<p>I'm a Junior and I recently got a letter from Harvard which "encourage[d] me to consider the opportunities available at Harvard as * plan [my] academic future." Does this mean anything?</p>
<p>I just got about 3 credit card applications worth bout $75000 of additional spending power. It means about the same thing as your Harvard letter. And the 100s of other college letters and brochures you’ll be receiving soon.</p>
<p>All colleges, including Harvard, mail tens of thousands of letters and viewbooks to students every year. It DOES NOT mean anything, other than you scored above a certain threshold on the PSAT/SAT/ACT. And it certainly does not mean that you have any better chance of attaining admission than everyone else. See:</p>
<p>[Application</a> Inflation - Admissions & Student Aid - The Chronicle of Higher Education](<a href=“Application Inflation”>Application Inflation)</p>
<p>"Most colleges start by buying the names of students whose standardized-test scores and self-reported grade-point averages fall within a particular range. In the early 1990s, the College Board sold 35 million names a year; now it sells 80 million to approximately 1,200 colleges, at 32 cents a name. More colleges are buying names of sophomores to jump-start interest.</p>
<p>Georgetown buys names of students with PSAT scores equivalent to 1270 on the SAT critical reading and math sections, and grade-point averages of A-minus or better. There are only so many students with these attributes to go around—about 44,000 a year, out of 1.5 million test takers. Georgetown lowers that threshold to search for another 5,000 or so underrepresented minority students.</p>
<p>William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions, describes his university’s recruitment as “aggressive”—and crucial. “Nobody wants to go back to the bad old days, when getting into America’s top colleges was like knowing a secret handshake,” Mr. Fitzsimmons says. “If we started cutting back, applications would go down from the students who need real outreach.”</p>