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This study sought to understand the relationship between undergraduate yield and an institution's internet presence. Data were collected from 2018 U.S. News & World Report national university rankings, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Database (IPEDS), and summer 2018 (June-August) SEMrush data, a web metrics database housing institutional (.edu) search and traffic information. Results demonstrate, when controlling for institutional characteristics, organic keywords/ search-engine optimization (p < 0.001) predicts undergraduate yield as well as overall number of undergraduate applications (p < 0.001) and better than undergraduate admission rate (p < 0.05). Implications for research and practice are addressed, in addition to implications for theory regarding online academic capitalism and summer melt.
The U.S Department of Education defines summer melt as a phenomenon in higher education where postsecondary students "leave high school with plans to attend college and never arrive at any college campus that fall" (O'Connor 2018, para. 3). Similarly, Harvard University defines summer melt as "the surprisingly common scenario in which high-school graduates apply, are accepted, and say they plan to enroll in college-but don't" (Harvard University 2018, para. 2). Other researchers have elaborated on Harvard's definition, asserting summer melt involves students who "have taken the SATs, been accepted to a college of their choice, applied for and received financial aid" and still do not attend any college in the fall (Vedantam 2018). Recently, education researchers have examined this phenomenon with various reports claiming 8-40 percent of low-income students (Castleman and Page 2014) and 33 percent of all prospective postsecondary students (O'Connor 2018) experience summer melt, meaning the student has applied and been admitted, as well as applied for and been awarded aid, but these students do not enroll in any institution in the fall.
Subsequently, research has explored how to reduce summer melt, including providing counseling to students over the summer (Castleman, Arnold, and Wartman 2012; Castleman, Page, and Schooley 2014) and text messaging students over the summer (Castleman and Page 2014) to increase these students' likelihood of attending college in the fall. In a randomized controlled trial, Georgia State University recently used a chatbot named Pounce to reduce summer melt. Their findings indicated a 12.1 percent summer melt rate among students who had access to the chatbot, whereas there was a 15.4 percent summer...