A college referral service, in the US, is a service that provides leads to tertiary institutions seeking to enrol students. The leads are usually generated by someone filling in an online form, whether about education or a credit card, and the details are then on-sold to a college (for US$20-60) and then the marketing phone calls start! There are concerns about high-pressure marketing tactics, as well as possible breaches of the US anti-commission law for student marketing. You can read more here.

It would be hard to run such a service  in NZ because of our privacy laws, but also because we don’t have the large and dynamic tertiary education market that such specialist services require to thrive. The services are growing in the US because the large for-profit sector targets non-traditional students who cannot be reached via the normal high school channels.

I first came across this Internet lead generation method in 2005, when it was just starting to get into its stride, at a conference in Boston (run by Eduventures, which is well worth a look if you are interested in the business of higher education). While I’m not surprised that it hasn’t come immediately to NZ, I’m surprised that such services don’t have at least a toehold in some form, but I might just have missed it. More likely, though, is that the increasing constraints of the last Labour government made such innovation less and less useful – why seek more students when you’ll just get rapped over the knuckles?