At College Fairs, Recruiters Turn to Swipes and Scans to Attract Students

While swiping his credit card at an airport check-in station to get his boarding pass, Joe Manning got an idea.

Mr. Manning, associate director of admissions at James Madison University, figured a similar system could be used at college fairs to obtain prospective applicants’ information electronically. Instead of students’ wasting time by filling out information forms by hand, he hooked up a laptop computer and a bar-code scanner and had students swipe their driver’s licenses or learner’s permits.

As The Chronicle’s Eric Hoover reported, the National Association for College Admission Counseling has introduced similar bar-code scanners at 15 of its annual college fairs, and it expects the service to be available at all 50 annual events by 2012. With the new system, students get their own printable bar codes to take to the fair that give recruiters their contact information and areas of academic interest electronically.

Recruiters hope that the new system will increase the number of students interested in their college, and that receiving more accurate information electronically will help recruiters spend more time talking to students.

The scanners allow college representatives to spend more time looking prospective applicants in the eye, “rather than students standing there with their heads down,” Gregory A. Ferguson, NACAC’s director of college fairs, said. —Marc Beja