<p>My D was recently deferred SCEA at her first choice Ivy. She has great test scores and GPA and has as good a chance as any qualified candidate. Today, another Ivy she has never heard from before emailed her--"Please consider applying here!" Why the late push for applicants? This school deferred and outright rejected kids with better scores/ECs than hers. I would think they have more than enough applicants without trying to round up more at this late date. Thoughts?</p>
<p>You must be new. They always want more. More applicants = lower acceptance rate = better ranking = more prestige.</p>
<p>More applicants = more $$$ from app fees</p>
<p>The schools employ marketing firms that do this for them.</p>
<p>Doesn’t this mess up their yield though?</p>
<p>It’s just blind mail. My kid is in college already but I still received USC mail with special account and password for her to apply last week.</p>
<p>“Doesn’t this mess up their yield though?”</p>
<p>Why would this mess up their yield? In theory, they don’t need to accept anymore students, they just get to reject more. Yield is the percentage of students enroll from the acceptance pool.</p>
<p>Columbia just sent my daughter an invite to apply; they want the app money so they can then reject another kid. Right after they just rejected a ton of applicants. Sent it to the spam file.</p>
<p>I think you are all being a bit harsh.</p>
<p>Colleges know that some good prospects applied early and were deferred. Why is it wrong for them to reach out to students who might be in that situation and urge them to apply?</p>
<p>I agree with jonri–it’s strategic to do this right after early decisions. It often happens that one Ivy takes a kid who has been deferred or rejected by another.</p>
<p>So many cynical people! </p>
<p>A deferral generally means you are a competitive candidate, so why wouldn’t other schools be interested?</p>
<p>As for the notion that colleges make money on applications that’s laughable.</p>
<p>My daughter’s stats are good but not Columbia good, not even close and they are not the only tippy top school sending emails to “apply today” “you are outstanding”. It makes these kids want to shoot for schools they have basically no chance of getting in, and sets them up for heartbreak and disappointment after rejection. Plus, the expense when your kids think they need to visit to show “interest”. This is harsh to the kids and puts parents in the position of having to say no to them because you have already spent so much money on apps, trips, sending scores, etc. My daughter wants to use her own money from her savings now to apply to more schools when she has perfectly good acceptances already. It is marketing at it’s worse.</p>
<p>Yes cynical and of course they are interested, but I doubt that it has zero to do with increasing number applicants and selectivity. Probably not too much about money, but then again I don’t think they lose money or incur extra cost by getting additional paying applications either. We all know increasing the stat is part of the game admission office play. This kind of mentality is part of what is wrong with our college system today.</p>
<p>If her stats are good enough for one Ivy they are probably good enough for all of them - particularly if she has a hook. Obviously some applicants will have a better chance at one college than another - perhaps because of a legacy, or the increased selectivity of one vs another, but the colleges themselves can’t know what else she brings to the table so they send out mass mailings. An Ivy caliber applicant ought to be smart enough to figure out which colleges don’t care about demonstrated interest (my son told his Harvard interviewer he didn’t apply SCEA because it wasn’t his first choice - they didn’t care). An Ivy caliber applicant ought to be smart enough to figure out whether a particular college is a good fit and a plausible candidate. Sunshinestatemom’s daughter may have perfectly good acceptances already, but not every student does.</p>
<p>Haven’t you ever seen an advertising campaign before? All these harsh judgments of evil intentions by Ivy colleges might be a little more legit if it were the case that each recipient of the post-EA marketing campaign were individually hand picked to receive the promo. But that’s not how mass mailings work.</p>
<p>Ask yourself this: did you ever receive some junk mail or e-mail spam that didn’t quite apply to you or was even totally pointless? Say a woman getting a “male enhancement” ad or a man getting informed about the new Wonder-Bra? Why did you get this even though your chances of qualifying for the use of the product are zero? It’s because your name is on some mass mailing list that the marketing firm bought and you got swept up into the ad campaign along with everybody else on the list. So even if your kid doesn’t have tippy top stats, his/her name was still on the list that some Ivy school bought and thus the they got the post-EA ad too. Big deal.</p>
<p>The thing you have to remember is that high-end schools compete fiercely with each other to enroll the high-end kids. But not every high-end kid gets into his/her EA/ED school for whatever reason. It makes sense for schools competing for those kids to try to scoop up some of the very high quality applicants that get deferred every year by their rivals. Chances are, for the moment at least, they are bummed at their EA/ED school and thus open to falling in love with a different school for the RD round. Hit them with a well-timed ad boasting about your school and urging them to apply just might do the trick.</p>
<p>So do more people get the ad than the Ivy school intends to accept? Of course. It’s mass mailing for crying out loud. Is each ad recipient individually carefully chosen because the school thinks they are interested and likely to get in? Of course not. See Wonder-Bra above. The school ads are just that, ads.</p>
<p>She was deferred by Duke, not an Ivy, and applied to a few ivy schools after being bombarded with emails from these schools. They already have more applicants than they need and 17 year olds believe Columbia wouldn’t send that email if they didn’t have a shot to get in. She has no idea that Harvard doesn’t care about interest, we live in a hick town in Florida, her class of 145 has bright kids but we don’t have expensive private counselors to advise them. She depends on reference books, the internet and unfortunately, CC where she reads about all these kids traveling all over the country applying to their 20 top choices. We can’t do that, the airfare, hotel and rental car for the Duke trip can’t be replicated. She has no hooks other than being a bright kid, but naive to marketing. I send male enhancement ads and wonder bra ads to the spam file and she does too. Don’t mean to be so vitriolic but there are people struggling in this country and applying to “not gonna happen” schools is a reality and I am not wasting any more money on them. Living within ones mean is an education in itself. If her hard earned savings goes to Columbia and to sending SATS and ACTS, so be it. Not all kids are as sophisticated in this process as others, unfortunately. she will learn from the school of hard knocks and hopefully be stronger and tougher from it.</p>
<p>If she was deferred from Duke, it’s not at all absurd to think that one of the Ivies might take her. Duke is more selective than several of the Ivies.</p>
<p>“They already have more applicants than they need”</p>
<p>I think this is the disconnect. It’s not about how many they need. No business, for-profit or otherwise, can be successful if it stops pursuing its goals because it has “enough,” especially if all of its competitors are aiming for “the best we can do.” For universities, attracting the best class is like annual earnings for a corporation – the goal is to get the best possible result, not just tread water.</p>
<p>Did she take the SAT this fall? If so what was her score? They may just be now picking her name up from there.</p>
<p>I was admitted ED to an Ivy, but I received some mail from another one recently. I think it’s because I had the second Ivy added on the CommonApp already.</p>