviewed by The Post, employees of Louisville-based Capture Higher Ed urged school administrators to hand over all data they felt comfortable sharing.

“We love data, so the more the merrier,” one of Capture’s consultants wrote in a 2017 email to the admissions director at UW-Stout.

The more the merrier!  And did you know that The New York Times will sell subscriber data about you?

Here is the full article, via the excellent Samir Varma.

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