When my DD applied this year, she did not make it into her ED first-choice school, so ended up sending her application to quite a few others… As most kids do, over the last couple years she got masses of mailings from bunches of schools, some of which she applied to but did apply to a bunch that she researched on her own, and some top tier and ivies. She has a younger brother who is a sophomore and just took the PSAT – and his college mailings started the end of last September. However, in his mailings recently noticed a couple familiar names from more competitive schools that DD applied to, but never sent her promotional mailings – the first of which sent DD a likely letter a week ago, and the other today from an Ivy.
Two questions:1. Do you think DS’s name and address were pulled from DD’s application?
2. Does the fact that these two schools bothered contacting my son, but not my daughter mean that they
considered DD’s application competitive enough to bother wooing a sibling with ostensibly similar stats?
@Rollomama, you could be correct. I have no idea. There are other possibilities, though. Has your younger son taken the PSAT yet? We had a similar experience with my children (son-college freshman, daughter-high school sophomore). However, this was explained away because the school district began offering free PSAT testing in both 8th and 10th grade for my daughter. My son was only offered it in 10th grade. Hence, her mailings started much sooner than his. Other factors like being in NHS or other service/academic groups could explain it as well.
You could also check with other students in your particular area. One of our friends, whose daughter is older, was very flattered when his child began receiving recruitment letters from a particular private school offering a fairly substantial scholarship (discount). That is until all of us with younger children began receiving the same letters over the next few years. It turns out that the school was simply checking PSAT scores from our geographic area and blanket recruiting students in a particular score band. Totally, fine, but not as “personal” of a compliment as he had assumed. When his younger daughter received the letter, he didn’t even open it.
One school we know def took info off the application. 1-the child has not taken any testing in recent years. 2- the college is not in state and our HS rarely sends students to there, if ever So, it is only explain by taking info off application.
AP tests are also run by the College Board. They probably get info from that data as well depending on scores. There are a multitude of standardized tests given in school besides PSAT (PARCC in NJ) where the data is used to track the kids.
I don’t know what happened with your children, but I am sure that one college knows the name, location and likely graduation year of my daughter who receives their mailings based on her older sibling’s application. The younger daughter has done no College Board testing.
But our dog received an invitation to the Harvard/Yale/Princeton/UVa admissions road show a couple of years back. They obviously use many different databases for their mailings.