<p>Of course, we do have some power in this situation - opt out of the mailings. When my son took the PSAT - he checked the boxes that he did not want mail. Same thing with ACT - checked the options to not have his info sold or marketed or whatever. </p>
<p>sylvan - I can’t find the article quoting the Harvard president or I would link it - but I do believe he said “qualified”. But as Roger points out - that is still a very wide net - you could say that every A/A- student in the country is “qualified” - but unless they have some hook or other unusual talent or attribute - it is the longest of longshots.</p>
<p>Coming from Harvard it could look roses and flowers. Why couldn’t we ask Harvard to act like a Higher Educational Institute which it is, tax exempt, non-profit at that. Why is it always us who should be smart and know better?</p>
<p>“The long and short of it is, there has been a remarkable democratization of higher education in the past 50 years in the United States,” said William Fitzsimmons, admissions dean at Harvard. He said his department’s goal is to get a Harvard application “on the kitchen table of every student in America who has a chance of getting in.”</p>
<p>I apologize - it was the Dean of Admissions, not the university president. But the quote itself is worse than I had remembered - every student who has a “chance” of getting in? Wouldn’t that be an insane number of hs seniors? There’s application inflation for you!</p>
<p>Pizzagirl - You said you can’t believe people could possibly think that HYP’s letters mean they really want a student to go there. I have to disagree with this, because this is exactly what my parents thought when I got letters from HYP. When I started getting the letters, they told me things like “Yale doesn’t send letters to just anybody,” and they encouraged me to apply to multiple Ivies (I did, and was rejected from all four I applied to). I think my parents believed that these letters were special because when they were applying to colleges themselves, a letter from Yale WAS something special. But by the time I, their first child, was ready to begin the college application process, it had been a good 25 years or so since they’d been through the process themselves, and they didn’t realize things had changed (I think they know better now for my younger siblings).</p>
<p>So while everyone on CC knows that a letter from Harvard means next to nothing, “regular” parents who haven’t been exposed to the college application process for years are more vulnerable to these marketing techniques, I believe.</p>
<p>As a side note, I think it’s ridiculous that Harvard sends out applications along with their letters. For me, this, more than the mail, made me think they really wanted me. In spite of the fact that I could use the Common App and they could save oodles of paper, they were going to all the trouble to make sure I had an application specifically for their college. We interpreted this as them wanting me so much that they were practically forcing an application down my throat. The practice of sending out applications like this angers me not only because it raises hopes, but also, the vast majority of students who get them are going to use an online application. It’s such an unnessacry waste of paper.</p>
<p>Can you base that on hard data or just self-report/word of mouth? The reason I ask is I can easily imagine a lot of kids and their supportive parents doing the ‘what the heck’ app for Harvard, but would be too embarrassed to publicize it in a ‘college-sophisticated’ environment.</p>
<p>While I agree that it must be frustrating to those who don’t realize that they are part of a mass marketing campaign, but these really are more targeted than some of you think. Harvard gets about 30,000 applications/year and the college bound population is about 1,500,000 per year. That means they get applications from about 2% of the college bound (or about 1% of each graduating class). So if they sent mailings to four times the number of applicants it is only 8% of the college bound or 4% of the graduating class. This is hardly every A/A- student.</p>
<p>These come-on letters are a little more heartless than normal direct mail marketing because they target young and hopeful scholars (and their proud parents) who may not realize these respected institutions are capable of using the same techniques used by window replacement firms. Of course, let the buyer beware–but some do not realize they are being targeted as buyers. </p>
<p>What makes these practices more frustrating, IMO, is that universities make the decision process deliberately opaque-- so that no parent or hopeful student can know if they “have a prayer.” Who would throw away their money, time and hopes on a school that never admits students with their profile? Because HYP admit at least one or two talented/offbeat outliers among most incoming classes, each and every “good” student may believe his/her special EC or community service or fabulous essay might put them over the edge. And then they get a letter from Harvard…</p>
<p>Since HYP often state they could accept multiple classes of excellent admits from their stellar applicant pool, it’s clear that many of those who get denied were, in fact, qualified and “had a prayer.”</p>
Certainly true - but it’s not too early for high school juniors and seniors to develop a healthy skepticism about the buyer-seller dynamic. When you’re in the market to spend many thousands of dollars, people are very nice to you. This is an excellent learning opportunity for students (and teaching opportunity for parents!).</p>
<p>Sometimes parents simply can’t bring themselves to accept the possibility that their child is not being ardently pursued by Stanford and peer institutions. That’s sad. I do wonder, though - is there another level of academic recruitment, something along the lines of what gifted athletes experience, for truly outstanding applicants? My kids never saw any of that, certainly. But I’ve read posts by parents with a fair amount of CC time who describe their kids as being heavily recruited by Ivies and similar schools. Is there such a thing as truly personalized recruitment for some applicants?</p>
<p>This isn’t what frazzled1 is talking about, as it is not individual recruitment, but I thought it was interesting: Last year, the college counselor at a public high school in my area got a call from Columbia’s school of engineering saying that they were looking for more girls to apply and asking whether there were any strong math/science girls he knew of who could be convinced to apply.</p>
