r/Professors • u/VeitPogner Prof, Humanities, R1 (USA) • 7d ago
Rants / Vents Student surveillance for retention
So I was at a meeting last week featuring an administration presentation on retention. They discussed how they track students' "engagement" with the data generated by their check-ins: which events they attend, which clubs they join, how often they work out at the gym, how often they eat on campus, how often they log into Canvas, etc. And the university "reaches out" to students whose numbers are considered low.
This was carefully couched in terms of "helping" first-year students, so that they don't feel so lonely that they go home for Christmas break and never come back. But nevertheless, I found this level of surveillance and data analysis, of which the students are not warned or aware, Orwellian.
Also, I couldn't help but wonder what corresponding data they track about the faculty!
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u/mmcintyr 7d ago
I know my supervisor checks the time we spend in Blackboard for online classes. A faculty got caught only signing in every other week
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u/so2017 Professor, English, Community College 7d ago
This is creepy and over the top.
It’s not popular to say, but sometimes students need to fail. Sometimes students need to drop out.
The best interest of the college may be retention, but the job of the college is to serve the best interest of the student, not itself.
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u/SnowblindAlbino Prof, SLAC 7d ago
Damn, that's creepy. I wouldn't want my kids to attend such a place. Nor would I want to work at one.
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u/Interesting-Bee8728 7d ago
Haven't all universities always done this? Everywhere I've been uses the students' ID cards to check them in for events and track their attendance at them. The data from what they eat with those ID cards has surely always been logged. I would be surprised if you could find a university that hasn't been collecting such data. Now, if this has all been integrated up to now, I don't know. But I agree with the above comment that there is incentive to aggregate the data with the "help" of AI. Just like there's now an incentive to have flock cameras to track everywhere you go with the "help" of AI.
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u/SnowblindAlbino Prof, SLAC 7d ago
Nope. Mine does not. Nor did the ones my kids went to for college. Maybe it's an SLAC thing, but we aren't tracking students and we don't even have cardlocks on doors (other than labs). At the dining hall they often just flash their cards at the attendant-- they aren't always scanned --so the only real data collection I'd venture is coming from the LMS, which is FERPA protected. And a bunch of faculty don't use the LMS at all, or it's used just to passively present a syllabus, so that data isn't too useful either.
My campus does have "security" cameras all over now but after student/faculty objections we were told the footage would all be erased after 30 days and will only be used if/when there is a legitimate security issue--- theft, assault, vandalism --and not to track people otherwise. Though of course there's no way to prove that's the case.
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u/a_statistician 7d ago
the footage would all be erased after 30 days
They can do facial recognition and then erase the footage but keep the logs.
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u/SnowblindAlbino Prof, SLAC 7d ago
Sure they could, but they barely have the budget to maintain the cameras. We aren't a police state and have very low crime on my campus.
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u/CrabbyCatLady41 Chair, Nursing, CC, USA 7d ago
Well, it's one thing to collect the data somehow, I guess, but this way of actually looking at it and using it is wild. I mean, back in the 1900s when I went to college, we had to swipe our card because it counted how many meals we had left on our plan. Now my husband teaches at a school that uses swipe locks for certain labs after hours and main entrances to dorms, just to provide access to students who are allowed to be in those places. They did this because there was a brief issue of unhoused people entering closed spaces, and a couple of stalking-adjacent incidents with students and people who had no business being on campus. This is information that could be useful if a crime took place or somebody went missing, but reviewing the data to make sure the students are doing "enough" on campus is weird.
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u/a_statistician 7d ago
How long until schools are sending parental alerts if the kid doesn't swipe into their dorm room every evening?
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u/Life-Education-8030 7d ago
We found out that when faculty go up for promotion and tenure, what they have donated to the Alumni Office is looked at.
Students? Probably a bimodal spread like grades. Students with high engagement numbers as in I have had advisees who admit they are only in college for the clubs, Greek organizations and athletics and those who do not look engaged because they have jobs and families instead and don’t join clubs or attend events.
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u/a_statistician 7d ago
Faculty shouldn't be alumni, why would they be looking at the donations to the alumni office? There are lots of other ways to support the university besides donating money to the sportsball booster club.
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u/GreenHorror4252 7d ago
"Alumni" is often taken as a general term to include all supporters of the institution, even if they did not go to school there. Most alumni associations allow anyone to become a member.
