I’ve always been a bit intrigued by the continuing popularity of Applicant Surveys. What is it that people expect to see in this year’s results that weren’t there last year?

There are basically three sets of research questions that are at the heart of current applicant surveys: who is applying (i.e., the social/ethnic composition), what information tools are students using to acquire information about institutions, and what do students say they are looking for in an institution?

The “who applies” question is an important one, but it’s not one that needs to get asked more than about once every three or four years. The data simply doesn’t change that fast.

At the margin, the “information tools” question does vary a bit with changes in technology. But in essence, the answer to this question is always the same: parents and friends at the top, schools and guidance counselors in the middle, followed by institutional websites, Maclean’s and the Globe and Mail, in more or less that order.

(Which is a disaster, of course; some of our recent research on the related topic of student financial aid found that students who relied on information from parents and friends were actually less knowledgeable about the topics at hand than people who had not sought ay information at all. Yikes.)

The important question isn’t “where did students get their information” but “what is it that students think they know about institutions”? Institutions need to have a much better sense of their own brand’s state of play if they are going to do anything useful about them. Sure, you can ask applicants if they think particular universities have “prestige researchers,” or offer “a safe environment”, but their answers are mostly ex-ante rationalizations, so why bother?

Bluntly, we know virtually nothing about the process of choice-formation. How do they develop interests in particular fields of study? How do they go about forming a choice set? How much do they understand about the differences between particular institutions? When do they become aware of institutional stereotypes (e.g., Western = “party school,” Trent = tree-huggers, etc.) and to what extent do these affect choice?

Admittedly, none of this is easy to get at through a survey. Some of these questions are inevitably qualitative (though analytical software is making post-survey coding ever-easier), and even the stuff that lends itself to quantitative analysis would require a lot of focus-group work to make sense.

But good things require work. In terms of being able to recruit better students, getting a jump on competitors gathering data to get inside the decision-making process is a lot more productive than seeing if the proportion of applicants saying they are looking for universities with “an emphasis on teaching” has moved another percentage point or not.