IP: College Survey firm sells student info...

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Date: Mon, 03 Dec 2001 15:23:06 -0800
> To: dave () farber net
> From: "Suzanne M. Johnson" <sjohnson () pobox com>
>
> College-Survey Firm Quietly Peddles
> Student Information to Big Marketer
>
> http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB1007345870354311480.htm
>
> By DANIEL GOLDEN
> Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
>
> Each year, more than one million U.S. high-school students take time out of
> their school day to fill out a survey asking their names, addresses,
> grade-point
> averages, races, religions and social views. The organization that sponsors
> the survey, the National Research Center for College and University
> Admissions, tells the schools it will broaden students' higher-education
> options by distributing their names and profiles to hundreds of colleges and
> universities across the country.
>
> But colleges aren't the only recipients of the survey results. Generally
> unknown to high schools, colleges, students and their parents, National
> Research
> for at least a decade has also sold the personal information it gathers to
> the country's leading supplier of young people's names to commercial 
> marketers,
> American Student List LLC.
>
> American Student List pays for the information by helping to fund the
> National Research survey. American Student List then sells student names and
> other information to companies that solicit students for a wide array of
> goods and services. Companies that buy student names from American Student
> List include shaving giant Gillette Co.; credit-card purveyors American
> Express Co. and Capital One Financial Corp.; Kaplan Inc., the Washington
> Post Co. unit that is the largest admissions test-coaching chain; Primedia
> Inc.'s Seventeen Magazine; and Columbia House Record Club, which is
> owned by AOL Time Warner Inc. and Sony Corp.

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