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:

Welcome back to our discussion with Dr. Karina Salazar. In today's episode, we will continue to explore Dr. Salazar's research and the impact her work has had on a local school district utilizing the knowledge she has gained from her research. 

Now, I know that one of the most impressive parts of how you have applied this research knowledge locally has been the transformative change you've been able to make in one of our local school districts, Sunnyside School District.

Can you explain a little bit more about the change you've been able to make locally with regard to that district and college access, utilizing the knowledge you've gained from your research? 

Dr. Karina Salazar:

Sure. Yes. Um, this has been absolutely the most rewarding part of, of all, of the work that I've done. But I think, you know, it, it kind of, it, it really began.

At the very beginning in terms of a lot of the work around even the, the very first recruiting intervention of understanding and analyzing off-campus recruiting visits. It really was partly motivated from my personal experience of being a Sunnyside Unified, um, you know, school district alumna. And so, the work around student recruiting and, and understanding that really began in a conversation that I had with my doctoral advisor at the time where I knew I wanted to study college access. And he had asked like, well, why don't you tell me your story of going to college? And I told him, right. I, I am a local Tucsonan I graduated from Sunnyside High School.

I graduated at the top of my class. Great test scores I had above a 4.0 GPA. Took every AP and honors class. And I, I remember I said, and I somehow just stumbled through the college application process, through the FAFSA process, and I was lucky that I ended up going directly to the University of Arizona, so my local flagship, land grant institution. Because I don't remember any recruiters on my, on my high school campus. So, there was no college fairs. High school didn't come, uh, sorry. Uh, colleges didn't come to recruit students. I never received any of the glossy brochures in the mail, any of the swag. And I really, we kind of compared this to, at the time my doctoral advisor's story around his college going process.

And so, um, he did give me permission to tell his story, but the way that he tells it is that he was, you know, an athlete. He was kind of this be average student from a very wealthy suburb of Boston, and he does remember getting tons and tons of, uh, brochures and swag in the mail. He said he constantly had college recruiting fairs that took up his entire basketball gym.

And so we kind of began to question, you know, why? What, what is sort of the difference in these two stories of one student that had, you know, college aspirations? Um, the way that I described it was I did everything right. I did everything I was supposed to as a high school student to, you know, fulfill these sort of aspirations of going to college, yet I only knew of one college. I didn't know of any other colleges, and that's the one that I went to. 

So that motivated the work. And so, as I was getting ready to graduate and to disseminate some of the first findings of this research, I decided that because of how it started, I would present this work as part of my dissertation defense to my local school district.

And so I defended my dissertation and the preliminary findings of this work at my local high school where I, usually right. Dissertation defenses happen in these like dusty rooms in the colleges that where it's just basically your committee of four professors and they decide to write your fate, um, moving forward.

But I decided, you know, this work was really important. It had really important implications. So, I invited, uh university administrators to come to that defense and to hear some of the preliminary findings. And then I also invited district administrators to come and understand the high school perspective as well of understanding why is it that college and universities aren't coming here.

And so, um, this sort of sparked much larger and collective efforts that are beyond my, uh, work. And have a lot to do with the advocacy that the district has really done around sort of calling the University of Arizona to kind of live up to the land grant mission, um, to live up to the Hispanic Serving Institution, federal designation.

Particularly because Sunnyside High School is a predominantly Latinx school district. And so that really began talks. Um, the, the superintendent after that defense, after attending that defense, asked for meetings with the university president, asked for meetings with, at the time the Vice President for Hispanic Serving Institutions.

Um, and so that sort of led to a formal partnership where, um, we coalesced a committee around understanding where sort of the university, um, needed to go to better serve this local community. It led to a, um, where, you know, I graduated quite a while ago, but I don't remember a single recruiter ever being on, you know, Sunnyside High School.

Now, as part of the formal partnership, we have two exclusive recruiters from the university that are exclusively focused on recruiting students from the two high schools in the Sunnyside Unified School District. And so, it was kind of the culmination of, again, this work really began with trying to understand kind of my own college going journey in contrast to my doctoral advisors at the time.

