Schools should try sending large envelopes full of cash. 
Obviously, as a dean, youâre sympathetic to the collegeâs point of view.
From a familyâs point of view, the question really is:
Is having random colleges grabbing my kidâs attention necessarily a good thing? Do they really have my kidâs interests in mind or their own?
We are generally privacy-conscious at casa AroundHere. We run tracker-blockers on our computers, turn off ads where we can, have security locks on our credit reports, and so on. Getting a card that reminds us that colleges have my kidâs birthday in their system would just freak us out. Rising junior DD has not filled in her entire student profile on the college board site and seems to be getting a lot less junk mail.
Given the useless stuff older sister received (lots of the template-based and information-free marketing materials), I donât really worry that she is âmissing out.â Except maybe she will be done of those dreaded âstealth applicantsâ?
The outreach emails or snail mails that offered to waive the application fee were winners. It made the difference when S was narrowing down a few last âmatchâ schools and didnât have strong preferences otherwise.
One school that was not originally high on my sonâs interest list moved itself up with a series of letters from departments that matched his interests. Another school, much higher âprestigeâ, dropped off his list by sending him randomly generated mailings from departments in which he had zero interest. His attitude was that he didnât want to go to a school that wasnât competent enough to do a bit of simple data mining.
A few schools (Millsaps was the worst of several repeat offenders) sent several dozen e-mails. I kept track as an experiment, but they were all off the list after 2-3 e-mails. Why? Because it was plain as day that they could care less about the applicants. At least two sent e-mails trying to entice me to apply by saying âIâve started your application for you, NotVerySmart! Just click here (link) and apply to Millsaps today. Now is your chance!â
These schools also made declarations like âWeâll consider you for scholarships!â (a wonderful differentiator, except the same is true of hundreds of private colleges), waived application fees (with multiple reminders), and boasted of degrees that could be completed in two years with a fairly unremarkable preparatory curriculum. Since I ignored most e-mails, I got a few titled âNotVerySmart, am I reaching you?â Later, with application deadlines looming, the steady stream became a cascade of âItâs not too late, NotVerySmartâ and âDonât miss your chance, NotVerySmartâ and âNotVerySmart - for a student like you, I can extend our deadline. Apply now!â The last of these was comical - one school sent a dozen such e-mails, the last of which arrived in late May.
I found it oddly fascinating to watch well-paid deans of admissions (or rather, the underpaid interns writing e-mails that went out over their signatures) talk to prospective applicants as most people would speak with ten-year-olds. Promising to fill in the application for me, give me scholarships for having a pulse, and get me out into the world with a degree almost before I matriculated said something about these schoolsâ values. The marketing wasnât a selling point for me, and I wouldnât be surprised if others feel the same way.
I would say reaching out to high school guidance counselors directly. When GCs suggest schools to kids, thereâs something more personal about it. Go to College Days at high schools so kids can meet someone from your school in person.
@homedog-I agree that a specific recommendation from a guidance counselor can go a long way toward sparking a a studentâs interest in a particular college. I think it would be a win-win if admission officials would be more candid with counselors than they typically are about an institutionâs current needs. For instance, if the school is seeking more STEM majors or music majors or males, they need to say so. A friendâs son looked at Washington and Lee last year after his counselor told him that the university was seeking Jewish applicants. He didnât ultimately apply because he picked a different Early Decision school and got in, but at least he went to campus and strongly considered W and L, based partially on the fact that he, as a Jewish student, felt âwanted.â And, if his ED college had turned him down, he would have definitely applied.
I think a major issue here is that the answer is different for different segments of the âmarketâ. I only put that in quotes because college, while certainly overlapping regular businesses in many aspects, also have key differences that make them NOT regular businesses. That strongly affects this issue.