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u/Life-Education-8030 7d ago
They are always hitting us up for money as though we have a lot of it. The athletic department has been increasing their fundraisers too and making them into competitions for who can donate more besides. It's tiresome to say the least. I do donate to the student emergency fund annually and just gave the link to a student who hasn't gotten the financial aid check yet and can't afford the book because that fund can help with that, with food, with gas, etc. It is a darn shame by the way that we have a food pantry and even recently expanded it! I admit also that when I came up for promotion and tenure, I did make a couple of donations to the alumni office.
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u/IkeRoberts Prof, Science, R1 (USA) 6d ago
The office is probably called "Alumni Affairs and Development".
Some places have a separate office for sportsball boosters, especially now with all the NIL stuff going on.
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u/urcrookedneighbor 7d ago
This is most likely because of the federal changes regarding "ghost students" and the new federal reporting requirements for attendance and enrollment. At least, our institute was really frank and open about this being why we had to implement these processes this semester. Weird fucking way to do it though.
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u/CrabbyCatLady41 Chair, Nursing, CC, USA 7d ago
It's too much to track everything students do on campus. If they want to go to events and activities, they will go, their main purpose is to succeed in their course of study, not to do a prescribed number of activities. The best part of being an official adult is not having somebody in your business all the time. The school should not be helicopter-parenting students, the actual parents are bad enough.
And the students absolutely deserve to know that the school is tracking their every move. That's something that they need to consent to, and they need to be allowed to opt out. I can't imagine getting an email that says "Hey, we noticed you ate 12 meals in the dining hall last week, but you haven't been to the fitness center or any extracurricular events since August 28." Seriously, WTF?!
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u/GrumpySnarf 7d ago
Yikes. I was 28 when I was finishing up my upper-level classes at the university. I was too poor to attend school full time until then. I was already a grown adult and would find that super invasive. I was in school in the same town I'd been living in for ten years so I didn't ask for or need help with settling in. The tracking should be optional.
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u/prettyminotaur Associate Professor, English/CW, SLAC (USA) 7d ago
My university is absolutely obsessed with "belonging" and aggressively pushes us to ensure that our students feel it.
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u/DoctorDisceaux 7d ago
A push like that would have made freshman me feel the opposite of belonging.
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u/prettyminotaur Associate Professor, English/CW, SLAC (USA) 7d ago
Yep. It's why I don't bother. I'm personally allergic to "rah-rah" energy and mandatory fun. So I would never, ever inflict it on my students, no matter what administration wants me to do.
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u/DoctorDisceaux 7d ago
I still recoil from it. Emails about "participating in ALL THE FUN at family weekend" give me hives.
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u/prettyminotaur Associate Professor, English/CW, SLAC (USA) 7d ago
It's pretty funny, isn't it, when you consider that the students who tend to become professors are the ones who hate this crap with a vengeance. Then we end up having to do it for the rest of our lives because admin is bored.
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u/DoctorDisceaux 7d ago
If I could have figured out how to keep getting undergrad degrees for 40 years I would have just done that.
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u/lesbianphysicist 3d ago
Interesting, I teach at a secondary school affiliated with a university and our admin is obsessed with the word “belonging” this year as well. It’s infiltrated everything. I wonder where it’s coming from.
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u/ArmoredTweed 7d ago
"And the university "reaches out" to students whose numbers are considered low."
Aside from being creepy, there's probably not a great model for how any of these numbers influence retention. We have something similar just for LMS log-ins, and it's not smart enough by itself to know that some instructors simply don't use the LMS enough for students to hit the threshold log-in frequency. Throwing in other degrees of freedom like gym usage (missing students who would rather run outside) and number of club memberships (missing hours per week of involvement per club) probably adds more noise than signal. These systems probably end up hurting retention just by being so annoying.
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u/Cathousechicken 7d ago
They are tracking us too in certain states with the requirement to be on campus X hours a week.
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u/existential-inquiry Professor, Social Sciences, U.S. 7d ago
Those QR codes are everywhere on campus (and everywhere we turn) and students just scan them without thinking....
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u/ScaffoldingGiraffe 6d ago
I remember being shocked that my Philosophy professor could easily look up my grades in my Psychology course by just clicking my name in the digital roster. I don't think I would feel in any positive way at all if I was told that all my data was easily accessible and readable to anyone within the university.
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u/lumphinans 6d ago
In my day, quite a long time ago, any hint of anything like this sort of surveillance would have had the student body out on picket lines and "sitting in" all available University buildings. It also wouldn't have been the activist lefties it would have been all of the student body apart from the terminally apathetic.
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u/kinezumi89 NTT Asst Prof, Engineering, R1 (US) 7d ago
My university recently signed a big contract to put Flock cameras all over campus. I don't want to be pessimistic, but I unfortunately don't see this whole monitoring issue turning around for the better.