And really kind of rooting a lot of this work in the lived realities of my home community and understanding why was it that, you know, when I graduated in 2007, I could count on two hands the number of students that went to a four-year university. Um, and I was one of them. So now we have, um, this growing partnership. The two high schools in the Sunnyside Unified School District are the leading feeder schools for applications and enrollments into the University of Arizona. Um, and it has really, you know, been a labor of love in many ways that are, is obviously tied to the research that I do, but also around sort of being part of this larger collective, really advocating for advancing post-secondary opportunities for local communities.

Dean Deil-Amen:

That is incredibly exciting. I mean, how you've been able to translate the knowledge that you have gained through your research to transform change on the ground. Right? Transforming the practices of educational institutions to be more fair. You know, this is really the power of research and how it can make the world a better place, how it's serving our land grant mission at this university.

Is there anything else you want to talk about in terms of what was surprising about the outcomes of your research, if anything? 

Dr. Karina Salazar:

Yeah, I think, you know, I'm in the midst of it right now. I think this the evolution of trying to understand recruiting again, because it's such a, it's a practice that we don't really, we haven't really analyzed on the scholarship side, and so it's been this ongoing evolution of trying to understand, you know, how these things really work on the ground. 

I think one of the most, um, surprising things that I'm sort of, you know, dealing with right now is sort of trying to understand the, I've primarily conceptualized recruiting as the behavior of colleges and universities, right? Colleges and universities that are perhaps a little bit more financially stable, may be a little bit more equitable in their recruiting practices because they don't need to, right chase tuition revenue. 

Or you know, student or universities that are really rooted in their land grant, HSI missions maybe doing more equitable work because they're really drawing on those core mission and values. And so as of right now, as I'm looking at student lists, one of the most surprising parts of this particular research project has been trying to understand the intermediary role that the education technology sector really plays in sort of shaping this college access road.

So, my work has primarily looked at, right, it’s college access is a two-way road. It's students looking for colleges and colleges looking for students. But in reality, there is a billion-dollar private equity business around educational technology that is really playing sort of a matchmaking role between students and colleges and connecting colleges to students and connecting students to colleges.

And so, this has really popped up in terms of student lists because we, you know, this project, we, we primarily thought that, well, this is just basically an industry that is dominated by the college board because they've historically taken test takers. So, for instance, if a high school student takes the PSAT or the SAT, they get to opt into the student list database from the college board, which that can then be, you know, their contact information can then be purchased by colleges and universities. 

But as I've um, been doing this work over the last several years, there's some really big players coming into this space that are, you know, backed by private equity, that have really important influence in where students go to colleges and which colleges reach out to which students.

And so that has been part of the, the surprising part of this new research project where I'm trying to kind of make sense of, you know, how these flows of students into colleges are not just the behavior of students themselves or the behavior, the recruiting behaviors of colleges themselves, but trying to understand the sort of role that the educational technology sector has.

Dean Deil-Amen:

That leads me to think about the now pervasive use of ai, right? So, for those who are not as familiar with the higher education industry. You know, how is AI relevant to this research you've done on search filters, you know, being used to generate these lists? What do you predict moving into the future with AI?

Dr. Karina Salazar:

Yeah, absolutely. So, AI has, you know. I think there's a lot of buzz around AI right now, but it has really been around for decades. Um, right on the quantitative side, you know, predictive analytics algorithms have been in place for decades and they have really been central to the student list business.

And that's sort of where a lot of the work that I'm doing currently is going. Um, and so. A lot of the work around student lists that I'm doing currently is grounded in sort of critical data studies that have studied algorithms and predictive analytics, which includes AI. Which, those studies don't necessarily look at specifically educational opportunity, but they certainly warn us about the potential harms that come from technology, products that use geography or the past to predict the future, which is exactly what student lists are currently doing.

And so as, um, the student list business. And the market has really expanded, um, college board, whereas they were kind of the predominant player in the past. They really had a monopoly on student lists for decades. Now we see, for instance, college search engines that gather student list information by students basically looking for colleges online.

Um. There's basically all these new players coming into the, to the student list market, which has caused college board and ACT to create new student list products that are geared towards helping colleges find, quote unquote, the “right students” or the “right markets.” So those, uh, products use geo demography, which is sort of this field of market research that tries to understand the correct characteristics of people based on where they live. 

And so, college board and ACT in the student list industry at a larger scale, broader scale, have used predictive analytics and um, you know, algorithms to try to predict the college going behavior of current students. And so, for instance, the college board has two particular geo demography, um, products.

