I strongly reccommend a single college email account for everything college-related, and give parents access to the account.
But there can still be errors. My daughter always uses the same account (and ssn, and birthday), and yet one college had actually opened THREE different records for her. We would not have known except for receivng the “we’re sorry we didn’t receive an app from you” email 2 weeks after she HAD applied. She wrote a polite email and got it resolved. Good thing because we did do a visit to this college and certainly want that DI credited!
I had always heard that colleges do track email openings and clicks on college links. Not sure if ths is true, but I told my kids it doesn’t hurt to click through. I’m sure some of this DI doesn’t matter to the tippy-tops (Yale no longer even logs people who take a tour), but for mid-range colleges it probably helps for the borderline cases.
Schools have enrollment management software that tracks potential student engagement. I’m pretty sure that there’s different weighting given to different forms of engagement. Opening an email and registering for more content are the start of engagement, not the end.
@thumper1 's list above is true engagement. Every one of those activities will be tracked by the school. For example, if you go to a college fair, some of the fairs have you register in advance and give you a nametag with a bar code. Colleges you speak with scan the bar code to get your contact info. If you register for the fair with the same email as you use to register on their website to attend an open house, then show up at the open house, the college will have you as in their database as doing all three.
I have heard that colleges not only track email openings but also if you forward the email to someone else. I can’t imagine who a student would forward an email to, so that never made much sense to me.
We visited her top 4 colleges out of her list of 12, 3 times each, registering each time for a tour and info session, an Open House, a specialized tour of her department of interest or one-on-one sit down with an adcom. Plus emailed questions and updates to the adcom. HS guidance counselor told us if we didn’t fill out the FAFSA, the schools would think we weren’t really interested. I called her top schools and they laughed at that notion.
Interestingly, of the 8 merit scholarships she received, the three most substantial awards were from schools we never visited or reached out to. But they were all high priced privates that weren’t very selective.
@MaterS - not sure whether colleges do track whether you forward but they certainly can. I know that when I used Constant Contact for a school newsletter you could track how many were opened, how many forwarded, etc. You could even drill down at look at which email address did the forwarding. That being said, I doubt the colleges take that time.
I do know that my son would forward college emails to me at times if he wanted me to see something that interested him.
Our experience was that the schools that were big on demonstrated interest were up front about it. Lehigh in particular comes to mind. The admissions person flat out said that they’ve found a high correlation between campus visits and matriculation.
Ski, worse than “urban legend,” because they spread like a disease and can harm.
No matter how many times you set foot on campus or send an email, an applicant can’t ignore the application. Enrollment Management isn’t telling adcoms whom to admit.
Create a new email account solely for college app purposes. Make sure your child checks everyday. Interview requests sometimes will come by email. This account can be deleted after the admissions process is over.
Use this same email for common app.
Goto each college website and fill out the info form. Use email address in #1 above. Some colleges will send marketing messages once every few weeks. Most of these utilize a tracking cookie. So make sure to accept cookies and download images. Buried within some hyperlinks are unique URLs. These are designed to track individual students. Many of the elite colleges say that they don’t track interest. But the cookies and tracking URLs are used by all the elites. Perhaps for marketing purposes only — but unclear how much the admissions committee pays attention to interest. Make sure your child clicks on all the links and to check emails from this account regularly.
signup for Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Each of the admissions offices has their own official account. Like and retweet liberally.
If possible sign up for in person tour and info session. How much this matters varies with the college. Some really take an interest for visitors (Conn College) and others couldn’t care less (Harvard).
Hence why I used the word “corollary.” By the reasonable person standard, one would not assume that I attributed your source as the internet.
I quoted you exactly @MaterS . On a related topic, please refrain from telling users what they can or cannot post or how they can or cannot respond to you or what they can or cannot say in a post; every member in good standing is free to post on any thread. If you have an issue with a user’s post, you can flag for a moderator to review.
@lookingforward I agree with what you’re saying, no amount of demonstrated interest is going to make a non-qualified candidate get accepted. And that’s a good message for people to hear.
But … I think given two otherwise fairly equal candidates, with yield management being very important at some schools, enrollment management tools may tell them which applicant is statistically much more likely to accept, thus indicating which of the two to potentially NOT admit to protect yield. If that were not true, why would colleges be forced to report whether “demonstrated interest” is important in their application process in the common data set, and why would some colleges admit that it is important to their admission process?
CWRU is historically one of the poster children for the demonstrated interest discussion. As is Tufts – just google “tufts syndrome” and the top hit is the Wikipedia page for “Yield Protection”
^Agreed, especially for top colleges. But for the not so selective colleges, DE is a factor in admissions decisions.
“In 2017, 37% of 493 schools surveyed by the National Association of College Admission Counseling said they consider demonstrated interest to be of moderate importance—on par with teacher recommendations, class rank and extracurricular activities. It carried less weight than grades, class rigor or board scores.”