<p>I've gotten somewhat decent scores on my tests (PSAT 10th: 160, PSAT 11th:165, 1st SAT:1820, PLAN: 27) and because of the student search services from both SAT & ACT, my email inbox get bombarded with colleges saying they're "interested" in me. Because I'm going to be a HS Senior in the fall, I've recently gotten scholarship considerations from colleges as well. A lot of them are colleges I've never even heard of and really have no interest in applying/attending. I'm a student in GA, and my mind is so set on trying to apply for Emory & U of Penn through Questbridge and using GSU, UCLA, and maybe other Georgia schools as safeties (I want to become a nurse practitioner). Should I consider all these "lesser known" colleges that are "interested" in me and take advantage of their offers, or should I just go with what I want to do?</p>
<p>*Maybe I should add that I get emails a lot from Oglethorpe AND Brenau Universities (since I live in GA), Rensselaer in NY, Pomona, College of William & Mary... basically colleges that are have a bit of prestige, but I've never heard of, nor have any interest in attending.</p>
<p>Those mailings are more propaganda than interest. If they are offering to wave your application fees and it does not require any additional effort on your part (such as extra essays etc…), go ahead and apply if you feel you could see yourself attending. Both my sons got mailings from Ivies and many many lesser known schools based upon their SAT/ACT, but there really was no chance they could get in to the Ivy schools and they had no interest in the other lesser known schools.</p>
<p>Definitely not. It’s not about where you could get in (and “receive an offer” does not equal “you could get in”); it’s about where <em>you</em> want to go.</p>
<p>I’m on my phone so I can’t forward the article, but every college you are receiving info from has purchased your name for $0.33. Depending upon your test scores, you might receive hundreds of brochures from colleges. So, NO you’re not supposed to apply to all of them, but you are supposed to use the info to narrow down your list to about 8 to 12 colleges (maybe slightly more if your family can afford all the application fees.)</p>
<p>Out of all the mailings D ever got, maybe one or two generated enough interest to even go on a tour if we happened to be in the area, and then it was a “not interested” on the part of D. (The one I can recall is Barnard.) We kept a large box of all the mailings, just to see how much we would get, but almost all of it was instant roundfile material. Every school she was truly interested in, either we or she found on our own.</p>
<p>If we went by weight of mail received, one daughter would be at Oglethorpe and the other at WUStL Neither even applied to these schools, but they kept sending and sending brochures and post cards and stickers for our car. Some of this is for your parents also, because the literature is full of scholarships and family involvement and how much fun it is going to be to go there.</p>
<p>There’s a lot of space between the reaches you mention, that you may not get into and safeties such as GSU and maybe your other Georgia options. It would behoove you to have a few more options. It doesn’t mean that you have to consider the ones that send you mail. That’s just marketing materials. You aren’t going to actually be offered any scholarships until you apply and are accepted, unless you find the colleges with automatic scholarships for certain level of gpa+sat/act and if you apply to one of those colleges you are likely to be accepted. But look around and find out about some more colleges. It doesn’t matter that you have never heard of them. I could probably name 100 excellent colleges that you’ve never heard of and that I hadn’t either until my daughter was looking. Learn about some–how can you know you aren’t interested if you’ve never heard of them? Do you intend to enter an undergrad nursing program? If so you can scrap any that don’t offer that.</p>
<p>UCLA is no one’s back up school, that’s unrealistic. UCLA is very selective and even high performing CA kids can’t use it as a safety. Also you won’t get enough money to go there if you are Questbridge level income. You are only guaranteed any Pell Grant you are eligible for, about 6k, plus your 5.5k federal loan. They may give you some additional but they will not give you anything to cover the $23k per year additional tuition that OOS students have to pay. Where were you planning to get that?</p>
<p>Remember that the more kids that apply and then are rejected, the more “selective” a school can appear. This can help with rankings. In other words, it’s not about you. :(</p>
<p>Definitely not. These are just marketing tools sent by schools. If you have no interest in applying, then ignore them mailings. Most of the ones my kid’s got were not for schools that made any sense for them to apply to. </p>
<p>@gibby I’d really like to see this article you mentioned. It sounds really interesting to me as I had been wondering about how the colleges obtained the names. As per above, the mailings don’t really indicate anything. If I applied to every college that mailed me something, I would be broke before I even entered college</p>
<p>If you can buy the names of “high performing” students, you can also marry it up to who applies and thus discover test scores by a backdoor means. Not saying they do that, but anything is possible.</p>
<p>@gibby thanks for the link! although it somewhat baffles me how colleges can “buy” these names. Doesn’t CB have a certain policy against releasing certain parts of your personal information and using it only for “research?” I don’t doubt it, but it’s curious. Also, I thought I recalled reading somewhere that it was specific SAT ranges not the scores themselves, though I may be wrong.</p>
<p>^^ You’re correct. When a college buys names they specify a range of scores they want. For example, a mid-level college (say the University of Colorado in Bolder) would probably have more success by buying names of students that are within their target range (say between an 1800 and 2100) then they would have buying names of students who have between 2100 to 2400, as those tippy-top students would probably use the school as their back-up.</p>