<p>Schools have to manage their acceptances so that in the end they have enough students committing to maintain their budget. Schools that are often used as “safety” schools by top-ranked students know that they can end up way out of balance if they accept too many kids who end up going to “reach” or “match” schools. With the advent of the common app, it’s very easy for kids to send applications to schools that they really aren’t that interested in. No school wants to find themselves digging deep into their wait list because everyone they accepted chose to attend elsewhere. So how to tell? Measure interest. That includes tracking physical visits. Tracking who signs up for webinars, who requests snail mail, who joins the Facebook page. It also includes tracking emails. If you’re offended, well, then don’t bother opening the email. But if you are REALLY interested in a school (barring the most selective schools, since they don’t need to be worried about being “safeties”), then yes, read the email. Follow the links in the email. Register for anything on the web site you can register for. Each “touch” gets you a tick-mark for having shown interest.</p>
<p>No one is telling you you HAVE to open an email or click on a link. This is not Sally Field saying “you like me, you really like me!” This is part of enrollment management, to assess the likelihood a student will actually come to an institution if accepted. Someone who never requests any information, who never reads an email, who never physically visits, who shows no interest other than sending in an application, may get rejected in favor of a very similar student who HAS shown they are interested in the school. It’s purely business driven.</p>
<p>@chickeninacar - When a rejection seems WAY out of line with the expectations, I sometimes recommend that families call the office to discuss it. The best caller is the student, and most AOs will respect that kind of call. It’s hard to make, I admit. Usually the mom calls, and in these cases that’s what happened and that’s what they were told. In another case, the high school had sent the wrong transcript and the AO had missed that fact. The student was admitted immediately.</p>
<p>@chickeninacar - You seem to know the usual ways to show interest. The only other one that I will mention is that some colleges are subscribing to data mining services (google Hobson’s) which allow them to peg specific IP addresses to specific applicants. So your child’s web activity can be personally identified. This is when it gets truly creepy, but the same algorithms which predict consumer behavior are now being used by some (not all) college admission offices. So surfing a college’s website a bit is a good idea . . . and not surfing undesirable topics is also a good idea.</p>
<p>^ The reason I ask is that about month ago I started a thread seeking suggestions on what to do when you get an admissions officer that doesn’t respond to a kid’s attempts at showing interest. </p>
<p>It was peek decision season for this year as I recall, @chickeninacar - things have probably calmed down dramatically by now. I know with my D’s favorite school (which she is now attending) she didn’t barrage with questions but did follow up now and then. She visited Jr year then stopped by the desk at the college fair just to get one more incidence of “face time”. She sent an email to explain shy she couldn’t attend the session at her HS in the fall so as not to appear disinterested. She needed merit money and wanted her folder to go in the “consider for scholarships” pile when the time came. The story has a happy ending. DS has a similar school except he is more at the 75% while she was topping out the charts. It is a good match school but he needs a boost to put it over the top and possibly receive merit money. He is not showing fake interest or trying to hedge his bets.</p>
<p>I would also say that this mail sin’t SPAM. He went on the website and clicked the “tell me more” button or registered to receive more information. When the information came he then followed up by actually opening it per his mother’s coaching ;)</p>
<p>“Rather than being offered suggestions, I got berated for not stopping D from pestering her hard working AO.”</p>
<p>Because to be honest, it’s best to show interest through the channels that are easiest for them and on their terms - which might be visiting their website, doing “virtual tours” if unable to join a real tour, joining a twitter or similar chat hosted by the college, and so forth – rather than on your terms. </p>
<p>Think about this way: They want to know that you’re interested in them, but they simply don’t have time to create personal relationships. You make it easier on them if you use their channels that they offer you to say “yes, I’m interested” rather than try to forge new ones. The chat room can always add 50 more participants, but an AO doesn’t have the bandwidth to now have 50 new student BFF’s. </p>
<p>Remember my kid received tons of college app materials in mail and emails. I could tell some of them more honest, serious when they offered to waive the app fees along with a simplified app form. Overall it wasn’t very hard to distinguish a genuine invitation providing in-depth info from quite general ones. Also I don’t remember the most competitive schools such as ivies and top LASs ever flooded us with invites. </p>
