University of California at Los Angeles and University of Arizona researchers released data this week that examined how colleges and universities often steer clear of poor communities and communities of color in off-campus recruiting.
While most colleges and universities present themselves as institutions open to a diverse range of students, regardless of race or socioeconomic status, research gathered by EMRA Research (Enrollment, Management, Recruiting & Access) shows a decided trend in off-campus recruiting.
Utilizing digital data collection techniques that “webscrape” public websites, EMRA discovered that off-campus recruitment, such as visits to high schools and college fairs by representatives of colleges and universities, prioritized wealthier communities and White communities and often overlooked poor communities and communities of color.
“We felt the debate to access in higher education focused mostly on students and often students’ deficiencies. That’s because we have so much data on students, but we really don’t collect much data about universities’ priorities,” said Dr. Ozan Jaquette, one of the study’s principal investigators.
“We wanted to start reframing this debate about college access to make it shift away from this blame on student deficiencies to consider are universities’ priorities contributing to this?” added Jaquette, an assistant professor of education at UCLA.
To do this, the research team spent 2017 compiling and analyzing data. Python, a general-purpose programming language, collected recruiting data by web-scraping the admissions websites of colleges and universities. Data was collected from 49 public research-extensive universities, 49 private universities and 42 private liberal arts colleges. They investigated the entire websites of the institutions, searching for URLs containing data on off-campus recruiting events such as college fairs, group travel visits and individual visits to high schools by representatives of an institution.
This initial report spotlights 42 colleges and universities. Graphs and maps are included in the report, covering schools ranging from Oberlin College, Smith College and Baylor University to Emory University, the University of Alabama and the University of Kansas.
