Your kid signed up for a college's mailing list. The emails started coming. Nobody opens them.

That's being recorded.

I'm going to be careful here, because this is the part of my presentation where people either get paranoid or decide I'm exaggerating, and neither one helps you. So here is what's actually going on.

Many colleges track demonstrated interest. Not all of them. But a lot, and more than families assume.

They can see whether their email was opened. A good number can see what happened after that. Did the link get clicked. Did your kid land on the page for the major they said they were interested in, or did they bounce somewhere else and spend most of their time there instead.

There are colleges running algorithms on this to predict whether admitting your kid is worth the seat.

That sounds cynical until you understand why they care. Colleges are measured on yield, the share of admitted students who actually enroll. Admitting a kid who won't come is expensive for them. So they ...