<p>well said. They get more applicants, get to reject more applicants and presto a lower admissions rate, which translates into ‘highly selective’ which makes them more attractive… a never ending cycle. simplify the admissions process…more kids apply…</p>
<p>I agree with momofthreeboys. There should be a limit to the number of applications. I know people with financial need have issue with this, but at some point it becomes the law of diminishing return. JMO</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, I’m sorry, I think it’s rather naive (or disingenuous) of you to purport to not understand the basics of marketing. Colleges of all degrees of selectivity collectively budget millions of dollars to hire enrollment management specialists/companies to produce marketing materials and strategies. I wasn’t a business major, but neither am I a dumb adult. Despite my total lack of business acumen I know that, guess what, these millions of dollars are spent because they Increase The Bottom Line. How? Well, geez, this marketing convinces many many many many students to apply, and of the lucky accepted applicants, guess what, more marketing convinces them to enroll and bring their tuition dollars along. I’m pretty sure that William Fitzsimmons and Jeff Brenzel and their ilk are not dumb - they know exactly what they’re doing with their marketing efforts. Perhaps I’m missing your point, but why are you criticizing those “dumb adults” who fall for this marketing? Do you think that they have equally dumb children, and it is all the dumb ones who are responsible for application inflation, and so really, if they wasted their money on application fees and were summarily rejected from colleges, who cares - it’s all their fault for being dumb and gullible?</p>
<p>The Chronicle summary of the NACAC report indicates that among other factors, the interplay of applicant and college behaviors are the cause of application inflation. The applicants do affect the marketplace for college with their attempts to strategically game the system. However, the colleges own the market - they are the ones doing the marketing, recruiting, admitting and enrolling. They have the power to alter the market to make it more user-friendly to applicants. To quote Deidre Henderson from the following essay on Inside Higher Education (<a href=“http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/02/28/henderson):%5B/url%5D”>http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/02/28/henderson):</a>
“What is still missing is strong, publicly articulated leadership on admissions reform from the presidents of the countrys most-admired colleges and universities.”</p>
<p>I attended the event where Fitzsimmons made that speech. The context included a description of his own working class background, his feeling that he would never fit an environment like Harvard, and his subsequent journey once actually there, leading eventually to a position as head of admissions, where he would like to see others get the same chance. I guess he can be quoted out of context, but his intentions at the time seemed more than benign. (And the Harvard president is female, at the moment!)</p>
<p>Our kids don’t check the box or do check the box or whatever on the SAT’s so we never get any of that mail. It works.</p>
<p>momofthreeboys raises an interesting idea-does anyone think limiting the number of college applications can work? Take the UCAS model-where students must choose 5 Universities and can only apply to either Oxford or Cambridge.</p>
<p>I can’t see being able to limit the number of apps in general - goes against the idea of being free to choose for yourself. If a person is willing to pay for and monitor all those applications, then why not? The high schools, OTOH, might be able to say that after X number (maybe 6 or 8?), transcripts etc would have to be paid for by the student.</p>
<p>My kid checked the box and gets brochures. She likes to look at them. If pictures interest her, she goes on their website to check it out. A three page letter from Haverd stating “You have what it takes…” seems an unnecessarily aggressive tactic to me.</p>
They may have the power, but this old gal will be surprised if they use it for anything other than their own benefit. Why would they? It’s marketing. They’re doing what marketers do; they don’t have an interest in telling students “you have a snowball’s chance in hell here.” When (and if) the increase in applications has a negative impact on colleges, they’ll use different tactics - but not because they want to be more user-friendly.</p>
<p>The most practical answer is for the applicant, and his/her parents, to be aware - and beware. Somehow my youngest d got THREE application packets from MIT. A careful look at the address labels showed slightly different variations in her last name. But we were never in danger of thinking that MIT must really want her because they sent her THREE glossy pieces of mail. In fact, when the third one came we all nearly fell down laughing. She said something like “I guess they don’t have any alumni working in the admissions department.”</p>
<p>Harvard is not a Wall Mart. As a non-profit organization benefiting from tax exempt status is it too much for us tax payers to ask that they market in a more responsible way? Besides, they are not selling anything. They are sold out. They just want one number, acceptance rate, in the USNEWS</p>
<p>Yes, there is enough information in the marketplace for families to make informed decisions and put together a reasonable list of colleges and universities for their students. I suspect at some point colleges and universities will reach a point where the cost/value equation for the amount of admissions employees, cost of marketing programs etc. cease to yield results and at that point they will question whether they really need 20,000 applications for a couple thousand spots or 40,000 applications for five thousand spots or whatever their metric is. </p>
<p>I can envision a point where high school senior year is returned to learning and not devoted to an entire year’s quest. There is enough information currently available to families to be able to determine approximately what their expected costs will be that the concept of casting a wide net doesn’t equate to fishing for an illusive tuition fairy and I expect in time the colleges/universities will use cost transparency as a way to whittle down applications.</p>
<p>I envision a very different marketplace in about a decade.</p>