Jeffrey Anthony:

Welcome to the Inquiry Oasis, the University of Arizona College of Education's podcast, here in the heart of the Sonoran Desert. We bring you conversations with our esteemed faculty members and staff whose research impacts lives from Southern Arizona to the far reaches of the globe. We explore the transformative power of education in this border town where diverse cultures and ideas converge, weaving a tapestry of innovation with compassion and a sense of wonder. So, join us as we journey through the sands of curiosity, unearthing insights that enrich and inspire. Sit back and relax. As we invite you to dive into the inquiry oasis.

Dean Deil-Amen:

There has been lots of talk lately and historically about college and university admissions practices, but what about college and university recruitment practices? It's not just about students looking for colleges, but colleges looking for students. It's akin to a matchmaking process of sorts, according to Dr. Karina Salazar. Using her expert quantitative methodology skills, she takes us into a deep dive on these topics. Dr. Karina Salazar, who also happens to be a 2007 graduate of local Sunnyside school district, has drawn from her personal life experiences to motivate her research questions and take us on a fascinating journey to a better understanding of the geography and the technologies, college student recruitment behaviors, and routine practices in this arena.

We will learn more about how history, geography, and technologies of enrollment management potentially influence a student's life chances when it comes to higher education opportunity. Particularly whether and where students go to college. 

I am Dean Regina Deil-Amen, and I'm here today with my guest, Dr. Karina Salazar, who is an assistant professor in the Center for the Study of Higher Education in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and Practice. Welcome Dr. Salazar. 

Dr. Karina Salazar:

Thank you, I’m super excited to be here. 

Dean Deil-Amen:

All right. Let's go ahead and just get started. I'd like to ask you to describe for us three words that you think exemplify or reflect the research that you do? 

Dr. Karina Salazar:

Sure. Thank you. I think the first word that really exemplifies the work that I do is community. And so, you know, being rooted in committed to serving home is a very central value to the work that I do and, and to how I was raised as a first-generation Latina college student.

And so centering home goes beyond kind of giving back as an act of service, but it's really who I am and, and not just what I do. The second word would be perhaps equity. A lot of my work focuses on understanding the educational trajectories of students within underserved communities, and I often think about how underserved communities are so much more than the cards that they are dealt.

And so we, through the research, I think we have. I talk about a collective responsibility to providing equitable distribution of resources and addressing systemic inequalities for underserved communities in equitable ways. 

And then the third word is perhaps access or change. In the work that I do in, in the way that I disseminate the work, I think I'm just a, I'm a firm believer in the transformative power of public education, and so I try to really bring that across in the work that I do.

Dean Deil-Amen:

All right. Thank you so much. You know, my next question is about who you are and you mentioned centering home. Can you talk a little bit about who you are and what home means to you? What is your home and how do you incorporate that into the research that you do? 

Dr. Karina Salazar:

Sure, yeah. Thank you for, for asking that. So, I'm a local Tucsonan. So, I was born and raised here in Tucson. I grew up going, uh, and attending Sunnyside District schools on the south side of Tucson and it has just been a really, it has really shaped who I am and what I do in very transformative ways. And so home has always been here in Tucson. Um, but I think it's also partly, you know, who I am has also partly comes from I am a daughter of two Mexican immigrants who immigrated from Mexico with a sixth grade education. They came in their twenties, worked really labor intensive jobs all of their lives to provide their children with opportunities that weren't available to them in their home communities. 

And so, my commitment to home, I think emanates from their need to leave theirs. And so a lot of the work that I do around transforming educational opportunities, I think is kind of firmly rooted in ensuring that underserved communities have access and opportunities in ways that doesn't require them to leave home. 

Dean Deil-Amen:

Wow. I mean, clearly you are an invaluable resource. You're an asset to this university, to the local communities. I know you've mu you've won many awards with regard to the excellent work you've done in the local schools and communities with regard to college access.

Can you tell us a little bit more about the focus of your research? 

Dr. Karina Salazar:

Yeah, absolutely. So I study the recruiting practices of public universities and how that shapes whether and where students go to college. And so, a lot of the work around college access opportunity at the kind of federal and national levels tends to be focused on understanding, you know, kind of this one-way road of students looking for colleges and understanding that from the perspective of putting the onus on students, on families and in under-resourced K-12 schools. 

And so, my work kind of flips that on its head and tries to understand how the enrollment management behaviors, so the admissions, financial aid, recruiting and marketing behaviors of colleges and universities also shape whether and where students go to college.

Dean Deil-Amen:

All right. And how, how do they shape that? 

Dr. Karina Salazar:

So my work has really focused on understanding two main recruiting interventions, um, by public research universities primarily. So the first is recruiting visits, so off-campus recruiting visits. So this is when universities send admissions representatives all across the country to meet with prospective students in their local high schools in recruiting fairs, at conference centers.

And so a lot of sort of the national discourses around college access tend to portray colleges and universities as these really passive recipients of admissions applications when in reality recruiting is a multi-billion dollar industry that, uh, is increasingly sophisticated, innovative, and has been around for decades, but we really don't understand much of it.

