<p>I don’t think my daughter received more than about 6 mailings from any school and she hasn’t gotten any phone calls. I’d consider calls pretty intrusive unless she had requested contact specifically from that school or already applied. I’d be pretty unhappy about a cold call unless it was to offer her a big scholarship.</p>
<p>I don’t know what the college board forms look like, but it would be nice if students could register some college preferences there. It is sad to see the wasted resources, since the vast majority of these mailings came from small colleges, and my daughter isn’t interested in attending a small college. There are also some geographic areas she doesn’t want to go to. </p>
<p>I can’t understand why a college would outsource the emails. How hard is it for someone who spends a lot of time selling the school to prospective students to write a few paragraphs about the school–why would they even consider paying someone else to do this?</p>
<p>Interestingly, my daughter has found that some University websites aren’t nearly as informative or easy to use as they could be. I would have expected making information organized and easy to find for prospective and new students would be a top priority, but apparently it’s not. One small example: Trying to look at what kind of schedule she would follow as a computer science major. In some school’s it’s very difficult to piece together that information. Even at schools which give a sample program, many just refer to course numbers. We don’t know what CS 310 and Math 270 are, and I doubt the incoming freshmen do either. Would it kill them to include the course titles along with the numbers, and would it be so hard to also hyperlink to the course descriptions?<br>
There are a few schools we haven’t been able to visit. I spent quite a bit of time trying just to see what the campus of one such place looks like. I still don’t know because all the photos I could find showed the same building. Would it be so hard to have a webpage with a video campus tour or even just photos? And when you do campus visits, you rarely get to see the dorms. How about posting some dorm interior tours or photos online as well? A few schools do things like this but it’s astonishing how many don’t.</p>