One is called segments. So, uh, the students start service uses segment filters to essentially categorize every high school in the U.S. and every census track in the U.S. into unique what they call clusters that predict the college going behaviors of students within those schools and within those neighborhoods.

And so, college and universities, when they're making student list purchases. So for instance, I want to get all, you know, prospective students that are high school seniors currently in the Tucson metropolitan area. They can use those clusters to include or exclude particular students from those metropolitan areas.

So, for instance, I want only right students that attend high school cluster 18 and neighborhood cluster 13. And so, what those clusters are doing are essentially using the past. So, they look at the five past admission cycles of students within those high schools and neighborhoods, and then make predictions about, okay, these are the types of students that either attend these schools and live these schools, and how do they match with the enrollment goals of colleges and universities.

And so, part of the research that I'm doing now around sort of thinking about AI, thinking about algorithms and predictive analytics, these are proprietary, so they use proprietary, uh, data collected from the college board. Um, so my current research is trying to essentially open that black box of those particular proprietary products to try to understand how, where a student goes to high school and where they live may likely influence what types of colleges and universities are reaching out to them to solicit admissions applications.

Dean Deil-Amen:

This is amazing. Very, very interesting. I, is there anything else you'd like to share about your research and its importance or its impact? 

Dr. Karina Salazar:

Yeah, I think, you know, the, there's several things here. I think, like I said, I, I, I think policy discourses and national discourses around college access, rarely one think through or include the behaviors of colleges and universities themselves. Like I said, I, they often kind of perceive colleges and universities as these passive recipients of admissions applications when in reality this is a very strategic and very impactful practice that really shapes the trajectories of students about, you know, whether and where they go to college.

It impacts, particularly for thinking about the student list industry, it impacts millions and millions of students each year. And based on some preliminary work that we have seen from other researchers, students are really influenced by the types of colleges and universities that reach out to them.

Particularly we see that by opting into student list databases, essentially allowing universities to purchase your contact information and send you all these things in, you know, in efforts to recruit you into the university. You know, students who opt into those controlling for a whole host of covariates.

They grad, they attend four universities at a much higher rate, and they graduate within four years at a much higher rate than students who opt out of those processes. And we find that, you know, that's a really important part of this process. It's, it's impactful. It's, it's really influencing where students go to college.

And so, I think, you know, national discourses, both policy public as well as the kind of scholarly discourses really don't know much about this process, and it's such an important part of really trying to understand patterns of, of who goes to college and who doesn't. 

Dean Deil-Amen:

Alright, so my final question for you is, can you talk about one book or paper that is meaningful to you and that you might recommend to our audience about how it has influenced your thinking?

Dr. Karina Salazar:

Yeah, I think the one paper that I, I, um really has changed the trajectory of my work as a researcher. Um, is the recruitment redlining piece where again, I, again, I was spatially trying to analyze and mapping out the kind of geographical patterns of where colleges and universities go to recruit and not re and not to go to recruit prospective students.

And I think some of the work that I did there in grounding it in sort of the socio-historical context of metropolitan areas around geographical access. Um, where I really, I, again, it was not even about educational access. It was about access to home ownership. It was about access to public spaces. It was about understanding this from the perspective of having access to grocery stores, of how geographically, if, if we're trying to understand inequity in all sense of, you know, the word, in the U.S. we really, it is incomplete if we don't try to understand it from a geographical perspective of how, where students go to high school and where students live is such an embedded part of understanding inequity, educationally and otherwise for the U.S. And so it really has that paper really has shaped the way that I think about university recruiting practices from a structural level of how these sorts of practices are so deeply intertwined with understanding other forms and other structural inequities around, um, the disenfranchisement of communities of color.

Dean Deil-Amen:

Dr. Salazar, I really want to thank you for being part of this podcast today, I think you've taken our audience through a journey of understanding around a topic that people know little about the way it operates when you look at it from the inside. Right? And the method you've applied have been incredibly helpful and giving us a look into how these processes work and how we might think about inequity in education and how it becomes realized through this sociohistorical and geographical context as well as institutional practices. And thank you so much for your work and for being part of Inquiry Oasis. 

Dr. Karina Salazar:

Thank you for having me.