<p>Okay, receiving unwanted junk mail is not suffering. Good grief. </p>
<p>It seems like a terrible reason to apply to a college – “free” application and “no essay”. Considering how much money you are likely to pay them for the next four years, I personally do not think you should allow yourself to be distracted by these types of marketing ploys. It is like getting a toaster to open a bank account (which most younger posters will not remember 
). Yes, you get a toaster, but over time the bank makes much more than the toaster is worth from your business. I stick with the idea that you need to play your own game of identifying the right colleges without getting distracted by freebies. College application season is stressful, and there is only so much time to spend on essays, applications, financial aid paperwork, and final visits. </p>
<p>Two telemarketing calls this morning! </p>
<p>@Flossy haha yeah true just trying to make a point here so you don’t have to get 50-60 college junk emails every day.</p>
<p>Almost all of the schools we heard from gave us the option of discontinuing their e-mails. When we did the correspondence stopped. </p>
<p>I have a 2x2x2 ft. basket full of left-over mail…I read the NHRP scholarship ones, skimmed the brand-name ones for fun, and barely glanced at the rest. None of them influenced my apps -not even the NHRP ones, since I knew I could get more money from a UC anyways -except for one. It was a letter reminding me to apply for a merit scholarship; I hadn’t really considered the school before/wasn’t overly excited, and thought I couldn’t get it anyways. However, it was a QB school who would still give me good need based aid, so I thought “Why not?” It was all very random -I sent in the app in a whim, particularly enjoying myself with the quirky supplement. On December 2nd, when I didn’t match, I checked off an extra box on Questbridge’s RD forwarding. Let’s just say, I’ll be happily attending the school in the fall; I like to call it fate. ;)</p>
<p>My son and I enjoyed playing “Who Loves You Today?” at the mailbox from August through April. As for the free/no essay/quick decision offers, he was amused by their various names (“priority,” etc.) and created a file called SuperSpecialGoldstarBonus or some such thing. When a couple of them did match his interests, he applied and was accepted with merit aid, and that provided a nice basis of comparison with his more selective options. Attitude is everything. In his case, Macalester won the prize for most mail–easily 50+ mailings.</p>
<p>I don’t get why people are keeping bags / boxes full of this mail. I can understand keeping a brochure from a place that interests you, but doesn’t the rest of it just go into recycle along with the rest of the day’s mail? Why would you save / kept it all? </p>
<p>Anyway, do you really think there’s any info in these mailings you couldn’t get from a website? </p>
<p>PG, probably for the same reason that my DW still has some school reports from the kids’ second grade. </p>
<p>“I don’t get why people are keeping bags / boxes full of this mail.”</p>
<p>LOL, it does seem that the same people that complain about the amount of mail also hold on to it…hmmm. It really doesn’t have to be a thing. I walk to my mailbox, pull out the mail, flip through it on the way back up the drive, enter the garage and deposit “junk” unopened into the recycling bucket and continue on with my day. If I held on to every credit card offer, every catalog, every insurance solicitation, I could have a mountain of that stuff too, but who does that? I have 3 boys, so why would I carry an “American Girl” catalog into my house? If your kid hates LACs and refuses to leave the east coast, why would a Reed brochure even make it into the house, forget enshrined in a junk mail collection?</p>
<p>Yep. My routine is: pick up the mail, turn on the shredder, insert-insert-insert. D, on the other hand, is the packrat in our house. I know there must be a box or a bag filled with saved college brochures in the squirrel’s nest she calls a bedroom. </p>
<p>The thing that is the funniest/sad about these mailings to me is hearing a student, or sometimes a parent say they are “being recruited” by xyz school because they received this “personal letter.”</p>
<p>Not at all, if you learn how to spot emails that are mass-distributed form letters. Realize that this early in the game, most of your daughter’s college emails will be coming from colleges whose computers figured out that your daughter’s PSAT scores were in or above the average percentile for their school. It’s based on that and nothing else. It is very easy to send emails with “personalized” greetings. Real, personal emails from admissions counselors or other contacts look, sound, and feel very different from the form letters.</p>
<p>I find myself looking at some of the shiny, slick brochures and calculating how much it must cost to produce them and mail them all out. And then we wonder why college costs so much! In a couple of cases, the brochures have sent exactly the wrong message – “Look at us! We’re wasteful and we cost too much! Send your money here so we can waste some more!”</p>
<p>As a private college counselor, I’ve heard of more than one student lately who was not admitted to a “safe” school because they had “not opened our emails, so we assumed (s)he wasn’t really interested.” So while I agree that all of this is marketing, current applicants need to be careful about the emails that arrive from colleges on their lists. They also need to be aware that LACs with 20-25% acceptance rates are often customers of Noel Levitz (google it) and they are actually running an index rating on each student’s likelihood of matriculating. Some use it for marketing, so that they don’t waste expensive materials on students who are not likely to attend, and some use it to swing admission decisions.</p>
<p>^@PtonTriangle66:</p>
<p>How did you find out that the reason a student was not admitted was that he/she didn’t open the school’s emails?</p>
<p>Any specific advice (aside from the obvious visits, respond to emails, etc) on how a kid can be proactive in giving a school the impression that he/she has a high likelihood of matriculating?</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>My kid has a school of interest that does care about interest. Embedded in one of the emails was a link to a virtual tour and embedded in that was an offer to sign up for something else and contact his admissions guy. Had he not opened the email and read through (at his mother’s urging) her would not have noticed that.</p>
<p>Here is part of a subsequent email that he received:</p>
<p>“Thank you again for your interest in _____________! Your registration at our virtual campus tour has been processed.”</p>
<p>I wouldn’t want to go to a school that is so controlling as to tell me when to open SPAM and how to control my search for a college. Honestly. Are these schools so vain as to require that you like them best, that they are the favorite because you text them 21 times and another school only 10? You are dropped from the party because you didn’t RSVP quickly enough?</p>
<p>I think if I respect the rules they set up - apply on time, send the required documents - they should respect me and consider my application as submitted.</p>
<p>I agree, but there are definitely schools that want to be your first choice and measure these things. The truth is they are not most people’s first choice and they know it. They are protecting their yield.</p>
<p>The Noel-Levitz site is fascinating to me, both as someone who works in marketing and as a parent of a high-school junior. Interesting.</p>