Giving Compass' Take:

• Tech companies are set on selling mass data collection to colleges, touting that they can help institutions attract and retain students. 

• What are the inefficiencies of data collection in this way? What has been successful or effective in student retainment?

• Learn more about higher education outcomes: why we need student-level data.

Big Data will save you. Versions of that sales pitch echoed through the cavernous exhibit hall this week at one of the largest trade shows for tech companies selling to colleges.

Though each of the more than 275 companies exhibiting here at the annual meeting of Educause claimed a unique spin, the typical refrain mixed inspiration and fear, and went something like this: “Our tech system will help your students finish their degrees and save them (and you) money,” and “Oh by the way, if you don’t use something like our product, you won’t retain enough current and/or recruit enough new students to stay in business.”

Bold, half-foot tall letters on one company’s display claimed its software had helped a college bring in more than $1 million in new student revenue and led another to a 53 percent increase in new students. Another exhibit promised “no more silos” in the data that colleges routinely collect in digital form.

If colleges actually bought all the tools sold here, just about every move made by students and professors in physical and virtual campuses would be tracked and analyzed in the name of efficiency. And the vision expands beyond that, as the vision is to create data profiles of students before they even arrive on campus and to continue data tracking long after they’ve graduated.

Read the full article about selling colleges on mass data collection by Jeffrey R. Young at EdSurge.