A list of potentially college-bound high school students will cost the U.S. Military Academy (USMA) at West Point nearly $58,000 to obtain, a move that will enable the institution to target-market certain kids based on personally identifiable information gleaned from that list. According to a contracting document that The Peacock Report has located, the USMA intends to award a no-bid, sole-source contract for this list of adolescents to the National Research Center for College & University Admissions (NRCCUA), a Missouri research and database-operations firm that prides itself for annually gathering "information on student attitudes and educational plans from nearly 5.5 million students" across the U.S.
NRCCUA will deliver to the USMA an unspecified number of "names of college bound high school students who meet certain criteria and have expressed certain interests," according to the document, which was first circulated via FedBizOpps on Wednesday. "The NRCCUA will conduct a nationwide search of students in 9th, 10th, and 11th grades that meet USMA selected criteria."
The company website touts its ability to collect names and personal data "through a nationwide post secondary planning survey of students in more than 20,000 high schools. Secondary school educators distribute, supervise and return questionnaires to NRCCUA."
NRCCUA's mission statement/marketing pitch is "Creating a brighter future for America's youth, with integrity... through a unique process that captures and shares educational and career aspirations...one dream at a time."
Upon closer inspection of its methods and services, it's clear that this "unique process" does indeed capture the aspirations of children, as evidenced by this promise to potential clients: "We will pinpoint and provide you with each matched student’s complete name field, year of high school graduation, high school name, email address, grade point average and more."
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