<p>I've received letters and invitations from MIT, Penn, Brown, Columbia, Stanford, Northwestern, UChicago, WUSTL, Wellesley, and Tulane, among many others. Obviously, I would love the opportunity to attend any of these schools, so I'm wondering what made them send their mail to me. Are there any benefits in the college application process because of receiving these colleges' mail? Thanks!</p>
<p>No, doesn’t mean very much in the big scheme of things. It’s just marketing. And although they all tell you how special you are, you are not being specifically recruited, except for your application fees. Mostly it just means you met some minimal threshold on your PSAT which put you on the mailing list they bought. In all liklihood you will get tons and tons of mail from a lot of great schools. Don’t read too much into it.</p>
<p>Awwwww man!</p>
<p>One of the moms here kept every single piece of college mail that her kid received, and then weighed it and reported how many pounds it came to about a week ago. I can’t find the thread right now, I think it is in the Parents Forum.</p>
<p>Why do parents even use this website?</p>
<p>Liv, rethink that question. There are parents on this board who’ve shepherded multiple kids through the admissions process, and figured out how to pay the bills. They have a lot of experience. You could learn a lot from them if you’ll be willing to listen.</p>
<p>Oh, and the colleges are writing to you because they know your address. Nothing more. They probably got it from College Board.</p>
<p>I’ve rethought it, and I’m still curious as to why they do.</p>
<p>Who? The parents or the colleges?</p>
<p>The colleges send all the mailings because they are trying to sell you a product: four years at their college. They are especially hoping that you might be someone who can pay the full bill without any financial aid, or someone who would add a little something extra to their student community. Some are secretly most interested in increasing the number of applicants so that they can then reject a greater number of applicants than in previous years thus improving one of the factors that goes into the calculation of the rankings produced by USNWR.</p>
<p>As for the parents, I can’t speak for anyone else, but in my case I learned way too much about this college-search process trying to help Happykid through it to just quit without paying something back to the community. That and it keeps me from eating bon-bons all day.</p>
<p>Not to mention collecting application fees.</p>
<p>Happymom, you seem nice. Some parents will write paragraphs on why their kid is superior and deserves to go to HYPSM and THAT is what annoys me!</p>
<p>A lot of us parents live in communities with high schools that do not have good guidance counselors. In the school my son attends, every guidance counselor has 400 kids to advise, and has to deal with drugs, gangs, pregnancies, truancies, etc., and has neither the time nor skill to help much with college admissions to the kind of schools that are sending you mail. It is the things I learned here that kept us from making some big blunders.</p>
<p>So it you tone down the 'tude, you will find parents here who are quite helpful. I probably read a dozen common app essays for kids last fall, some of them multiple times.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>There are lots of annoying people on public forums - nature of the beast. Of course, some people are actually trying to make an important observation using personal experience that might be helpful to others. But yeah. some have other motives.</p>
<p>Liv, maybe I misinterpreted the tone of your question. If I did, I apologize.</p>
<p>Here’s my answer. I have a kid who’s a senior, and another who’s a freshman. I used to teach high school. I know a lot about kids and schooling, but until I started to post on CC, most of what I knew about college admissions was 25 years out of date. If you’d asked me to guess what a year of private college costs, I’d have underestimated by 20% or more. If you’d asked me what it takes to get into Princeton or Penn State or Towson, I’d have underestimated by 20% or more.</p>
<p>I still know a fair bit about colleges, but I needed CC to help me determine what was a match and what was a reach for my senior.</p>
<p>And, as happymom said, a lot of parents have spent a lot of time learning about colleges, so when adolescents come here to ask important questions about college selection, or the application process, or financial aid, they like to provide informed, sensible answers based on recent, practical experience.</p>
<p>Honestly, if there weren’t parents on CC, the lion’s share of what you’d have left is a bunch of 16-, 17- and 18-year-olds making stuff up.</p>
<p>They send out tons of that mail because they want large numbers of students to apply so they can reject most of them, and consequently look really “selective” and therefore “prestigious” in the eyes of subsequent generations of gullible HS students, who will then apply in even larger numbers and be rejected in even larger numbers . . . ad nauseum.</p>
<p>Do you really think Harvard sends out 70,000+ actual applications because it’s afraid it might miss someone? Hah! If you believe that, I’ve got this bridge I’d like to sell you.</p>
<p>Is a college essay on volunteering for the CommonApp too clich</p>
<p>Thanks for the compliment liv4physicz! One of the things that keeps me here is all of the kids who aren’t Harvard-bound who feel intimidated by those who are. All of you, no matter how much you can afford to pay for your educations, what your GPAs are like, or what your career goals are, have a right to information about the process that you are facing and encouragement as you work your way through that process.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, it doesn’t! haha
I used to keep a file box full of carefully sorted college mail, but about halfway through my junior year I realized its worth and just began putting the bulk of it through the shredder :)</p>
<p>The marketing department (it probably has a loftier name, like “institutional advancement”) is not connected to the admissions office. My kids got mail from colleges they would never have gotten into, and from colleges they wouldn’t have considered attending. Trust me–if you get mail from Princeton, it doesn’t mean they have the slightest interest in you personally.</p>
<p>^A kid at my school who receives exceptionally low grades in all of his classes (I know this because he brags about his slacker ways) received some mail from Yale and nearly threw a fit; he expressed to all of us just how proud of himself he truly was and it wasn’t until someone asked him if he’d mistakenly checked the “yes, I’d like for my contact information to be handed out to the colleges” box on his SAT registration that he finally calmed down. LOL.</p>
<p>OP mentions on another thread that she is female. A female that checks off an interest in science and engineering is very likely to end up a lot of mailing lists.</p>
<p>Liv, actually look over that junk mail carefully. You could have a real shot at MIT, for example: the acceptance rate for females is around 17-18%, pretty much the same as it now is for Northwestern overall.</p>