Are we providing equality of opportunity? An Interview with Ozan Jaquette

Ozan Jaquette is an associate professor of higher education at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. A great part of his research is focused on the college admissions practices of colleges and universities and their implications for racially and economically equitable access to higher education.  

Together with Karina Salazar, an assistant professor in the College of Education at the University of Arizona, Jaquette has examined important aspects of college access, looking closely at what is referred to as the “enrollment funnel,” and particularly at the practices of the purchase of leads from student lists, and school visits, which have proven problematic.  

In the wake of the recent affirmative action ruling, the issues shaping college access have become more urgent.  Recently, Salazar and Jaquette published an article synthesizing their research and examining the tools and strategies that can be used to address issues of racial equality and justice in college access. The article,  “To Dismantle Structural Racism in College Recruiting, Policymakers and Advocates Must Play Offense, Not Defense,” was published in the Education Trust Higher Education Equity Lens Blog.  We talk with Jaquette about the article and his research with Salazar here.    

UCLA:  In your latest research piece, you say that the movement for racial equality in college access is at a crossroads. Tell us a little bit about what you mean by this. Why do you think that is?

Ozan Jaquette: Affirmative action has dominated the policy discussion on racial equality and access to higher education for a long time. Affirmative action is a progressive policy, it was originally conceptualized as a policy to try to help equalize the playing field after historic and continued racial oppression. It's a progressive policy that tries to correct the wrongs in the system.

In the wake of the recent ruling by the Supreme Court, the crossroads I see is, do we want to sort of recreate affirmative action in the aggregate, trying to reestablish it as a progressive policy that sits atop a structurally racist system of college access. Or do we want to focus on the foundation of that structurally racist system?  To me, that is the crossroads that civil rights and higher education are at. Are we satisfied with a little bit of progressivism to try to write those wrongs that are fundamental in the system?  Or do we want to try to dismantle the racist structures that are the underpinnings of college access?  Our view is that it's time to take a more radical and structural approach because that is the one that's likely to be more practically potent.

What do you want people to understand about this research?

First, we need to change the debate around racial inequality and college access. The current debate centers around admissions. But admissions and access are not the same things. Our work is focused on college access and looks closely at what we call the enrollment funnel.  The enrollment funnel begins with the set of prospective students that are out there, which the university defines as leads, that they try to turn into applicants. And then which applicants are accepted, that's the piece that a lot of the policy debate is on. And then which accepted applicants enroll. Admissions is just one step in the college access process. Yet it gets 95% of the policy attention. College access is what we should care about. We should be focusing on racial equality in all steps leading up to the college access decision.

We need to understand that the vast majority of colleges and universities don't have a huge demand for admission. Ivy League colleges like Harvard and other similarly elite institutions are like the prom king who has so many dates to the prom they don’t know what to do. But that's just not the case for 95% of higher education and we shouldn't let the situation facing Ivy’s and similarly selective colleges drive the policy debate on college access. 

Most colleges and universities are getting their applicants and students by recruiting them and recruiting very heavily. The system is in some ways similar to those used by companies that try to sell patio furniture or other products. They have all these prospective customers out there that they'd like to sell patio furniture to, so some of them buy their contact information which they use as leads. Universities do the same. They also use another sales technique, they do off-campus recruiting visits to go to such and such high schools as another recruiting intervention.

And so, our work looks at structural inequality throughout the entire system of college access. When we study the interventions that colleges and universities have at their earlier stages in the enrollment funnel (leads and visits), we see vast racial inequality. In our research, we have consistently found that the lion's share of recruiting efforts for most selective colleges and universities is focused on trying to get students from affluent, predominantly white schools and communities. And that’s because that's where colleges and universities are spending the majority of their effort.

Can you tell us more about how the purchase of lists and college visits fuels inequality in college access?

The big purveyors of lists have historically been the College Board and ACT.  Students take their tests and these organizations sell their contact information to colleges looking for students. If a student doesn't take the test, they're not included in that underlying database. The rates of test-taking of exams like the SAT or ACT, or an AP test, differ by race and by class. So right off the top, there are racial and socio-economic differences in who's included in the student list process.

These lists cost money, and most colleges and universities have limited budgets, so the companies have ways to allow them to purchase the prospect profiles of some students, but not others. And those filters that universities can use, some of them are just very problematic. For example,  you can filter by desired zip codes. But we know that zip codes are racially segregated through decades of residential segregation. There is no equality of opportunity or rationale, for saying, “Let’s allow enrolling in such and such university to students from one zip code, but not another.” The ability to choose which zip codes you target is very racially and socioeconomically problematic. When you do that, you are implicitly agreeing to turn a blind eye to the decades this product has been used to exclude students from communities of color.  

Your research looks closely at what you call the “visit path” of colleges and universities. You argue that the visit patterns are based on the historical educational disenfranchisement of communities of color and amplify the effects of historical disenfranchisement. What do you see in your examination of the visit paths and what are the implications for college access?  

In our work, we collected data on the off-campus recruiting visits a college did, like a college fair at a hotel.  But most of the visits - about 80 percent of them - were to high schools. To do that, we looked at a few hundred colleges and universities and we scraped their admissions websites.  The sites would post things like, “We're coming to a neighborhood near you,” and it would list their upcoming recruiting visits over the next couple of weeks. 

