<p>Do a lot of you get these in large numbers mailed to your sons/daughters? Some seem more agressive than others with multiple mailings a few weeks apart, while others only mail once.</p>
<p>my sons look at the brochure and go well that's nice and chuck it in the garbage. What a waste of money for the most part.</p>
<p>While I find em kind of interesting to read LOL</p>
<p>You can always recycle the paper. Better yet, see if any of your local high schools would like to have some of these brochures for the guidance counselor office or the library. Also check with local youth groups or programs that might want them for their high schoolers. </p>
<p>My senior gets something almost every day. Today he got 5 pieces from schools in which he has NO interest. He looks at about 5% of the stuff. I've found several schools I'd like to attend.</p>
<p>I'm saving all mine in a big box so I can weigh it all at the end and calculate how many trees they wasted. :-P</p>
<p>Typically, I opened any of the stuff, even if I wasn't interested seriously in the college, and then tossed it after reading it. 90% of the stuff is the same old same old. They can be interesting to read although none of my five eventual application choices came from the mailings, although the mailings did re-affirm my decision to apply if you will (two were from personal experience with the school, one was from hearsay and recs, two were from books/website recs).</p>
<p>I devoted four file folders to college mail: at first, I had one for random stuff and another for stuff from schools I was actually interested in. The second later turned into three, one for each of the schools I applied to. At the end, I recycled everything in the first.</p>
<p>In our house, everything went to the mail table and then to a basket for later consideration. The basket overflowed into another and onto the floor. One day I decided to go through and get rid of everything that was duplicate or totally out of the realm. I found several letters from Harvard asking my daughter to apply (she didn't want to go there and probably couldn't get accepted) and a letter from Clarkson offering her a spot in their prep school for her senior year (no way, but at least I was flattered). </p>
<p>We laughed about Harvard--inviting kids to apply to get their app #s up & their acceptance rate down making them more selective. </p>
<p>Had to spread the recycling over several weeks, those view books are heavy!</p>
<p>We used similar approach to Sly Si, although #1 started out in a file folder and ended up in a box -- a big box.</p>
<p>Now we're down to the school of choice, but its communications take up as much room as the random box of a year ago.</p>
<p>If you have younger high-schoolers who will be in the college search process within a couple of years, it's not a bad idea to keep some of those college mailings in a box somewhere. Child #2 could browse through them to get an idea of what campuses look like, what kind of programs are offered that interest him, etc. It's kind of a low pressure way of getting them interested in college selection.</p>
<p>You are probably getting mailings from colleges within a huge range of selectivity and size. so even if your children are very different from each other, there ought to be something of interest to each of them in the pile. Even though the financial info will be outdated, much of what is in the viewbook remains the same and is still valid.</p>
<p>My kids had rules for the college mail.</p>
<p>My D's rules were: I'll look at it IF: it's from a school in the east (mid-Atlantic and north) or Oregon or western Washington AND it has interesting pictures. No military mail.</p>
<p>My S's rules were: I'll look at it IF: they offer me money. That included military mail--most of which he passed on to friends.</p>
<p>Most of the mail got recycled unopened. Catalogs (yes, there were schools that send unsolicited catalogs) got put aside to give to the college counselor at one school or another.</p>
<p>Ah, how I (sort of) miss the college mail!</p>
<p>We filed the mail from the colleges D was interested in. I put the rest in a box. After a while, I took the box to a friend of mine who teaches Careers in junior high (they do a unit on college research).</p>
<p>For the first year, I kept it all (soph year after I took the PSAT) in a box. At some point, I decided to do something productive and unique with it all: I made a college collage. I took envelopes and letters from various colleges (usually the most colorful) and used simple silver thumbtacks to collage it on an old, unused bulletin board. It looks really cool. However, most of the stuff wasn't used. Now I throw most of the stuff out. I think it's good though-but not the duplicates that I am not interested in. I first found out about UChicago through its interesting mail, and now it's my first choice.</p>
<p>My brother kept them all in a huge box. I threw out everything except Olin's duct tape mailing.</p>
<p>I (I am a 2010er) read every single piece of unsolicited mail that arrived. Good thing too, because I applied to the college that I am attending in a month (Amherst) solely because of a diversity mailing that I got for being a National Hispanic Scholar. I knew nothing about the campus, and sat on the letter for a while, and was suddenly more open to applying after I got deferred from my EA :P</p>
<p>It's always a nice ego booster when a school you have never heard of offers you something :P</p>
<p>I don't think I've ever received anything that I didn't explicitly request (and sometimes I've had to make several requests before they'd send me anything). It's almost to the point where I feel ignored. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>You house will be invaded with these. You will eventually have enough paper to start your own recycling business. Half of them will come from Washington University in St. Louis. You will hear from many colleges you never heard of and at least one those will be within 15 miles of where you live, and you will wonder why you had never heard of it. The ones in cold weather will have beuatiful pictures from early fall or late spring. The ones in hot weather will have pictures of a beach. The classroom photos will always be from some obscure class that has only 10 students rather than the huge lecture hall with 500. The recently built residence hall with large dorm rooms will be shown and the rooms any freshman can actually get will not. The amount the place costs will either be left out or buried somewhere in the brochure in small print. Most will profess having a national reputation and that your son or daughter is an ideal candidate. A couple of months from now, many of them will actually send follow up materials asking if you went through what they already sent. Others will have form letters pour in from some alumni. As things progress you will start throwing some of it away. Then two weeks later, you will see the same stuff and wonder whether it is new stuff or whether you just forgot to throw it away.</p>
<p>My cousin kept all of her mailings, and at some point realized that she had over a pound of paper from particular school. She boxed it up and sent it back to the university with a note explaining that they didn't have any majors she was interested in (environmental studies), and even if they did, she wouldn't want to support their non-environmentally friendly practices.</p>
<p>
[QUOTE]
My brother kept them all in a huge box. I threw out everything except Olin's duct tape mailing.
[/QUOTE]
Did you know the duct tape was added by hand?!? :)</p>
<p>The current dean at Olin was at Wash U-St. Louis for a time years ago and shared a few details of the communications plan there. Mailings were scheduled to "hit" students every 10 days and from what I hear, they've kept that pace up over the years. I can't imagine the budget they must have for publications.</p>
<p>UVA has cut back quite a bit (though the specialty schools do some of their own mailing) because we know that the vast majority of our publications are going into the recycling bin. Besides, students do a lot of their college search online these days. I think the communications budget is better spent going towards great web features (podcasts, videos, virtual tours, etc.).</p>
<p>drusba, I'm actually a student going into my senior year (why doesn't my age appear next to my username anymore?)... and I'm still not getting anything besides what I've requested. On the other hand, judging by these stories, I don't think I'm missing too much! :p</p>
<p>After I took the PSATs in 10th grade my mailbox was flooded with all of that fun college stuff... I figured ok it will end now that I've sent in my deposit and I've graduated... Nope, I've still received a few things from schools!</p>
<p>Drusba:</p>
<p>I had to laugh when I read your post. Loved it. You might add the pictures of diversity . . . I remember reading a story five or six years ago about a college that edited its pictures of students so that it appeared that the school had a more diverse campus than it actually had . . . </p>
<p>We're using large storage bins at our house for the brochures. We're on the second one. After the decisions are made, we'll recycle the paper and use the bins for moving day.</p>
<p>Best brochures nominee: Frank Olin</p>