I would never tell my kid to not check that box. I’m pretty sure I told her to be sure to check it. We looked at everything that arrived and may in fact have been alerted to a suitable college via a mailing or email. Even if a school was not suitable, sometimes their literature bought up something we had not considered before, to look for at other schools.
Surprisingly, we were not inundated with “junk mail.” More and more schools do everything via email now. Once my D ruled out a school, she sent all their future emails to a special junk email folder or hid them or something. I tried to get her to unsubscribe but apparently kids don’t do that. Just keep getting ten million emails as long as they’re not in their face.
And I definitely concur, even though these pieces sound very personalized, they are not, so don’t look at them as individual invites. But yeah, when we got that letter from Yale, I took a second look and talked to my D about it. She had uniformly excluded Ivies from her search and I wanted to be sure it was a thoughtful decision. FWWI, her counselor had suggested Yale of all the Ivies as one that is striving to be really inclusive and attract creative unusual students, not just future investment bankers.
Her counselor attended Brown which I thought was good match for D and has that creative aspect. Said counselor is an artist and was actually steering D more towards Yale. In the end, no Ivies made D’s list, no schools with single digit acceptances, nothing even in the teens, I don’t think.