<p>I regularly get mail from Stanford and Columbia - today, I received a rather large viewbook from Stanford. I always assumed that most kids received this stuff since I'm by no means a spectacular student and my PSAT was only around a 190-195 which I didn't really consider remarkable, at least not ivy-league-remarkable.</p>
<p>However, my Dad (who is rather naive to the college process and still believes anyone with a 3.6+ is Harvard bound) is super hung up on the idea that Stanford is "interested in me" and that I have a solid shot in getting accepted... (which I don't.)</p>
<p>I just wanted to know generally, how common is mail from elite schools? (Top 20 or higher)</p>
<p>I get it too. My PSAT was close to yours.
My mom has no idea and I always tell her they want to reject me to decrease their acceptance rate. It works. She doesn’t bother me as much.</p>
<p>Very common. Not to poop on your parade or anything. It’s just pretty common. If you get above a certain score on your PSAT (I think 170 to 180 ish), you’ll get that mail. They just want to get more applicants b/c that means more money and a lower acceptance rate.</p>
<p>Also, you could have searched this on Google. There are a plethora of threads on this topic.</p>
<p>Don’t worry about the mail. Some schools do more marketing than others, which is their prerogative. But just because you get some glossy brochure is not necessarily an indicator that you are being recruited. As far as the comment that schools want more applicants, that is true and not true. Schools like Yale, MIT, and Princeton have already indicated that they do not want to target students that have almost no chance of acceptance. I believe that these schools will be sending less mail to students.</p>
<p>My friend’s father was the former VP of Northeastern and she said that NEU used to send out mail to pretty mediocre students just to convince them to apply so that they can lower their acceptance rate… She claimed that NEU’s relatively low acceptance rate is rather deceiving because in reality, most of those who were rejected were kids that had been statistical outliers for acceptance from the very start… LOL.</p>
<p>I don’t think Harvard needs to resort to such tactics to keep its admission rate low - trollbait students get trolled just by the name “Harvard” and apply anyways just to experience imminent disappointment.</p>
<p>My daughter has been getting mail from U. of Chicago ever since she took 2 AP tests as a sophomore. They have sent her nerd glasses, bound books and at least one mailing a month ever since, and she’s a senior who has absolutely no intentions of applying there, and would probably not be admitted if she did.</p>
<p>That’s on top of mail from almost every elite (and many not-so-elite) college in the country. She goes to a test-in high school; maybe that’s why.</p>
<p>Our letter carrier will be very happy once she moves on to college next year.</p>
<p>It’s the same principle behind spam: spew $160k worth of brochures throughout the country, and it will be worth it if only one person per year consequently enrolls and starts paying $40k per year in tuition.</p>
<p>If each brochure costs $2, that’s 80k high school students who are now subject to the power of suggestion, which is devilishly effective because it comes from within: all it takes is a suggestion for a student to entertain “I could fit in with Stanford” with enough gravity to start the chain reaction that leads to an application.</p>
<p>Not to mention the people who didn’t enroll because they got rejected – keeping up the appearance of being elite is priceless. Arguably, that’s even stronger of a motivator for invasive advertisement than actually increasing enrollment.</p>
<p>These junk mails and emails are annoying. But are probably aimed at helping to decrease their acceptance rates and help their rankings. You know, great students should be rewarded with merit scholarships and not elite price tags.</p>