And so off-campus recruiting visits are one of these interventions that are really detrimental to understanding patterns and flows of students through colleges. And so, some work prior to, uh, some of the research that I've done has really understood this from a qualitative perspective of, particularly for first generation college students, for low income students, for students of color, um, having an admissions representative come to their local high school and make them feel wanted by the university is a really important part of determining where they apply and enroll into college. 

And so, what I did, partly as a doctoral student here in the Center for the Study of Higher Education is really where I started. I began to become interested in, in understanding where and where they don't go, uh, universities go to recruit prospective students. And so as part of my dissertation work, I webs scraped travel admission schedules by public research universities and began to track where they go and do not go across the country to solicit admissions applications.

And so, from that work in analyzing the characteristics of schools and communities that receive visits. I found that public research universities predominantly visit out-of-state schools on communities. So, they are visiting to states outside of their local communities to recruit prospective students.

And in those out-of-state localities, they tend to focus on predominantly affluent, predominantly white schools and communities. And so that's the, the first sort of recruiting intervention. The second recruiting intervention. It was actually quite, um, it, it sort of progressed from this first research intervention of recruiting visits.

And so, as I was sharing some of this work that I found a lot of research universities as I was one, kind of triangulating the data and checking with them in terms of does this seem accurate? Is this sort of the way, um, is this, uh, the way in which recruiting is really happening on the ground? A lot of the sort of feedback, and I did this work with a colleague at UCLA, a lot of the feedback that we received was yes, but. Um, so college and universities were very forthcoming about, yes, we tend to focus on recruiting students from predominantly affluent out of state. Predominantly white localities. And they sort of said this in the sense of, but that's not the only way in which we go about recruiting prospective students in reality, that's just one of the ways, and, and when they were kind of explaining this.

They kind of pointed to, we primarily identify and recruit prospective students by purchasing student lists. And so, student lists are, um, the contain the contact information of prospective students that are often sold to colleges and universities by third party vendors. So, college board is at one of the most dominant student list.

Uh. Data vendors. Um, ACT is another as well as other enrollment management consulting firms. And, and so these are the fundamental input into university recruiting campaigns because they contain the demographic and contact information of students. And so college and university's primarily identify and recruit prospective students through these student lists.

Um, by essentially deciding on search filter criteria that will basically include particular types of students into their purchase student list. And so, they can use like test scores range. So, if they're purchasing from the college board, they can identify, for instance, test score ranges, high school GPAs, geographic information.

Um. Student preferences for college and university. So, for instance, I could say I want to purchase the contact information of all. High school seniors in the 2022, uh, high school class that, uh, live in the Tucson metropolitan area that have a P-S-A-T score above, you know, 1400. And they have a high school GPA above 3.5.

And so, these search filter criteria allow college and universities. Because these student lists tend to be really pricey. They pay about 51 cents a pop for each student name in that contact information student list. And so, these search filters become one way in which college and universities become more efficient in their student list buys. Then once they have that student list purchase, that becomes a fundamental input into deciding who gets all the glossy brochures in the mail. So if, if you have a high school student that has ever received the glossy brochures, all the swag, the t-shirts, the knickknacks in the mail, um, it also includes targeted social media.

So, through everything from Instagram to Facebook to, uh, Snapchat; Institutions, universities and colleges are using this information to target those prospective students. And so that was the second intervention that I've been able to study through my research. And that was a very long and painful, uh, collection, data collection process in which, pulling from my journalism background as an, as an undergraduate student, one of the main.

Things that we learn in journalism school is how to fill out a Freedom of Information Act. And so, I was able to collect, again, with a wonderful team of other researchers and colleagues. We were able to collect the student list purchases of colleges and universities in five states. 

Dean Deil-Amen:

It really seems that the methodological approach that you're taking to the data is so rigorous, and from what you're saying, it sounds as if some of these approaches, techniques, tactics, when it comes to standard approaches to enrollment management and recruitment are helpful in some sense and in reading your research, it seems as if there's an underside to all of that. And I know you use the concept of recruitment redlining. Can you explain a little bit more about that concept? Maybe the historical context and what it means for the findings of your research? 

Dr. Karina Salazar:

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Um, yeah, so a lot of the work that I do is kind of the underside of enrollment management. So, this is a field that is incredibly important, not just for the shaping of flows of students to colleges, but it has also become very, very important for the financial health of colleges and universities, particularly public research universities.

Yet from the empirical scholarship side, we know very little about some of the predominant practices that really influence whether and where students go to college. And so, some of the methodological approaches that I've used have had to be very creative in trying to collect data. One, because colleges and universities are not as, uh, forthcoming in wanting to share these practices.

Um, but primarily because we really don't know much about them on sort of the scholarship side, on the empirical side, um, these practices have been around for instance, student lists have been around since the 1970s, yet some of my work is some of the first empirically published work on these practices.

