<p>Is it customary for a University or College to cold call your home?
We have a lot of mail from them, but one school is calling the house.
I was a bit amazed, and they keep calling. Is this typical in admissions?
Am i naive regarding this?</p>
<p>We experienced this with a few schools.</p>
<p>Keeping the applications coming in this economy with the number of US students shrinking is upping colleges’ marketing games. Even Harvard send over 40,000 solicitation letters!</p>
<p>Yes, it happens. </p>
<p>However, in our case, I can’t recall whether the calls came from “any ol’ school” or just the colleges where S had applied/requested info.</p>
<p>One cold called with an offer of a hefty scholarship for D2. She’d never heard of the place.</p>
<p>Only a few that I am aware of and only from schools he had visited. There may have been more who called his cell phone.</p>
<p>Liberty U kept calling for D2. They still send us mail. Something like “open houses for prospective freshmen or transfers”. Ugh. Other schools now send mail for their graduate programs! For kids who are now just freshmen! </p>
<p>Another small school called for D1 and offered her a huge scholarship. She is practical and would have considered it strongly if they had offered her major. I guess it’s a way to expand name recognition for relatively unknown schools.</p>
<p>If your child has taken an official ACT, PSAT, SAT, or SAT II he/she probably has given permission to the companies that produce those exams to release his/her name. You can prevent a large portion of these kinds of contacts by limiting the info. on the registration forms, and then carefully identifying the place where you can refuse the release of the information.</p>
<p>Stopping your child’s HS from releasing information, and keeping your kid’s name out of the local press will further reduce the opportunities for college marketing machines to find out who and where your kid is. But, it will be almost impossible to prevent all of this.</p>
<p>greenwitch, what was the small school with the huge offer? There are several students on CC right now who had good credentials and are looking for big scholarships due to family financial restrictions.</p>
<p>Wow, I have not heard of that before. But, I was curious (and cautious) when one registration form asked for cell phone number - did not provide it. We generally do not give out phone numbers unless it is a required field. D has gotten a lot of snail mail and e-mail, but no phone calls . . . so far.</p>
<p>Wondering if those of you receiving cold calls in the past few weeks have NMSF students? Those have been the ones we have received lately. Offering big scholarships based on NMSF and SAT scores. </p>
<p>And some apparently do not cross reference their lists. One school has called our son because of 1) Boys State, 2) his attendance at a summer program on that campus, 3) NMSF. Each time, he reminds them that they do not offer any engineering degrees, thus he is not interested. Another school has called because 1) older son went there for a year and younger son attended a siblings weekend, 2) ACT results, 3) NMSF. He has politely declined each time. Then they sent him a voucher to come visit. Later that week, they called to ask for a donation–even though our son has not attended there for two years. Loved the school, just wish they would remove us from ALL the lists.</p>
<p>As a marketing professional, it seems unprofessional to me.</p>
<p>We got a few repeated calls from Centenary in Louisiana? I just told them they weren’t on his list or even in the region of consideration. I am sure someone in marketing thought this was a good idea to man a phone bank with students or alums or min wage telemarketers. In this economy, I try not to be too rude since it is just someone’s job. Seems the “do not call registry” doesn’t apply here since you checked the box on sats? In any case, as with most telemarketing, it is a big waste of money when emails are relatively cheap to send mass mailings.</p>
<p>@gadad - it was Ferrum College, near Roanoke VA. D1 was a B+ student, with not so great test scores, so I hope it helps someone!</p>
<p>It happened several times to me. One school actually called my grandfather’s phone. He has a separate line in the same house as us and is listed first in the phonebook. We rarely answer our home phone though, so I believe I spoke to one school once when my little brother answered, got confused and shoved the phone in my hands.
I also got a cold call from a school I had already been accepted to (and ended up going to), but that was the only time I got a call from a school I’d heard of.</p>
<p>The Kings College in NYC cold-called with an offer of a $10k scholarship last year. No NMSF or even exceptional PSAT/SAT scores here and no idea how they targeted our son. They called during the school day (?) and spoke with my husband briefly. That’s about as far as it went.</p>
<p>My son got several calls from Dominican College (I think?) in NY state. He was SO not interested that he just let the call go to voice mail. I cannot imagine why they were calling him.</p>