My daughter is a junior - and is continually getting marketed to by the same set of hype schools which we know we cannot afford. Via mail/email, etc. That these schools have a 3% acceptance rate , and still marketing to kids gives me a major cringe…
Fortunately (or not so) we have been receiving the same sort of predatory marketing for soccer, and so she is “somewhat” educated on this topic. But she gets so excited when t20 schools sends something personalized (I think they pay college board for access to names/scores?) I wonder if they sell zip code, attempts taken, date taken to really ramp up the sale.
Ok - that’s off my chest;) this forum is a major life saver…
There is a box to check on the SAT’s. These mailings mean nothing. This issue comes up a few times each year. I feel sorry for mail carriers and it is a waste of paper. Colleges went to keep the applications up so that the acceptance rate stays low, most likely, though there is a more benign factor in that this is a way to prospect for underrepresented groups of potential applicants in the interest of diversity.
Through the College Board’s “Student Search Service” colleges get students’ name, email and mailing address so they can send marketing material. They also get the dates you register for and take the SAT or PSAT, but they do not get individual scores.
Colleges can also run searches based on scores - example: “give me all students who scored over 1450 on the SAT”. But again, they won’t get individual scores.
My kid never checked YES on this box and still got tons of solicitations from college. They actually started after 8th grade and we never figured out why.
But…really, this is marketing plain and simple. We got regular mail and had a couple of boxes of this junk mail by the time she left for college. At least all you need to do is hit a delete button!
The amount of college marketing mail is appalling. Some schools are way worse than others. The sad thing is that it works in driving up applications for families who don’t understand that it’s all marketing and has nothing to do with chances of admission.
Maybe we need to put together a movement towards “denominator-blind” - colleges, media (USNWR, Forbes) and others pledge to eliminate all measurement statistics that include how many total applications were received (admit rate etc.) these get replaced by selectivity measures that are standardized to specific types of applicants (e.g. percent admitted with certain test score or GPA or geographic location etc) for which additional uncompetitive applications aren’t beneficial for looking more prestigious. For example, U Chicago maintains a selectivity advantage over Northeastern by showing that admission rate among 3.9+ GPA is say 17% versus 35%, and isn’t advantaged by seeking out thousands of 3.2 GPA apps to reject (killing many trees in the process). On the other hand, this could really add to the problem with “yield protection” if the Northeasterns of the world are already rejecting top stats kids to look better…
Yes, this has bugged me with all 3 of my kids (youngest is same grade as yours). How is it that colleges defend their tuition rising many times the rate of inflation due to cost, yet have no problem spending hundreds-of-millions on unnecessary marketing materials? But to your point, the super elite colleges are the worse. They don’t need to do it, which makes it particularly egregious. Even if you stretched for an excuse why they would spend a dime on marketing (and not that I believe it), it would be the reach kids from less privileged schools where perhaps promising students didn’t have those schools on their radar. But they could do that in a targeted way for a small fraction of the cost and without leaving many kids with the false impression that these school’s are really interested in them. Instead they blast these emails and mailed brochures out to basically everyone, including students who needed no reminder these school’s existed. It appears to serve exactly one purpose only, to juice the number of applicants so they can brag about super low admission statistics.
Even worse is the way these same Ivy’s market these cash cow for-profit pre-college programs to kids.
You would of thought my S21 was guaranteed admission by the amount and type of marketing material he got from University of Chicago
D23 just got her first mailing from UC this month
Good suggestion. The overall selectivity rate really shouldn’t matter.
But Northeastern, which has turned “climbing up the rankings” into an institutional mission, will undoubtedly find ways to adapt.
Acceptance rate is not a metric in USNWR, Forbes, or WSJ ranking methodologies.
I agree colleges find ways to adapt to changing ranking methodology, it seems like USNWR is the only ranking that college administrators/Trustees care about.
Probably another thread, but I agree this is a bad look. So many parents (and students) don’t understand the school isn’t even involved in these programs, nor will these programs provide an admissions advantage, nor can most afford them (although some programs do offer fin aid).
With that said, I do understand why a college would want to bring in revenues during the summer.
They could let the private companies that run the program use their campus and dorms and freely solicit their professors for summer gigs, but not be allowed the market the program in the name of the college. So, for example, “College Edge Summer Session” (made that up) that happens to be at Harvard or Brown or Yale, then even a better a byline under the title that says, “College Edge is not affiliated with X University.”
But of course fewer people might opt-in and they wouldn’t make as many bucks off the intentional false optimism of the parents and students.
In terms of acceptance rate, whether it’s part of the ranking or not it’s only almost every kids mind and definitely plays into the perception of how special a school is.
Hey, at least the spam is from Cornell, not Cornell College.
Some of the Ivy’s are less expensive to attend than many other privates and publics if you are not full pay.
I agree that the amount of spam advertisements from universities is appalling.
However, a big part of college or university is to help transition our kids to be ready for the real world. A big part of the real world is getting bombarded by advertising.
I figured that all of this spam advertising from colleges and universities at least occurred in an environment where us parents were there to help them understand how meaningless all of this spam was. It helped to get my kids ready to disregard the mountain of advertising that they will be subject to as adults and to see it as the misleading garbage that it is.
And then in spite of the spam advertising they went off to good universities that were a good fit for them and that fit our budget.
Our son is averaging ~40 of these college messages a day (some individual days are worse). Some of them even send more than one message a day sometimes. That a lot of spam just from schools.
What’s crazy is some of those schools apparently penalize you if you unsubscribe. There’s another topic here about someone who applied to Case Western but had their application pulled (without refunding the fee) when the school detected that the student had unsubscribed from their spam. They took it as a sign of lack of demonstrated interest as opposed to just not wanting to get spam…
I posted this on a similar thread a few months ago. My career was in marketing, with a good portion in direct marketing, specifically political & non profits. This article is the most accurate description I’ve seen about what happens behind the scenes.
We leave the mailed marketing materials out for D23. She is not interested at all. What’s worse she just leaves them on the counter for days. Drives me nuts. D19 was total opposite and looked through them and at least tossed the ones she didn’t want.
We got something from Yale that my spouse thought looked a bit personalized. She conveyed that to D23. I didn’t have the heart to tell either that I was 98% sure it wasn’t personalized. I will say it might help D23 is not showing much interest in applying to many schools. Although she plays everything close to the vest.
First kid we left it for him to look at; he almost never did. Second kid we just piled it all in a giant 64 gallon bin (ended up taking two) and saved it until the acceptance month when I brought it all out just to take a pic before getting rid of it all. Latest '23 kid it goes straight to trash the moment it’s opened. No one looks. Doesn’t matter who it’s from or what it says (we don’t read it, so we don’t know). Ironically if any college actually tried to do something personalized or targeted, it wouldn’t matter because it would be lost in all the other noise and go straight to the trash.