<p>This is all I could find in a few minutes, from the school profile.
(full disclosure: no one in my family has ever attended Andover.)
““STUDENT DIVERSITY
The Academy is committed to establishing a community that encour- ages people of diverse backgrounds and beliefs to understand and respect one another and to be sensitive to differences of gender, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation. Andover’s 1778 Constitution charges the Academy to prepare “youth from every quarter” to under- stand that “goodness without knowledge is weak…yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous.” Students of color constitute more than one-third of the student body. A typical entering class contains students from 40 or more states and 25 countries.””</p>
<p>performersmom, my point is that I don’t mind the marketing. It doesn’t bother me that colleges are so much more selective now. It doesn’t bother me that schools like Chicago and Washington don’t take the kind of students who went there in the past and flourished, some other school will take them and they can flourish somewhere else. It doesn’t bother me that schools are working to increase their applications so that they can reject more students. It doesn’t even bother me that admissions is not always “fair”. I think that there are plenty of good colleges, and life should be spent “worrying” about things that ARE in your control. This whole college admissions rat race is only a rat race because people let it become one. It isn’t in my house.</p>
<p>Nor in mine, CRD. But I realize that not everyone has this perspective and control.</p>
<p>Importantly I think it is a rat race for the colleges- they have to keep feeding the marketing beast to keep up (with things that some argue should not be their goals)…</p>
<p>Full disclosure: neither of my D’s checked off the boxes on the PSAT. Even though they were NMSF’s, they have received NO promos exc from the colleges they visited (some of which are indeed not good fits for them!)</p>
<p>Hitting the first gens and the unawares is a double-edged sword. Can’t it be a little more precise? and transparent?</p>
<p>W/re the University of Chicago, I haven’t seen any of the recent marketing material, but my kids got an enormous volume of it in 2004-2006, and I really admired how well it met performersmom’s standard of communicating what the college was like. The contrast with WashU and other mass-mailers couldn’t have been greater – it was really informative and substantive. My daughter was aware of the University of Chicago before she started getting the mailings, but the mailings absolutely made a difference in convincing her it belonged near the top of her list.</p>
<p>That was all pre-Nondorf, however.</p>
<p>There was never a time when a B average and a 28 ACT were enough to get a student accepted at Chicago. There WAS a time when a student wasn’t rejected automatically for having a B average and a 28 ACT, but that student would have to have something that was awfully impressive in his or her application. And Chicago was (and is) the sort of college that would not necessarily appeal to so many B/28 students. </p>
<p>Not all such students are created equal. I once reviewed an application for an ultra-prestigious job from a student who had gotten only one B in his first two years of law school. One of his main recommenders was the professor who gave him the B. The letter said, in essence, “Mr. X got a B in my course because he refused to answer one of the two questions on my exam, writing instead a short essay on why it upset him. His answer on the other question on my exam was the single best exam answer I have seen in my 20-year career at this [highly ranked] institution.” That’s the kind of B student who used to get into the University of Chicago. And may still, but probably not.</p>
<p>I remember those mailings from Chicago, too, from when my son was looking. They were cool. I also liked the ones from Grinnell, although there were an awful lot of them. Much better than the generic viewbook with the picture of the approved diverse (but all attractive) group of students on the cover.</p>