My son has been getting regular emails and two mailings from one of the colleges he sent his scores to, none from the other two. He is only a sophomore though. The first email he got was “we received your scores” and then the many emails came after.
RPI has a 70%/30% M/F ratio, so yeah they would recruit females especially.
RPI has a TON of money, recipient of one of the largest anonymous gifts ever to a college (like $300M I believe). RPI also has their “every HS can have one” Rensselaer Medal program which is ludicrous.
@lvvcsf - yes if the student filled it out while registering for SAT or ACT but more likely than not, people ignore them since there is a way to bypass the questionnaire and just register for the test. It can take someone at least 30 minutes to do a good job but if someone is in a hurry, they don’t care about filling it out.
I had always assumed the mailing are correlated/targeted, it makes sense. Guess I wanted some more data points before I chalk my assumption up as fact, lol.
If that is the case than CB must have released the baseline score information to the third parties/universities prior to releasing to the HS and students. This was D18’s first sitting for PSAT and she has not taken the SAT/ACT. Only an AP test last year which she scored well on but not stellar. She claims to have marked the please do not send me emails box on the test and she has not sent her scores to any schools.
The delay in the score release leaves room to speculate. It would be bothersome to me if the baseline score had been released to third parties before being released to students. I don’t think Stanford or the U of Chicago sought my kid out. I am just trying to guess what she might have scored on her PSAT, lol. Because if she met some sort of demographic cut off than I need to prepare my family for the minor health condition that I will be having when the actual test score is received. I am calling it now, there is NO WAY she scored that well.
Yes, I absolutely think there’s a connection between stats and the mailings that your kid receives…though I’ve seen it stated many times here that the colleges send them out to everyone…
My D was a high-stat kid…always and from the very beginning…starting at the summer before junior year, the brochures and letters flooded in…My kid who is a mid-year junior now (a GREAT kid but without the standardized scores of his sister) has received little to nothing…so unless there’s been a sea shift in the past 24 months in how colleges market to students, I believe there is a correlation.
As I said, first college board sitting here and no mail yet. I do not think the scores have been released. They probably released info from the AP exam if you are getting mailings.
I would love for the college board to offer an online profile which students can update with preferences for location, size, majors, etc. that would allow schools to target their mailings better. My kid was very sure that she didn’t want an LAC and 95% of the mailings we received were from LAC’s. Our tuition dollars are paying for all that wasteful marketing. Yet most of the schools she did apply to never sent her any materials.
My D is a sophomore and has not taken an AP exam before and she´s received the Stanford letter and the Brown email. I do think it´s odd and annoying that the PSAT scores may have been released to colleges before they were sent to the students.
I believe it’s entirely stats based and not highly targeted. I can’t tell you how many mailings we got from a particular college of engineering, when my D has never had a STEM interest. They just kept coming and coming, because 4.0 GPA was obviously specified in some algorithm.
We also saw a noticeable uptick this past summer, in both volume and what seemed to be the proportion of more highly selective schools. That did correlate with her best-ever ACT sitting, but it also coincided with plenty of other milestones in the junior-to-senior year transition, so it would be hard to pin down the new score as the primary cause.