So without market research, my first layer hypothesis is that the typical CC user benefits far less from ANY mass marketing approach and materials that would be used, and these materials often would, in fact, have the opposite effect of what was intended. These parents and kids are so well informed that only a highly personalized, highly targeted approach of the type mentioned by @Sally_Rubenstone would be likely to move the needle. With all due respect to my friend @shawnspencer, the school has your transcripts and so would know that you are in your 4th year of German, and presumably has other information as well. Unless you havenât even applied yet, in which case shawn is right. I am thinking that for this level of student emails to âjust applyâ are relatively ineffective, although Tulane was a notable exception after Katrina with their free application that was also extremely simple to complete. But for the most part I think this student would be best handled by a personal pitch, since many of these schools have relatively high yields anyway.
The vast majority of students, however, are probably benefiting from just being made aware that certain schools exist and may be good candidates for their applications. CC wonât capture this large segment very well, and the reactions on here to the mass marketing wonât be the same. So I guess my point, if I am right, is that many of these colleges are not doing a good job of having different strategies for these different market segments, who have very different family histories and exposure to resources as well as one of the segments growing up in a school atmosphere where college is virtually a given or at least the decision of the large majority.
I actually got a handwritten letter from a Chemistry major at St. Lawrence. That definitely stood out.
The birthday cards are nice, even though I received some months late.
Any informational booklets are great (i.e. the one Yale just send out, I also got eye-catching ones from Fordham, UChicago, and WUSTL), so much better than the useless postcards which I immediately throw out. If they send me a book I will take the time to read it, no matter what college.
@shawnspencer and @fallenchemist-- Even before students ever apply, colleges can access a lot of information and are able to track much of what interests them. For instance, on the detailed SAT registration questionnaire, test-takers answer queries that range from whether theyâve had coursework in computer science and assorted arts to if theyâve been involved in rodeo or rugby (etc. etc.) or if theyâre Mennonites, Methodists, Seventh Day Adventists or one of another couple dozen choices (optional to answer, of course). Regional reps who visit high schools and college fairs are often instructed to sniff out prospective applicants who may meet some other institutional priority not included on the test registration forms (thatâs where those multiple years of German might come in).
Certainly there is a lot that the college folks DONâT know about prospective students, and there are plenty of teenagers who might fill a schoolâs needs yet will fall through the cracks. But with too many kids already applying to too many colleges, it seems reasonable to me that admission officers should be as open as possible about their priorities, thus engendering more fruitful student/school matches. However, parents and their progeny will have to understand that these priorities can change from year to year. So it will be important to ignore the grapevine and focus instead on what the admission folks specifically say because the college that wanted classics majors in the previous admissions cycle may have already moved on to chemists.
My son quickly chucked all the mail he got from Yale last year, assuming that an application from him would just be another notch on Handsome Danâs rejected-student gun belt. But I have to think that, if these generic letters had addressed my sonâs experiences in acting and film or mentioned his prowess in rowing or physics, he might have taken a closer look and felt --at least fleetinglyâthat he was actually wanted (and maybe he really was!). So I would think that many less sought-after schools could get a lot of mileage out of personalized correspondence that claims point blank, âWe sure could use a few more AP Art students just like you!â
I was just annoyed by the books. UChicago, Stanford, and Yale: I know my PSATs werenât high enough to pinpoint me as a serious contender for admission, so why did you just send such expensive marketing materials? It felt to me like I was being targeted to decrease their acceptance rate.
I actually liked meeting representatives face to face and being able to talk to someone who is knowledgeable and could talk about what their school could offer me, especially in my area of interest.
I think that meeting a representative of the college at a college visit or college fair could get my attention if I like the way their program sounds.
If a student indicates a major they want to study when they fill out registration for a test, and you have access to that information, colleges should explicitly mention that major and send them information from that department. I noticed when one college did that for me. Even though I had no interest in that college, I read through the materials and at least gave it a chance.
(speaking as a parent hereâŠ)
I did enjoy the high quality brochures from Yale and Princeton (nice heavy paper, colorful pictures, not too wordy) and the giant fold-out aerial photo poster of campus from U Chicago.
