<p>My Son scored in the 99th percentile on his PSAT and has begun receiving e-mails from all sorts of schools that he would be very much interested in attending. Do most schools offer merit scholarships to National Merit Semifinalists? He has grand dreams but unless these schools will have to give him some scholarship money if it is to be economically feasible.</p>
<p>We’re starting to see postal mail now for our sophomore. So far it’s from the same colleges that have already sent email.</p>
<p>Same here for our junior. Since no email address was provided (didn’t want all that “stuff” clogging up the inbox), we’re only getting postal mail. It’s interesting that one of the pieces of mail is very blunt about their expectations for the NM process.</p>
<p>curiousgeorge- was that school Carleton that was blunt? My kids seemed a bit taken aback by it. I quickly through them away… I can only be expected to let my birds fly so far from the nest!!!</p>
<p>2by2 - it was Carleton. It’s really an interesting school - although a bit far and a bit too cold for me, but we’re open to (almost) any geography…</p>
<p>DS#2 took the PSAT in 2007 as a sophomore and received a 187. So far, no snail mail, and I haven’t asked about email. Has he scored too low for colleges to be interested?</p>
<p>I know DS#1 was contacted by many schools both sophomore, junior and senior years but he had much higher scores on the PSATs and SAT.</p>
<p>Did your son check the box to be included in the student search service when he took the PSAT?</p>
<p>Yes, he says he did.</p>
<p>UPDATE: Today DS#2 received an envelope from NYU, so I guess he’s not being completely overlooked!</p>
<p>UPDATE #2: DS#2 (after seeing the NYU letter )now tells me that he has received more than a dozen emails from colleges! Will I ever learn not to worry about this whole process?</p>
<p>Thanks for not snickering at my inane and uninformed post.</p>
<p>my older D got more “paper” as a jr, and now it seems that colleges are sending emails, asking if you WANT the paper, (smart, and green!!!)</p>
<p>My younger D had a higher score, jsut by a bit, but has gotten less paper…which just makes sense, save a tree!!! and energy and less for us to recycle</p>
<p>This is an interesting thread. My son scored 212 on the PSAT (he is a junior) and in the 99th percentile, and we were astounded by the email deluge, not having gone through this before, including Columbia, Brown, Boston U (several times now), Wesleyan and just this morning MIT. I would guess there have been at least 100 emails. My son will not be a semifinalist, though, as we know his score will be too low in our state of Maryland, so we are continuing to keep our expectations of actual admission way, way in check. Does all this attention give kids too high an expectation of their eventual outcomes?</p>
<p>Yes, it can. It will also happen later when Harvard and Yale send their applications out en masse. Colleges like to have lots of applicants for several reasons -</p>
<ol>
<li><p>The obvious - the more applications they receive, the more are rejected. Which means their acceptance rate declines, which means their US News ranking could rise.</p></li>
<li><p>If they charge an application fee, then they can offset a good amount of their admissions budget.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>But I think the main reason colleges send out lots of recruiting letters is simply that they like to beat the bushes to find good students. They don’t take continuing to receive applications from great students for granted. </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_34/b3998441.htm[/url]”>http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_34/b3998441.htm</a></p>
<p>My daughter is a junior and scored 213 on the PSAT. She received the Carleton letter mentioned in earlier posts and I thought that was the beginning of the “deluge”. But so far that’s it - a few other pieces of snail mail, but not a single email. Maybe her email address was entered incorrectly somewhere along the way? Or is a score of 213 not high enough to garner much attention? Oh well, probably just as well not to be buried in mail, paper or electronic!</p>
<p>My son, who uses a Web-based email account for his college emails, found out that a lot of his college messages were automatically treated as spam at first. That might be something to check if you are getting many fewer emails than you expected to get. </p>
<p>The context of colleges recruiting students: </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_34/b3998441.htm?chan=search[/url]”>http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_34/b3998441.htm?chan=search</a> </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.maguireassoc.com/services/empowr.html[/url]”>http://www.maguireassoc.com/services/empowr.html</a> </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2006-03-01-cyber-recruiting_x.htm[/url]”>http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2006-03-01-cyber-recruiting_x.htm</a></p>
<p>PRJ - 213 is definitely high enough to merit attention! Your daughter should have received an email from Carleton in advance of the letter. If not, then as tokenadult suggests, her spam blocker could be preventing the emails. Or they got the incorrect email address. Has she logged onto My College Quick Start on the College Board website? If so, you can double check the email address they have in their system.</p>
<p>It seems like this year a lot of initial contact is being made by email rather than snail mail, but there is still plenty of time to get deluged.</p>
<p>Thanks, tokenadult and fireflyscout. She outsmarted herself (and me). Apparently, she gave the College Board a different email address just for this purpose and then forgot about it! We checked My College QuickStart, figured out which address she had used, and lo and behold, there were all the emails :-)</p>
<p>18 letters today, including at least the third from Ohio State in a week or so. Incredible. The more kids that apply, the more letters the colleges seem to ship out. A friend of mine who’s now done with the process said she saved all this stuff in a big bin, thinking it would be of some use some day and it never was…</p>