Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You? Off-Campus Recruiting by Public Research Universities

Abstract

Scholarship on college choice largely focuses on how students search for colleges but less is known about how colleges recruit students. This article analyzes off-campus recruiting visits for 15 public research universities. We Web-scrape university admissions websites and issue public records requests to collect data on recruiting visits. Analyses explore the similarities and differences in off-campus recruiting patterns across universities in the study. Results reveal socioeconomic, racial, and geographic disparities in recruiting patterns. In particular, most universities made more out-of-state than in-state visits, and out-of-state visits systematically targeted affluent, predominantly White localities. We recommend that future research should exploit new data collection methodologies to develop a systematic literature on marketing and recruiting practices in higher education.