<p>But Harvard didn’t know any of my ecs or anything. They knew my sophomore PSAT score. That’s it.</p>
<p>^^ You’re correct – Harvard doesn’t know anything else about you, just your PSAT score. They are trying to interest you in sending in an application, where they can examine your transcript, essays, EC’s, and teacher recommendations. It’s the game all colleges play . . . and Harvard having a wonderful endowment, can afford to play the game better than other colleges. Past news articles have Admissions purchasing 80,000 to 100,000 names from the College Board every year. To some extent, you should feel honored that your PSAT score was high enough to interest Harvard in purchasing your name. On the other hand, because they purchased so many other names from the College Board, it doesn’t mean your chances have increased one iota to gain one of the prized 1,600 beds. If you have an interest in attending Harvard, you should submit an application. But, you should not feel special or unique because they sent you materials.</p>
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<p>From what I have heard, they may not even know your score. </p>
<p>They set thresholds for cutoffs in sections when buying these scores. So MIT might have a Math cut off of 65 while Harvard may have a reading cut off of 60 and so on. One of counselors on CC had explained about how it works an year or two ago and this is what he said about what they are buying. So technically, you could score above the cut off in one section but be really bad in the other two and they may not even know about it unless a baseline is set in each section.</p>
<p>The schools are looking for potential applicants to target at this level, not people they are trying to admit. However, whether you are admit worthy is based on a whole set of other factors once the baseline for the scores has been established.</p>
<p>@gibby,</p>
<p>When I read what you write about these efforts on the parts of the most elite colleges and universities, I almost get the sense is that you view their efforts in a somewhat negative light, perhaps even a little cynically. ;-)</p>
<p>I don’t. I don’t think Harvard is trying to boost its applications for the sake of boosting applications or to better its ratings, or anything else. I think Harvard over the past nearly century has striven to become less of an elite old boys club for rich eastern elite white folks and more of an intellectually-elite school for everyone. And so, they do what they can to get the word out. Paradoxically, in their efforts to make the school less elite in some ways (based on class, position in society, wealth, who you know, to whom you’re related), they have gone a far way in making it much more elite in others (going from a nearly 20% acceptance rate in the early 1990s to a 5% rate today). But anyone who subscribes to the idea of advancement through merit should applaud Harvard and other top schools who do this sort of thing, at least a little.</p>
<p>The bottom line is if they were just trying to boost applications, they’d send to a much larger percentage of the several million students each year who graduate from high school.</p>
<p>@notjoe: you’re correct, I do view the efforts cynically. Other colleges, like Yale and MIT for example, have cut back on their mailings to students as they feel it’s deceptive to encourage students who don’t have a chance to apply. On the other hand, as you said, Harvard feels differently.
<a href=“Bloomberg - Are you a robot?”>Bloomberg - Are you a robot?;
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<p>Also see: <a href=“More applications not always better, officers say - Yale Daily News”>http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2010/01/28/more-applications-not-always-better-officers-say/</a></p>
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<p>@gibby,</p>
<p>Sounds like sour grapes from the other schools. In your previous post, you wrote:</p>
<p>“Past news articles have Admissions purchasing 80,000 to 100,000 names from the College Board every year.”</p>
<p>In your last post, the article that you cite says approvingly of Yale:</p>
<p>“Yale University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are scaling back their marketing, saying they don’t want to encourage kids who likely won’t be accepted. Yale, which admitted 7.4 percent of applicants this year, cut its mailings by a third since 2005 to 80,000,”</p>
<p>It doesn’t sound to me like what Harvard is doing is out of line with what Yale is doing NOW, no less what they were doing previously (my little mental calculator tells me that if Yale cut mailings by one-third and CUT BACK to 80,000, that means previously, they were mailing 120,000 pieces).</p>
<p>Anyway, as for this: </p>
<p>"‘The overwhelming majority of students receiving these mailings will not be admitted in the end, and Harvard knows this well,’ said Reider, a former admissions officer at Stanford University."</p>
<p>That’s a disingenuous statement, and Mr. Reider should know it. I remember a quip by JC Penney once about advertising. He said, “I know that 90% of my advertising budget is wasted, but I don’t know which 90% it is.”</p>
<p>It’s difficult to predict, strictly off of PSAT scores, who is Ivy material and who isn’t. A lower threshold does indeed wind up including more kids who won’t make it, but it also risks fewer kids being left out who really had a chance. So, schools cast the net widely. Frankly, whether Yale sends out 80K pieces or 120K pieces (and Harvard sends out 100K) doesn’t change the moral valance of the activity. If it were 80K pieces versus 1 million pieces, that’d change the moral dimension.</p>
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<p>I totally agree, which is why I think is disingenuous for any college, be it HYPSM or a community college, to send mailings or emails to students off a PSAT score.</p>
<p>So, no points to MIT and Yale for merely cutting back?</p>
<p>Is there another basis that you think is okay from which to derive mailing lists?</p>
<p>Or are you against unsolicited college mailings altogether?</p>
<p>Yes, I think MIT, Yale, Brown, Duke and others get bonus-points for trimming their mailings. All selective colleges are going after the same students – students that score in excess of 2100 on the SAT. That would be about 60,000 kids from this list: <a href=“http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/SAT-Percentile-Ranks-Composite-CR-M-W-2013.pdf”>http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/SAT-Percentile-Ranks-Composite-CR-M-W-2013.pdf</a>. When HYPSM is sending materials to 80,000 to 120,000 students, who else are they sending them to? Or maybe HYPSM should just target URM’s and assume students with 2100+ scores would apply anyway.</p>
