Normally, the junk mail from Northwestern is addressed to Sarah (as an alum with a Comp Lit MA), but this was addressed to me. Apparently, someone in the School of Continuing Studies had the bright idea to buy the American Statistical Association's mailing list for a pool of potential applicants for their online Master of Science in Predictive Analytics program.
The fun and irony of this is that choosing whom to mail in the hopes that they will respond to your offer (whether it's a Masters program, car insurance, or commemorative plates) is a problem of predictive analytics! So, how well they do in choosing whom to mail from the pool of potential applicants should provide some evidence of the quality of the program, right?
They've started off well, by choosing a group that might actually be interested in predictive analytics, relative to the whole of humanity. However, if I were building a model for determining whom to mail, I'd think there would be a very low response rate from people who work for companies that build statistical software, especially companies that have done the most work to build the predictive analytics "brand" and made Northwestern's MSPA program possible. The fact that I've been sent a postcard advertising this program is, to my mind, a black mark against it.
To be fair, it could also very well be that the costs of printing and mailing a postcard to me are more than offset by the cost of doing the necessary work to determine that there's a vanishingly small chance of me applying (not to mention the benefits if I should apply to their program). Of course, the idea that it's better to just mail the whole pool of potential applicants is not exactly a message that those of us who make a living off predictive analytics approve of.
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