My son has been getting mail from Yale since his sophomore year. They’ve sent letters, postcards, reminders about how affordable Yale is (which I thought was an interesting selling point) and this week they sent a book. Cappex gives him a medium to low chance. He has great test scores and a rigorous schedule, but only a 3.54 UW GPA, so I just assumed Ivies would be out for him.
Does everyone get this much mail from schools like Yale? He has never requested info from them and hasn’t received near as much advertising from other Ivies. Is it worth considering applying based on this??
They got his info from his PSAT scores. It’s marketing, pure and simple. They are inviting an application - that’s it. Read absolutely nothing else into it.
That’s pretty much the case for every applicant to Yale.
Without seeing the rest of the application, and knowing nothing about his HS, Yale for anyone with that GPA would be a very, very high reach.
Oh, please. My daughter started getting mail from Vanderbilt after she took the ACT cold and scored a 21. A 21! I throw it all away; she’s not getting into Vanderbilt either with the 21 or with her much better second score. I resent Vandy a little more, though, every time I toss their latest postcard in the trash.
No, they mean nothing other than his scores may be within a particular range. My D got so much mail her sophomore and junior years. At first it was nice. After the millionth letter, brochure, swag, etc., they just became food for the recycling bin. Ironically, while she did get a random letter from Harvard, she never got anything from Yale.
Correct, it means nothing. If he took the PSAT as a sophomore, he probably checked the box which said “let schools contact me.” Schools buys lists of students and inundate them with mailings. It is marketing, the same as when I keep getting Xfinity cable brochures encouraging me to switch providers about every month. This is true even if the letter seems personalized, "midwestmomofboys you have been selected for a special promotional offer . . . . "
Means nothing. After my oldest got all these mailings, I told the other two not to check the box at the SAT’s and they never received a thing.
Let’s say Yale wants a lower admission rate versus Harvard and Stanford. Well, they have a relatively fixed number of attendees so the only way to do that is to increase the number of applications.
@Lindagaf, funny how kids are different…my S18 is completely unimpressed by the U of Chicago mailings. Duke sent him a ton, even more than U Chicago (which is saying something), and he liked Duke’s better but not enough to actually get him interested in the school. For a while it was kind of like a bingo game, seeing which top schools killed trees to market to him. He’s gotten mail from all the Ivies, Stanford, Caltech, Vanderbilt, WUSTL, all the usual suspects looking for rejection bait. Now he’s asked me to just recycle everything without even bothering to give it to him…he doesn’t even want to look at them anymore. And of course then there are the emails, it’s crazy how much marketing these kids get!
We too have been getting reams of mail from many campuses. But Yale just set a new standard by mailing a thick 96-page booklet. Lots of trees felled for Yale, which incidentally does have a school of forestry. I guess there’s a reason why Yale owns six forests!
The mailing materials don’t mean anything; the information colleges can get from standard test scores are just a small part of the whole application. There are many many other aspects of your application that will be more decisive, and the admissions officers will know only when they see the whole picture. Many many ppl think that colleges send those mailings just to increase the number of applicants (which also matters, obviously), but the reality is they want to attract attention to their school, because there are students with strengths (or hooks) that can make the lack of a perfect ACT, less important for a certain college. You have no idea how many kids get into Harvard, for example, without those perfect scores or GPA’s (athletes, legacy, donors, artists, URM). Imagine other schools.
Colleges do not know you or your chances until you send the complete application.
My kid got a personalised card from UChicago LOL (It is so cute, she has quite an unusual name in the US). I told her it means they might know her test scores, but more likely they know our EFC is an acronym for every fruitin’ cent
Last year my son got invited to a local reception for accepted candidates for one of the schools he was waiting to hear from. He emailed back: “Great-- does this mean I got in?” The response?? “Sorry, sometimes we make mistakes too.”
At that moment, they fell off the list of schools he cared about.
My daughter did some survey in 8th grade. They asked what colleges she was interested in. Honesty she wans’t thinking about college. She put Brown (her cousin was just accepted), Harvard (family friend works there and it is fairly local so she’s been there), and UNH (her cousin went there). Somehow it came back that she should consider U. of Buffalo, U. of Rochester, and U of Minnesota. I think she put she wants schools in cold climates.
Since then she has been getting college junk mail constantly so before she started high school. I can’t say it increased after 10th grade PSATs or not. She has gotten calls to go to accepted student days in 10th grade etc. Basically all the mail meant her name was on list which had nothing to do with interests. She has gotten mail from for profits, low level schools up to IVY league.
Oddly, my son got less college junk mail than people report on here despite high scores and tests taken earlier than usual. He said he didn’t check the “don’t send me stuff” box. We only got about 3-5 college items per week at the peak. He did unsubscribe from a lot of college emails, so that may have affected his paper mail. (He’ll be attending Caltech, so it’s not like his scores weren’t high enough.)
