Senator Harkin’s investigation found that schools typically paid as much as $150 for each lead. When costs of leads are coupled with the costs for admissions officers and financial aid advisors, some schools report that they spend more than $3,000 to enroll a new student.
Lead generators are a hidden but almost universal player in the admissions process at for-profit schools. In seconds, their algorithms can estimate a consumer’s likely future behaviors, whether the question at hand is if a person is likely to repay a bill or if he or she will follow through on a college application. For-profit schools pay for this data to maximize the return on their marketing dollars.
“For-profit schools [benefit from] the latest digital tricks to snare people into their high-cost tuition net,” says Jeff Chester, director of the Center for Digital Democracy and an advocate working to combat the practice of lead generation. “Stealth data tracking is designed to steer people into making decisions that will cost them thousands of dollars. Few consumers and certainly not many of the ones looking for an education know that they are really being tricked when they fill out various forms on sites about going to college. They don’t know that the data is sold to the highest bidder.”
Companies such as eBureau, the developer of the eScore, assesses the potential value of 20 million Americans every month. According to the New York Times, a spin-off of eBureau scores 110 million people just as frequently. Those ratings tell companies how much a consumer is likely to spend on a particular product category over his or her lifetime. In the future, the integration of payments on to the smartphone platform will further increase how much companies know about individuals.