<p>So - recruiting from the SAT at 2100 is acceptable. What about from the PSAT at 210?</p>
<p>PSAT’s are generally taken during a student’s freshman and/or sophomore year in high school – at least they were when my kids went to HS. I think college’s sending promotional materials based upon PSAT scores is a bit too early, regardless of the score. After all, isn’t that what we tell student’s here on CC when they post a chance thread based upon their PSAT score. We all say – wait until you have your actual SAT scores, as the PSAT number is not a strict predictor of your actual score; actual scores can and do vary depending upon a number of variables. IMHO, colleges should hold off promoting their school until actual SAT scores are in. As you previously said
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<p>The skew of CC. A student with a test score that is in the 94th percentile doesn’t believe he’s done well. Now I understand it’s an individual thought based on what he thinks he’s capable of and if it was my child I would be encouraging him to retake and do better but he shouldn’t have a negative feeling about the score either. The average test score at Harvard for an African American is around 2100. If the OP takes the test again with some prep he’ll probably hit that mark. Now he could be denied with a 2200 or he could be admitted with a 2100 it depends on the rest of the application as previously stated. </p>
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<p>Which is one reason why I think Harvard should only be targeting URM’s. Instead, they target URM’s and then send 80,000 possibly 120,000 or more brochures and emails off to everyone and anyone that has a test score above a certain threshold. That would make more sense to me, but I’m not an AO.</p>
<p>“I think sending college materials from a PSAT score during a student’s freshman or sophomore year is a bit too early, regardless of the score, as those scores tend to go up or down for a variety of reasons.”</p>
<p>If the reason not to send mailings based off of PSAT scores is that scores for the younger folk are variable, then it’s a specious argument. Except for students already testing near the upper limits of the test, scores are more likely to increase from freshman or sophomore year to senior year. Someone who scores a 190 as a 9th grader is more likely to score a 2100 on the SAT as a senior than to score a 1700. Your reasoning actually argues better for a lower cutoff.</p>
<p>"‘It’s difficult to predict, strictly off of PSAT scores, who is Ivy material and who isn’t.’"</p>
<p>This applies to SAT scores, too. I read that Harvard rejects most students who apply with perfect SATs. In fact, this applies to any single aspect of the college application. A test score in isolation, a GPA in isolation, a teacher’s recommendation in isolation provide very little information to determine whether or not the student will succeed in applying to the most elite universities. Again, if one is to try to make this argument, the real argument is that selective colleges should be unable to execute mailings based on any single demographic attribute. But, for a fast, easy screen of folks who are more likely to be credible applicants, using a PSAT screen isn’t a bad place to start…</p>
<p>“PSAT’s are generally taken during a student’s freshman and/or sophomore year in high school – at least they were where my kids went to school.”</p>
<p>Where I am, most schools don’t administer the PSAT the first time until sophomore year, if even by then. And the one that counts - that provides eligibility for National Merit participation - is in the junior year. Because the National Merit folks will not consider any result other than the junior year result, many schools, especially those that aren’t elite Ivy feeders, don’t administer the PSAT until junior year. It saves a large gob of money for non-elite public schools and old, broken-down, poor private schools.</p>
<p>I don’t really see any downside in sending mailings to kids off their PSAT scores.</p>
<p>I really don’t think most kids who are smart enough to do well will, upon any reasonable amount of investigation, think that getting a mailer from Harvard or MIT means they’re on the fast track to glory.</p>
<p>By the time most kids get around to actually filling out their applications, the ones who are applying to the top schools will have heard about admissions rates in the single digits.</p>
<p>Conversely, I think that for students who have the desire to start looking at schools early, the experience can be an extremely positive one, as the star-struck freshmen who starts in naivete will have time to mature and learn, and get a better feel for what’s out there, what’s possible, what’s not so likely, etc.</p>
<p>Finally, although correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation, I will note that as the elite schools have become more aggressive in recruiting, they have significantly increased their socioeconomic and ethnic diversity. In that that was a large part of the goal of these programs - to reach out to folks who were not part of the traditional audience for the elite schools - I’m willing to entertain the notion that these aggressive mailing programs may have enticed one or two kids along the way from high schools not generally known to send their graduates to Ivies and the like.</p>
<p>@gibby:</p>
<p>My daughter (non-URM, with top grades and test scores, who listed a STEM major when registering for the PSAT) received numerous mailings, including viewbooks, from Yale, Princeton, MIT, and other selective colleges, but only a single email from Harvard. Despite this, she’ll be attending Harvard. I know nothing about their decision process in deciding who receives their mailings, but suspect it’s not a coincidence that Harvard made little effort to convince her to apply - she’s in a demographic that is likely over-represented in their applicant pool.</p>
<p>I know it’s only a single data point, but to me it suggests that Harvard’s mailing campaign might be more focused than some of the other colleges you mention.</p>
<p>Gibby having children who probably have similar academic traits to yours based on where they attend or attended school I can say esp in the case of our first child. The mailings helped. It gave us a sense, I know in some cases it’s false that certain schools were attainable but it also exposed us to schools that we had not been familiar with or did not know the proficiency of like a Wash U, Williams or Pomona or even how many options were at a place like the Univ of Chicago. Do some of the schools go to far. Sure. But with a little common sense it can prove of great value esp to families that are first generation. </p>