Scholarship on college choice largely focuses on how students search for colleges but less is known about how colleges recruit students. This article analyzes off-campus recruiting visits for 15 public research universities. We Web-scrape university admissions websites and issue public records requests to collect data on recruiting visits. Analyses explore the similarities and differences in off-campus recruiting patterns across universities in the study. Results reveal socioeconomic, racial, and geographic disparities in recruiting patterns. In particular, most universities made more out-of-state than in-state visits, and out-of-state visits systematically targeted affluent, predominantly White localities. We recommend that future research should exploit new data collection methodologies to develop a systematic literature on marketing and recruiting practices in higher education.
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