Some of those lists of where they were visiting were incomplete, but we focused our analyses on a set of universities where we thought we had pretty complete data on where they were going, and ended up with a set of 15 public research universities, 15 private research universities, and 15 selective private liberal arts liberal arts colleges. Our analyses initially focused on the public universities. Interestingly, most of the visits the vast majority of public universities in our sample made were out-of-state rather than in-state. These are the universities that, in theory, are supposed to serve their state, but they devoted most of their visits to out-of-state schools.  And those out-of-state recruiting visits disproportionately focused on affluent, predominantly white communities, and disproportionately on private schools. 

Then we looked at the patterns for the private colleges and universities and they looked a lot like the out-of-state visit patterns of public research universities. They are all trying to get the same students -- children in rich households who go to an affluent public school, or a private school. The private universities are skewed even more towards targeting private school students.  But they're all trying to compete for this same affluent population of students. And that's where 90% of the recruiting effort goes. So, if we want to talk about increasing racial equality and college access, but we're going to ignore the obvious racial inequality in where colleges and universities spend the lion's share of their recruiting resources, what are we talking about if we're not even having a policy debate that looks at the actual problem?

In your research, you talk about geodemography and geodemographic filters. Can you tell us about those and how they influence or accelerate discrimination and disadvantage students? 

Geodemographic tools are one of the student list products. They are filters that allow you to say, “I want to target people with this value on this filter variable and exclude people with these other values on the filter variable.” What they do is enable colleges or universities to target prospects in ways that are not based just on the demographic characteristics of their neighborhood, or high school. For example,  there is a set of there's a set of filters that target high schools by whether they have a low, medium, or high out-of-state college-going rate.  There is another that just kind of categorizes all schools into clusters based on specific elements such as high rates of college-going. Colleges and universities can use those to target students in those clusters, but not others. 

When you target students by filters like rates of college-going, you are reinforcing racial inequality. Those past patterns of college-going and socioeconomic inequality are a result of historic racial segregation, a lot of historic structural inequality that has led to differences in college-going. When you use those differences to decide the opportunity for future students, you amplify historic inequality. And that's what these products are doing. 

These geodemographic tools are used to find customers to sell patio furniture and other products.  Whatever, it's patio furniture, who cares? But we are not selling patio furniture here. We're selling who has access to go to college. And so, we can't just use these technologies and analytics that were designed for the world of commerce and apply them to equality of opportunity in education. When we do, we introduce a lot of problems associated with those technologies. We need to ask, should we really take this approach that is utilized for the sale of patio furniture, or who is going to buy a Tesla, and then apply it to who gets access to higher education?

And that's what we're trying to do with our research. The College Board has been selling lists for 50 years.  And they have a pretty big effect on who goes to college. In those 50 years, no one ever studied lists empirically. That's not the fault of The College Board. That's the fault of the research community and the policy community who are continuing to ignore these aspects of college access. What we're trying to do is cast an eye towards these structures that affect who gets the opportunity to do what. Let's interrogate these structures and ask, is this what we want?

What are the implications of your research for higher education leaders and policymakers? What do you hope happens?

Maybe nothing will happen. But I tend to think what will happen is kind of like a slow burn. Years back, Karina and I were some of the first people to start systematically studying recruiting as our explicit focus. And it wasn't until five years later that the White House and Department of Education released a report on recruiting practices that cited our work. That's an example of people beginning to realize we should be looking at all the aspects of college access. 

I think there needs to be a change in our approach to the civil rights efforts for racial equality in college access. If the idea is to see how we can backdoor affirmative action through 1,000 cuts, I think that's a stale idea. We need people to take a different, more structural approach to lead the fight on the civil rights side. There are a lot of federal regulatory agencies that have the regulatory authority and the capacity to study these products that structure opportunities to college access. Researchers and others at think tanks and elsewhere need to be engaging those regulatory agencies, asking, can and should we regulate these industries? 

For example, I met with some lawyers for the Federal Trade Commission who were very thoughtful, and they told me they were unaware that the student lists lead generation industry even existed. They knew for-profit schools were systematic about targeting students. But they didn't realize that this other industry existed for public and private nonprofits called U.S. universities. That's not their fault.  That's the fault of higher education and policymakers and the research community not being focused on these aspects of college access. What I would like to see is more research, more policy debate in this area, and then engaging federal policymakers who want to think of constructive solutions and regulations when we observe inequality. 

We could ask, do some of the filters on student list products run afoul of the Federal Trade Commission's guidelines for fair practices?  Are there violations of consumer or credit regulations? Those are the areas where I think regulatory tools exist. And we need smart people to start looking into them. We need lawyers and other experts to take that on.

When you think about leaders in higher education, if they read your research, what do you want them to do?

I'd like them to interrogate their practices and compare the names that they purchase through student list products, to the names they don't, and compare the schools that they visit to the schools they don't. They need to examine all of their recruiting interventions. And they need to ask themselves, are we providing equality of opportunity? 

The article, “To Dismantle Structural Racism in College Recruiting, Policymakers and Advocates Must Play Offense, Not Defense,” is published on the Education Trust website here.