As far as acceptance letters go, I was impressed by:
CMUâs giant âOFFICIAL FAT LETTERâ
University of Rochesterâs personalized acceptance letter with references to sonâs essayâŠthat was a class act!
We never got any phone calls, though that might have caught our attention. We paid high attention to colleges that gave merit aid to NMFs.
Years ago, Columbia U sent my daughter a poster not of the campus but of NYC at night. This made it to her bedroom wall and stayed there for months. Any ad that stays visible that long has to be good.
Iâm a fan of personalized marketing. I found some personalized videos very engaging. These were short videos showing a few campus scenes that put the studentâs name on an opening dorm room door, on the stadium scoreboard, etc.) I wasnât the target market, though. (CCâs parent company used to produce these, but as far as I know, does not now.)
I see this whole question as fallacious. Any college that tries to âget my attentionâ (or more accurately, my D17âs), is seen as purely trying to pump up their application numbers to make their listed acceptance rate better. Now, mind you, once my D eventually does get accepted into colleges, then we will take their approaches to get her to accept them back seriously.
We got one phone call. Interestingly it came at about 11:00 am during the week. The caller, a student, asked for my son by name. At first I was like: Heâs not here. May I take a message?Then I paused and said, Hey, if youâre a college, donât you realize that heâs in school right now? The college said: Oh well we are targetting homeschooled students. They do really well here.
I thought that was interesting because somehow (maybe it was just guesswork) they figured out that my lovely son was a prime candidate for homeschooling. Against our better judgement he finished in a regular public school but the experience from k-12 was none too great. How had they known this, that weâd heavily considered homeschooling?
This was Marlboro College and after this very nice phone call, Marlboro went way high in my estimation. Lovely Son is not ready to start college and may be taking not a Gap Year but a Gap Decade, but Marlboro is on my personal list for him when if ever heâs ready for school again.
Only a handful of colleges can attract a surfeit of top applicants without lifting a finger. The others have to work to identify and attract the kinds of kids who would be their ideal students. That means casting a wide net (college fairs, mass mailings, etc), followed by targeted marketing of kids who express interest. Even in a world where there were no USNWR type ratings, I donât see any other way for them to approach their basic task of enrolling a class. My son will be going to a college that we first heard of by way of a postcard that came shortly after he took the PSAT. Iâm very happy they got our attention.
Postcards go straight into a box never to be looked at again. Seriously, when the same college sends you the same letter three times telling you to log in to your account and explore, it truly is a turn off.
Though Iâm not a huge fan of this, I have been attracted to explore some colleges that send me stuff I like to keep (pens, pendants, posters, shirts, magnets, other cute/cool stuff). I dont know how cost would play into this, but receiving stuff always makes me visit their websites and search around for stuff.
Another thing is big packages. If a college can send me just one booklet that highlights the best stuff there and their financial aid then Im happy. I dont need five postcards about how you offer this many sports teams and this many clubs.
All in all, I think the days of marketing are over. Surely, some smaller schools need to gain some exposure, but I think the vast majority of students know how to look up colleges they might like to attend. With so many students applying to colleges each year, I think there are enough students that know about a schoolâs programs and offerings or at least know how to get that information without needing colleges to continuously send mail
I was very impressed by a large state flagship school that took a very personal approach after DD spoke to their rep at a college fair. I believe they sent three postcards from studentsâI know 2 were majoring in the subject she was also interested in and one was, I think, the student government president. After DD sent in her application, she got a phone call and a letter from the head of the department of interest, in both cases with the open invitation to call at any time with questions. This extra personal touch, combined with their generous merit scholarships, made that school DDâs number one safety.
On the flip side, WUSTL sent SO much material that we joked that if DD decided to go there, we could wallpaper her dorm room with it all. It went from annoying to ridiculous.
Maybe colleges could publish names of prominent people who have attended the college. Maybe post interviews with people on You Tube.