My kids are both top 8% of their class, and they get lots of marketing brochures from TOP colleges. They never get anything from state schools or other good schools… only places like Vanderbuilt, Yale, Washinington U St. Louis…
Is this because these schools know anything about my kids? Like I don’t mean have they researched my kids, but have they gone through some type of filtering process by which they think my kids could handle those schools, and that is why we get brochures just from those types of schools?
State schools usually only send information to those who ask for it. They don’t have unlimited budgets for glossy brochures.
We got tons of mail from schools my kids had no hope (or desire) of admissions. Recycle bin. One also was invited to a lot of camps to prepare her for medical school. She has never expressed one iota of interest in a medical career.
What @eandesmom said above. This is all about driving the applications up, and the admit rate down, making the schools desired by even more prestige-chasing applicants and parents.
Haha! They don’t waste money on marketing. My D received mailers from Harvard and Stanford, plus all other Ivies, U Chicago,etc… She wouldn’t have gotten into Harvard in a million years. Harvard gets approximately $3,060,000 from applications alone. That more than covers the cost of extra readers and the mailers themselves. It’s not wasted at all, becasue of course it boosts their selectivity, which is more marketing for them. Its a wise investment on their part.
They waste a TON of money - a lot of the schools do. I work in advertising and marketing and my colleagues and I are so surprised on how poorly these schools communicate. No customer relationship management. Just send out a ton of mailers over and over again.
I agree 100% that it means absolutely nothing about an applicant’s chances. But why is it different than any other kind of marketing? Not every mailer for every product is designed to have a 1-to-1 event effect. (That’s what coupons are for). It’s also brand-building and yes, statistics… but you know what else? There might be a few kids who wouldn’t have applied otherwise who do get admitted.
Without evidence, I refuse to believe it is part of some secret conspiracy to separate students from application fees or worse, to purposefully break their hearts. The only strategic design I might accept without proof is one that prefers areas with high disposable incomes, as that is marketing 101, right? Keep the applicant pool full of as many full-payers as you can and need-blind will have a less detrimental effect on revenue.
They know we have kids reaching college age. They know the economic data for our zip code. They probably correlate that to PSAT scores and some other data they get. So why not? To not send them would be bad marketing, and I bet a lot of other colleges wish they had the budgets to do it more.
Just the fact that we talk about it here - constantly - shows it is working.
They are targeting your kids because the College Board gave them your kids’ PSAT scores, along with the PSAT scores of about 2 million other kids. And a computer is sending the mailings to every student who got any score higher than X.
In our experience, it wasn’t just the tippy-top schools that do this. We got lots of stuff from Wash U and Mount Holyoke and Miami of Ohio and Western Washington and Brandeis and UArizona and UAlabama and so on. A very interesting mix of schools.
Back when a college classmate from South Carolina was in HS, he received an unsolicited application from the Citadel offering to admit and enroll him as a “Citadel Scholar” based on his HS states, class rank, and possibly because he had a relative who’s an alum.
He immediately tossed the application/offer in the trash as he had absolutely no interest in a military school-like environment. .
Wash U sent my son an email and a mailing weekly for over a year. His grades or test scores are not even close to their averages. He had no chance of admittance nor did my son ever show any interest or ask for info. They are 100% doing it to increase how many applications they get, so they can later reject them. Really left me with a bad taste in my mouth for that school. If we didn’t know better, we could have been led to believe he had a chance and wasted time and money.
We, too, were a Wash U ‘chosen family.’ Every week. Sometimes postcards, sometimes 20 page brochures. Daughter also got a million texts and email.
The best swag we got, from a public school (after we expressed interest and attended a ‘weekend’) was a senior school year calendar. It had all the SAT/ACT dates on it, all the dates for things due to the school like applications and FA, 12 beautiful pictures of the school, the football schedule, other team schedules, etc. It was very useful.
While I don’t think top colleges care about the application fee, they do care about selectivity. Who’s going to be the first to a sub 2% acceptance rate?
I actually think the catholic god is having a big giggle sending my kid stuff from catholic schools. You'd think, omniscience being all that, he might notice the atheistic inclination? Count me in on the conspiracy LOL.