<p>I got an email like that from Princeton. Princeton, seriously! </p>
<p>I sent them a super long reply explaining why I find it embarassing for Princeton and the only thing I got back from admissions was this statement: “Remove yourself from the mailing list”. </p>
<p>Many of the schools contacted my kids by text or email. The environment appreciates this, but honestly it is more likely that my kids would even consider the school if the marketing came through the mail and I saw it. A few schools kept sending things, and at least I’d look at them. My kids just deleted the texts and emails.</p>
<p>@PtonTriangle86, that’s an interesting approach, one we did not think to do. </p>
<p>In general, the kid’s applications panned out as expected, but there were two surprise rejections. Both were schools the kid visited multiple times; at both schools, the kid thought the visits went really well. The kid’s stats were comfortably above 75th percentile at both schools; these are very good schools, the kid just has dynamite stats. The kid also wrote school-specific essays and had great ECs as well as a very rigorous schedule. </p>
<p>The kid had considered the merits of merit aid and had decided that, were one of these schools, we will call it College X, to offer merit aid, it would be the kid’s clear first choice. The kid visited campus a few more times, met with and corresponded with faculty, attended classes. The kid was not interested in poring over thousands – and there were thousands – of marketing emails, so most of those emails went unopened.</p>
<p>The kid did not receive merit aid from College X; the kid was not admitted to College X. We were shocked. This was not “why wasn’t my special snowflake admitted everywhere?” shock, it was “we did our diligence and this seemed like a pretty sure thing” shock. We expected rejections, just not from College X. Some have suggested there must have been some deficit in the kid’s application, yet there were offers of admission and merit aid to more selective/ higher-ranked schools. I wonder if the school used some algorithm and concluded incorrectly that the kid was not serious about College X . It would be frustrating to learn that opening those silly emails counted for more than the time and effort we expended viisting College X. </p>
<p>Visiting a school is the best way to demonstrate interest. I would find it hard to believe that not opening emails would be an issue when you’ve visited multiple times, especially if you registered with the admissions office when visiting.</p>
<p>It’s the kids who didn’t visit, didn’t register with the school’s web site, didn’t request a catalog, didn’t attend an online open house, didn’t fill out a postcard at a college fair, AND didn’t bother to open any emails that look like they’re using the school as a safety. Schools want to see that a student has done SOME due diligence about the school. They know not everyone can visit, but every student should be able to interact to some degree with a school electronically.</p>
<p>What you can’t know is what the applicant pool looked like that your child was competing against, and what niches the school was looking to fill with its acceptances. Sorry things didn’t work out. </p>
<p>Most of the unsolicited emails were bothersome, but some were amusing. One started off with, “Say it isn’t so. Tell me there isn’t another school in the picture. We haven’t heard from you.” I wouldn’t mind if my daughter looked at that school because I thought that was funny.</p>
<p>And for schools checking to see if you’d clicked on to their website. One school posted their decisions on a Wednesday at 5:00 pm and by Thursday morning my daughter received an email asking her if she had lost her password because she hadn’t checked her decision yet. Pushy, pushy! But also understandable.</p>
<p>Wow. We weren’t inundated at all. Only U Chicago was obnoxiously sending us brochures on end. If my son had wanted to go there we would have been fooled. He (and we) must have been flying under the radar.</p>
<p>My son plays a sport and while he is a good player and plays on a mid-high level regional team, he is not a candidate for a D1 or even a higher level D3 school. Yet every day I (and he) get multiple emails suggesting he should attend this camp or that program because he is a promising player. Which is completely untrue. The programs are just a money grab for the schools. Some of his fellow players found this out last summer when the coaches at the camps had no interest in them (even if they got a specific invitation to attend).</p>
<p>The emails and mailing from colleges that my kid has no realistic shot at seem to be the same - a way for the schools to increase their applicant pool and reduce their percent admittance. </p>
<p>Ridethewave it seems like your kid was a victim of the so-called “Tufts Syndrome” where schools protect their yield by denying (or waitlisting) students that they deem to be over-qualified and thus unlikely to enroll.</p>
DS has a similar school except he is more at the 75% while she was topping out the charts. It is a good match school but he needs a boost to put it over the top and possibly receive merit money. He is not showing fake interest or trying to hedge his bets.</p>