Assessing university enrollment and admission efforts via hierarchical classification and feature selection

Recruiting prospective students efficiently and effectively is a very important challenge for universities, mainly because of the increasing competition and the relevance of enrollment-generated revenues. This work provides an intelligent system for modeling the student enrollment decisions problem. A nested logit classifier was constructed to predict which prospective students will eventually enroll in different Bachelor degree programs of a small-sized, private Chilean university. Feature selection is performed to identify the key features that influence the student decisions, such as socio-demographic variables (gender, age, school type, among others), admission efforts, and admission test results. Our results suggest that on-campus activities are far more productive than career fairs and other efforts performed off campus, demonstrating the importance of bringing prospective students to the university. Furthermore, variables such as gender, school type, and declared university and Bachelor degree program preferences are shown to be relevant in successfully modeling the student's choice of university.