And so, I've had to get pretty creative in, in trying to one, gather the data and then two as well in trying to understand how this actually happens on the ground sort of the practice that goes into understanding how college and universities recruit students. And so, on the method side, one of the approaches that I sort of coined was recruitment redlining.

And so, in trying to understand where colleges go to recruit prospective students and where they don't go, I took a, one particular paper I published, took a spatial approach to trying to understand how the recruiting paths of admissions counselors interact with sort of the sociopolitical spatial formations around geographical areas, particularly large metropolitan areas, in understanding how communities have become educationally disenfranchised over time.

And so, in sort of analyzing these recruiting paths, so basically when, for instance, a university from the east coast goes to Los Angeles. You know, presumably arrive in LAX and then they spend maybe a couple of weeks kind of, uh, visiting different localities in, uh, the Los Angeles metropolitan area. And so, what I did was I looked at how those pathways of where recruiters go from one school to another, for one community to another in visiting schools and prospective students, how do those sort of pathways interact with the geographical understanding of that particular metropolitan area?

And so, what I found that as recruiters are going from one predominantly white, affluent school to another. They circuitously avoid predominantly black and Latinx communities and low-income communities in trying to get from one recruiting visit to another. Um, and so these recruiting visit pathways really mimic the you know, the spatial governing around sort of how communities of color have been disenfranchised over time. 

So, they mimic Jim Crow segregation. They mimic sort of redlining through the mortgage industry. It's quite mirroring those same spatial formalities and so the educational disenfranchisement of those communities are not sort of just the geographical legacy of those really, you know, racist problematic practices that we think tend to be in the past, but the educational practices that really provide college access opportunities for current students are mirroring those same spatial formations.

Dean Deil-Amen:

That's so instructive. When you talk about redlining in the mortgage industry, can you give a little more context to that for people who may not be familiar with that practice in the past?

Dr. Karina Salazar:

Sure. Yeah, so, so a lot of the work in terms of the spatial analysis of recruiting visits is grounded in sort of understanding how the federal government and the mortgage industry in the 1950s and sixties redline communities of color, particularly Black communities, out of lending practices for mortgages.

And so, we have lots of historical analysis around how wealth inequality, particularly when it comes to home ownership, is not necessarily a reflection of a racial wealth gap, but rather of explicit discrimination by the Federal Housing Administration in denying home mortgage loans to Black in Black communities.

And so, um, similar to how that sort of explicit racial discrimination was happening in the mortgage industry. Essentially, they would take a geographical map, look at where, you know, in a metropolitan area where predominantly Black and other communities of color were located, and they would quite explicitly draw a red line around those communities and ensure that those communities were not accessing mortgage loans for home ownership.

Dean Deil-Amen:

The more I hear about your research findings, the more questions I have. So, one question I have is that, you know, these patterns you've uncovered in, you know, the off-campus recruiting. What do you think has motivated universities to engage in this pattern of behavior, this approach to recruitment, given some of these negative consequences?

Dr. Karina Salazar:

Yeah, I think that's a, that's a difficult question. I think there's, um, you know, the way that I approach a lot of my work, particularly because I talk to enrollment managers all the time. I work with enrollment managers. I talk to recruiters, and I think there's a really big distinction between impact and intent.

And I think the predominant sort of thinking around a lot of the work that I do is trying to kind of focus on the intent. And so, I, a lot of the times I tend to focus on the impact. And this is primarily around a couple of really surprising parts of the research process that have sort of popped up as I've continued to do this work.

And so, one of them was around sort of trying to understand these patterns. And so, as I was making sense of, particularly on the off-campus recruiting visits, I would talk to admissions, enrollment manager professionals. And one of the ways in which they sort of made sense of this was around this is sort of business as usual.

This is where we have always gone to recruit students. This is where we get the most number of applications in a historical context of over the last 10, 20 years. This is where we know a lot of our students come from. And so, a lot of the sort of explanation was really around sort of the, the business as usual model for enrollment management that has never been perhaps critically examined in terms of looking at the reproduction of, of inequity around sort of, right? If we go where we have always gone, then we will continue to reproduce the inequity of who goes to college and who does not. 

The other part was also around, as I, progress from the recruiting visits to looking at student lists uh, again, in consulting with admissions professionals and consulting with enrollment managers. This project and the, and the research team, we were quite surprised to find that as we were talking with professionals at different institutions where we were collecting the data, we figured out that a lot of these decisions around; Who do we recruit? Where do we recruit? Was outsourced to enrollment management consulting firms where sort of understanding the goals that an admissions or an enrollment management office had for their incoming class and how to translate that into the recruiting practices was really left up to consulting firms that are perhaps not as aligned with sort of public good missions that colleges and universities have. And so, I think there may be some right lost in translation approach there as well in terms of trying to understand how these sorts of decisions around, again, I, the reality of the financial aspects of a public college university, particularly post, you know, 2008, great Recession in the decline of public support from state governments for colleges and universities, and the need to really rely on enrollment management as one alternative to making up those budget shortfalls around tuition revenue. And so, I think there's a lot of sort of, you know, complex understanding around understand, you know, the, the intention versus the impact of these practices.