“Colleges Mine Data on Their Applicants”

Campus visits, interviews and carefully crafted thank you letters are no longer the only methods of demonstrating an interest in a specific college or university. It is now important to make a concerted effort to demonstrate an online interest in a school due to the fact that colleges are beginning to collect data based on the time an applicant spends reading college correspondence or clicking school-related links. As the number of annual applicants at the nation's top colleges and universities continues to increase, schools are trying to determine which students are truly and authentically interested in enrolling as undergraduates.