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how would the colleges even know my D's GPA? Was that also a question on the PSAT form?
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Yes, it is. The questionnaire used to be the entire inside of the answer sheet (I haven't seen it in a few years). There are questions about the number of years they've taken in each subject area, potential majors (and they are able to list more than one or two, if memory serves), their GPA range, activities, etc.</p>
<p>We don't even bother importing most of the data provided when we get our names from CB. The files are massive.</p>
<p>Name, GPA, email, address, school, hobbies, preferences, whether you want to be contacted. The SAT is sign-up is overwhelming through CollegeBoard. I think it takes longer to answer all of their profile questions than it does to take the test (exaggerating , of course). </p>
<p>Seems like a waste of money for a "top" school to market to students that do not meet their preferred credentials. Many of these schools are not trying to be the reach school, they are trying to be the safe school. For every 10 applicants to Ivy schools, less than one are admitted. If we assume that most of these Ivy applicants feel that they are worthy, there could be 50,000to 100,000 great students out there looking for a another choice and millions looking for a different offering. I do not fault these schools for making it easier to apply. As I said before, they have done their research. Bottom line is they are offering the opportunity, we can either choose to accept or reject this offer. The no fee, no essay, easy application is just their way of enticing you to take the next step. This is similar to deciding to try a new product, go to a new restaurant, or visit a different beach hotel because we had a coupon for a free sample, dinner or night's stay. If you did not have this coupon, how interested would you be to consider it.</p>
<p>The tone on some of these emails is laughably creepy, "we've been watching you" is not exactly what a teenage girl wants to hear. If Brandeis was a boy we'd be considering a restraining order. </p>
<p>Every so often a piece of mail or an email does spark an interest so I guess there's some value in receiving it.</p>
<p>Question for the veterans -- when do they turn off the spigot? Since the daughter took her PSATs (she's now a HS senior) we've experienced the same sort of deluge you all are talking about. We expected things to slow down after January 1, and indeed they have. There are still 30-40 schools, however, who continue to solicit by e-mail, postcard and mailers, even though in most cases their application deadline has passed.</p>
<p>How long should we expect this marketing blitz to continue? I have visions of us still receiving e-mails for D1 when D2 starts getting her college mail 3 years hence.</p>
<p>I agree that it can get annoying but funny enough, Rensselaer sent me soo much mail that I actually applied to it and I knew nothing about them before all of the mail.</p>
<p>WASHDAD -
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I thought this was an unusual opinion: "Any school we determine to be hounding us via e-mail is off the list, no matter how highly ranked it may be." That'll teach 'em, heh? No matter how good the school might be for your kid, they're off the list because of aggressive marketing? Doesn't make sense to me.
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<p>I agree with you on this - every single school has some type of marketing thing that potential students will be dealing with - if you don't want the input/info - make sure your kiddo doesn't mark that 'more info' thing on the PSAT form.</p>
<p>Our college search depended totally on the snail-mail aspect the first time - email was not on the radar at the time - yet we received tons and tons of unsolicited stuff from many colleges - I had to almost laugh - wondering what the budget was at some of these schools - whew - tho I had to admit that Dickinson College in PA had the absolute best marketing tools out there - at the time - it was beautiful. They had hired a marketing firm to update all of their 'stuff' - and I have to say - I think they did a fantastic job - at that time - and because of their updated 'stuff' - it actually was a consideration at the time - tho lost out in the end.</p>
<p>If one does not want to receive stuff - you can un-subscribe - or even put a block on the email addy - but I certainly would not drop them from any consideration at all - you just might be missing out on an absolute GEM of a school - that could be THE one perfect place for your kiddo. JMHO :)</p>
<p>Excellent tip - a yahoo email account specifically for college stuff - determined prior to any college stuff/PSAT - to keep your sanity :D</p>
<p>I am now in the process of emptying my D's email and sanil mail boxes. She did stop looking at it because it was too overwhelming. I , however, am amazed at the names I now recognize, that meant nothing to me when she first started getting email. We knew of nothing other than the UC's for the most part. A few LAC's actually made it into our conciousness, resulted in a few visits, and now one is in the number one spot. There are a few I wish we would have paid more attention to. My point is that we'd never really considered much other than the UC's, didn't really know about LAC's, didn't think too much of leaving CA, until of course, College Confidential. After spending a little time here, i went back to the emails, and persued those that seemed worth it.</p>
<p>Our home email is very similar to that of another person in a nearby community (who has the same name as my husband and a son with the same name as my son). As annoying as it is to get these persistent college emails, guess what? I think the (other person's) son put the wrong email address on his PSATs and must have checked "contact me." AHHKKKHH!!!</p>
<p>Haha, that seems like an even better trick to play on someone than signing them up for a porn e-mail list.</p>
<p>I kept getting mailers from colleges for up to a year after I had started attending college. Of course, by then it was hardly any, but I guess they were still holding out for the occasional transfer student. Grad school offers dropped off almost immediately after the school year began (took the GREs the previous fall).</p>
<p>Frankly, there are so many schools out there, everyone's eliminating them for random reasons, and to some degree, that has to be okay. Some kids won't look in certain states, some won't consider particular mascots, some are turned off by overzealous ad campaigns. I've heard nothing but wonderful reviews from students at WUSTL and W&L, but despite my mother's best efforts, I refused to even look them up in my college books...I felt like I was getting stalked by their admissions offices. I had classmates who enjoyed feeling so "courted." I know a few kids who felt inundated by NYU, but I loved getting their info. This is "fit" at its most elusive! It's been 5-6 years since I started getting this stuff, and it still influences the way I feel about + the connotations I have with certain schools. </p>
<p>I am glad I didn't get too much via email (as I did for grad school). Email is far more eco-friendly, but I really did learn a lot about schools from their mailings. I couldn't help glancing at the covers before stowing them somewhere! Email is so easy to just delete-delete-delete. I would've missed out on good info. In spite of everything, I'm glad I checked the box.</p>
<p>So, OP, the mailers are a double-edged sword. IMO, this is how the schools are choosing to present themselves to prospective students, so one is well within her rights to base judgment on recruitment tactics! Do you risk missing out on some good stuff? Of course, as you do every time you semi-arbitrarily trim the list of interesting schools. Regarding particular trimming strategies, as a friend of mine likes to say, "If it works for you, it works." :)</p>
<p>WHile the junk email can be annoying, I think you are missing something by automatically sending it all to the spam folder.
