While few colleges follow the same admissions playbook, they are all taking their cues from the invisible array of algorithms that recommend music on Spotify, movies on Netflix, and books on Amazon. While colleges say the data help to target their marketing efforts, the new methods also explain why students with similar similar academic backgrounds now get varying degrees of outreach from colleges.

“We needed to focus on finding students who would be a good fit,” Goff said. “So when we looked at the demographics of the previous class, we wanted to not only look at the students who chose to enroll at the institution, but those who ended up succeeding and were satisfied. We wanted to know if we could replicate those students.”

The university began by analyzing three years of its most recent graduating classes, looking for students who finished on time with high satisfaction scores. Admissions officers found that almost half of the Roman Catholic research university’s students were Catholic, for instance, and they had among the highest satisfaction scores. Nearly 80 percent of the students at the top of the list were also clustered in a small group of majors: health care, business, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math).

With the help of data from the College Board and the ACT, the university went on a hunt to find students in existing and new geographic markets matching the profile of the most satisfied students who recently graduated. Admissions officers knew that by combing through more than 120 potential data points produced from the questionnaire high-school students completed when registering for the SAT or the ACT they could find key points of overlap between what potential students wanted in a college and where Saint Louis University succeeded the most.

For example, admissions officers looked for high-school students who stated they preferred to attend a private, religiously affiliated college; performed community service in high school; and, given the preponderance of satisfied business majors on campus, had an entrepreneurial mindset (one of the questions asked of high-school students is whether they started a business or organization).

Because the university was trying to expand its geographic reach, officials also wanted students who in their questionnaires indicated they had the mindset to travel. Most students attend a college close to home. The students most willing to travel tend to have the most choices in where they can go because of their high standardized test scores. According to the ACT, students who score highest on the test—scoring between 33-36, the maximum—go to college farthest from their home (172 miles, on average), compared to just 45 miles for those who scored at the national average (20.8).

To reach those students, Saint Louis University added three positions to the admissions team and located the additional staff in new markets, including Southern California and Texas. Recruiters focused on specific high schools with large populations of students the university wanted and deployed targeted internet advertising in the regions. Today, only about one-third of Saint Louis University’s students are from Missouri.