I’ve been getting e-mails spams from them midway through junior year. They say stuff like “Your academic record has really made and impression on me,” “I just want to let you know again how excited I am to review your application to Whittier College,” “You stand out,” “your academic record continues to impress me,” “I’d like to personally invite you to apply” “Distinguishing work!” Are these actual people or are these automatic? As their deadline approaches, they have frantically spammed me even more. They offer to waiver my application fee, make it test optional, “generous merit scholarship.” I’m not remotely interested but should I just apply seeing as this will be an easy safety school?
Consider the mailings as propaganda and if you are not interested then do not consider applying. A safety school should be first and foremost a school you are willing to attend no matter what and is affordable. If Whittier meets that criteria than take them up on the free application. If not, then ignore the emails.
They are automatic mailings, but that doesn’t mean that Whittier College isn’t interested in you. Whittier occupies an interesting niche. It’s a nice liberal arts college, but it’s greatly overshadowed, not only by west coast LACs but by national LACs in general (as much as I hate the list, let’s go with the top 100 LACs listed on USNews).
That is to say, Whittier, from what I’ve heard, is known to be aggressive with, ahem, “outreach,” because it needs to be. Small schools need to hit their enrollment goals, badly. Again, this isn’t a knock on Whittier (Nixon graduated from Whittier), and it probably would fit as a safety school for you as long as you’re a B-ish student.
Of course, if you have no interest and do not even know what Whittier College is, it makes little sense to apply. I assume that you already have a safety school? Also, a safety school should not be a “If all **** breaks loose I will attend” type of school. It should be a school that you would love to attend, even though it’s a shoo-in.