The invitations being sent out are all based on the low college enrollment rates since before the pandemic started. The colleges and universities sending these invitation are not suspect since they are using valid services to reach out to these students. These are all legitimate universities who are using third parties to reach out to students who have not considered their educational institutions. These third party companies include, but are not limited to Common Application, Concourse, Niche.com, Sage Scholars, and the state of Minnesota.
There is a misunderstanding about how these invitations are sent out. According to the explanation from Business Insider, a registration process is still required. No private information is ever used without permission. The process is completed by an interested student through the following process:
"... a student registering on a website, providing some biographical information, and inputting one's GPA and academic interests, a process that can take as little as half an hour. Then, they wait, and if a school is interested, the student might be accepted without completing any additional application materials at all."
Since there are almost 300 legitimate colleges and universities that use various companies to reach out to these students, there is a high possibility that a student looking to attend college, without a particular preference could find himself receiving an admissions invitation from several universities. This will still give him the prerogative of choosing from the universities that accepted him based upon his own learning preferences, something he could have done with his dream universities, had he qualified to applied for them.
I hope this explanation helps to clarify the misconception that the universities illegally obtain student information and reach out to them in a form of data privacy breach. Nothing of the sort is happening in this system of college enrollment. |