Today's junk mail King may be tomorrow's hot school.
Years ago, my first was innundated to the point of numbness with email and postal mail - huge packages of pretty pictures - from a school that was then famous for it. NOBODY in her class paid attention.
School in question: WashU in SL.<br>
Now you won't get that. They don't have to.
Now everyone knows how good they are.</p>
<p>" IMO, this is how the schools are choosing to present themselves to prospective students, so one is well within her rights to base judgment on recruitment tactics! "</p>
<p>Precisely, student615! If my prospective student were a mindless product of the u-tube generation who never reads anything except what's on the computer screen; if she were too attention-challenged to be able to wade through a whole viewbook or catalog; if she were an uneducated consumer who loves gimmicks and easily falls prey to slick marketing ploys; if she were an immature teenager who spends hours on the computer forwarding silly chain e-mails, then maybe her response to these tactices would be different. If the schools think that sending her frequent e-mails in the style of "Zach is waiting to meet you" will appeal, well then we don't find them appealing. </p>
<p>Doesn't a school that seems so very desperate to have you pay attention to them, make you lose respect for them instead? It's kind of like the young girl who will do anything to try to fit in that high school clique, not realizing that her very neediness to belong is what will put the nail in her social coffin.</p>
<p>Oh, and I wonder who will apply to the colleges that send e-mails with spelling and grammatical errors!</p>
<p>Oh, I think we're being a bit too harsh on these schools. It's easy enough to turn off those emails with unsubscribe.
Yes, this type of marketing smacks of desperation. But many of these schools are having a hard time competing with the obsession kids and parents have to get into the top 25. Tulane was one of the schools sending out those emails to my son (no essays, no app fee!). And I do understand why they felt they needed to go down that route...
I find the mailers much more annoying - think of the trees we could have saved! And it's not just the lower rung schools that participate. We got fancy viewbooks from Princeton (my son said "yeah right"). And multiple glossy mailings from places like Lehigh and Richmond. Now, this stuff is really out of control...our mailboxes were filled to the brim every day and it seemed there was no way to stop it.</p>
<p>I'm about as anti-hype, this-world-is-too-marketing-driven as the next guy, and frankly unsolicited mail/calls/emails is a real pet peeve of mine.</p>
<p>However...</p>
<p>The competition for good students is fierce, and it IS a marketing-driven culture. Deal with it. </p>
<p>Don't shoot yourself in the foot by disregarding a school just because you don't like their marketing efforts. I have found that, in general, the correlation between what I see on flyers and what a campus actually feels like when I'm there visiting is actually not very high (with a few notable exceptions).</p>
<p>As you work through your college lists to identify those most likely to be a match for your D, you should not be excluding colleges for this reason, IMO. Factors like location, academics, etc etc etc are the things that really matter.</p>
<p>It's hard, I know, to sift through the thousands of colleges trying to find the right fit. Just be sure you're using the right filters and don't put on blinders. You may end up finding that the list you're left with may not look all that hot for whatever reason, and you'll need to go back and widen the net.</p>
<p>I've taken a few stands on principle myself, pulling the plug on the satellite TV because they insist on charging me for 200 channels of crap, rather than just the 3 or 4 channels I want to watch, is the most recent example. Still kind of hurts, btw, but what the heck...</p>
<p>We're at the point where we're down to just two really viable choices out of the thousands of schools out there. I won't list the factors that mattered to us, but in hindsight I wish we would have relaxed a few of the constraints early in the process. Now it's too late to revisit the list.</p>
<p>Hudson - my son got several postcards around Christmas (now well into his freshman year of college) basically saying - you didn't pick us last year but we still want you so if you're thinking of transferring yada yada yada...so I'm convinced it's never going to stop!</p>
<p>The GFG, I dont exactly see the logic in eliminating otherwise great colleges just because of their inclination to send frequent emails. But at least you may be making it a wee bit easier for another student to get the coveted fat envelope and perhaps an enticing finaid package.</p>
<p>Seriously however, colleges which to unsolicited emailing should make it easy for recipients to stop them.</p>
It's hard, I know, to sift through the thousands of colleges trying to find the right fit. Just be sure you're using the right filters and don't put on blinders. You may end up finding that the list you're left with may not look all that hot for whatever reason, and you'll need to go back and widen the net.
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<p>For undergrad, I saved all of the mailers that I got. Put them in a big box under the desk until after my freshman year. For grad school, most things came via email, and I created a folder to save all of them in (still saved any potentially relevant hard-copy mailers). Some of the info eventually proved useful to have on hand, even if it didn't originally catch my interest. Even if you don't pay close attention to everything that comes your way, I suggest hanging on to what you can. No harm done by clicking "Move to 'College mail' folder" rather than "Delete"!</p>