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Short abstract:

This presentation examines the dynamic relationship between students and university data collection practices by analyzing how universities not only measure students but make the everyday experiences of students’ measurable, in addition to how students perceive and respond to these efforts.

Long abstract:

Surveillance once implemented is difficult to relinquish. The new measures of tracking and surveillance introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic continue to haunt university halls, with most current U.S. undergraduate students no longer aware of a world before the wave of change brought along by hidden digital and online forms of pervasive tracking embedded into digital educational platforms (Beetham et al. 2022). These educational ‘reforms’ represent a broader techno-solutionist paradigm buoyed by austerity measures undertaken by increasingly corporatized and managerial university organizational structures (Steck 2003). The goal of these reforms is not only to measure students but to simultaneously make them measurable (Porter 1995). The advent of contemporary technologies has significantly expanded the range and scrutiny universities can employ to measure and make measurable even more minute details of students’ everyday lives (Zurawski and Green 2015). The advancement of these tracking technologies is closely linked to their growing obfuscation from the eyes of students themselves. This presentation, which draws from interview and survey-based research, uncovers the lived experiences of students on college campuses in the U.S. as they actively grapple with this new wave of opportunistic data collection. We ask: how do students respond to being under surveillance and the lack of university transparency on the issue? How does surveillance contribute to their and the university’s co-constituted conceptions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ students? This presentation addresses critical questions about the co-configuration of student identities, highlighting the ongoing struggle to maintain autonomy and privacy in contemporary college environments.