<p>@texapg: I know the list of those schools (thanks to CC forum!) and most of them have made overtures to my daughter.</p>
<p>Again, my point is that one would think that EVERY school is going to want to have as many NMSF/NMF as possible, right? So why certain schools (who no doubt have the same NMC info) sort of “mail it in” vs. other schools that put a hard press on puzzling to me. Why even bother?</p>
<p>There are 15k students who will make NMF and for many schools it is a bragging right more than anything else and they probably feel comfortable to get 50 to 100 of them. So trying to personalize 15k letters is probably a bit much when they are only targeting a 100 to come.</p>
<p>Someone mentioned in 2015 thread that University of Houston person called and talked for a while and she figured out he might be calling all 16000 of them. Now that is a school which is pursuing every NMSF out there! Most schools actually don’t care to pursue but some state schools do. I remember my D got invites to local lunches and dinners 3 years ago from Univ South Carolina, Oklahoma and a couple of others. The one from OU was hosted by the Chancellor or someone at that level. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to go because she refused to go! I am assuming it would have been tacky for the parent to show up for a nice dinner without the kid who was being wooed.</p>
<p>So sickening… and so many poor kids look up to, and respect these schools. </p>
<p>My son is only commended in our state, so it is not just NMSF’s that are getting tons of stuff.</p>
<p>I do think that since he identifies as multiracial, he gets more mail from colleges than his friends despite about the same scores. We have gotten “Minorities in College” magazines also, unsolicited, which tend to have a lot about FA.</p>
<p>I have only spoken with two of D’c classmates/parents re. college search. Both made comments basically of “The way I look at it, if they (the colleges) send you something - they’re interested!” I didn’t know what to say. I don’t think I said anything. One of the schools in question is UChicago 
The mailings obviously serve their purpose!</p>
<p>At least the Chicago postcards are somewhat interesting. So much of the mail is just generic junk.</p>
<p>With peers, parents, and the internet, there is little excuse for most motivated kids to not have a pretty good college list without any mailings whatsoever. And in my direct experience, all of the glossy brochures in the world aren’t going to motivate a kid who just isn’t into the process. So opting out of the CB and ACT search programs is the way to go in this house in the future. </p>
<p>My alma mater sends me breathless correspondence every year about how they’ve rejected more applicants than ever. Then they ask for money because some of that applicants can’t afford the $66,000 per year all-in. I guess I’m supposed to feel proud that I was an early member of an elite club and that those eager beavers that came after me have made it even more elite. And I should feel bad that there are some kids who can’t afford the $264,000 to go to school. It all seems a little crazy. But if you’re generally going to only accept SAT >2100 applicants with GPA over 3.9, my suggestion would be to say that up front but be give 10 examples of the rare kids who get in with 3.8, 3.7 or even (gasp) 3.6. “Yes it’s true that 90% of ****'s applicants had a 3.9 or higher UW GPA, but meet Jane who got in with a 3.8 and what we found compelling.” </p>
<p>@texaspg, unless they changed policies in the last 2 years, Drexel’s full tuition scholarship is automatic for all NMF’s upon submission of the letter showing you are a finalist. </p>
<p>It’s funny - I was just thinking about this the other day. I was a HS senior in 2003-2004 when a lot of the elite colleges were really ramping up their advertising and flooding people with information (note that she says the peak was in 2005, when Yale courted over 200,000 students). But I was musing upon how much acceptance rates have shot down in the last 10 years. [url=<a href=“http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-11-02-collegerates_x.htm]This[/url”>College acceptance rates: How many get in? - USATODAY.com]This[/url</a>] list is from 2006, just 3 years after I applied for college. The top Ivies are all still in the double-digits; Middlebury and Bowdoin accepted nearly a quarter of their applicants; Lehigh and Oberlin accepted nearly 40%; Emory and Holy Cross accepted over 40%; and Mount Holyoke and Smith accepted most of the people who applied. Actually, the small LAC I attended (Spelman) at the time had a lower acceptance rate than Emory. And University of Georgia? They were the fallback school for the bright young student, accepting 75% of all applicants. It wasn’t a bad thing to just apply to 3-5 colleges, and I knew a couple of people who just applied to UGA or Georgia State and called it a day.</p>
<p>But the landscape has changed so much with the Internet. When I was applying for college, I had heard about a handful of colleges - the big name ones everyone has heard of (Harvard, Yale, Princeton et al.), the regional ones that were big in my area (Emory and Duke, which is honestly where high-achieving Southern students went back then), and the HBCUs because I am black and lived in a black neighborhood. I had never heard of Mount Holyoke, Holy Cross, Smith, Middlebury, or Bowdoin. Better yet, I had no idea that they give financial aid. I was looking for merit scholarships and was applying to colleges where I was in the top 25% of applicants; I didn’t know that these top schools were giving out money to poor kids lol.</p>
<p>But nowadays, everybody has a webpage, there are online college guides, there are net price calculators - so I feel like students hear about a lot more colleges. The Common Application allows you to apply to many colleges at once (when I was in HS, only a handful of schools took the Common App). And so students apply to more colleges because they’ve heard of more. The application rates go down, and then students and parents panic and apply to even MORE colleges because they feel like the colleges are so competitive.</p>
<p>Whereas I think that a high-achieving student with an excellent record probably has about the same chance of getting in today as he or she would’ve in 2004, because the influx in applicants is not due to actually competitive candidates - I think that it’s due to more borderline candidates tossing their hat in the ring just to see (because why not? The Common App is already completed), or more applicants trying to get in just to say that they got into Harvard.</p>
<p>I gotta say, though, Emory and UGA both benefited big-time. Emory went from being where smart Southern kids went to school to having more of a national reputation (and a 27% acceptance rate). UGA used to be a fall-back school for Georgia kids, but now I think it’s often a first choice for above-average but not super-excellent GA students.</p>
<p>@juillet Good observations. I hadn’t considered the aspect of Common App making it easier to apply to more places. And the expanded capabilities via Internet to market the region powerhouses - true as well. </p>
<p>My NMS D is a freshman at OU … where, by the way, the treat academically-talented kids very well. She received the boxes and boxes of advertising material for a couple of years. I would look at all the slick color brochures and books and wonder how much each school spent on these materials and postage, It might have been nice if they kept the advertising to emails, websites, and postcards and spent the difference on merit scholarships.</p>
<p>Am I the only mom who keeps this stuff in a Rubbermaid tote. It’s about to overflow though. It’s kind of interesting to me to analyze some of it. I like the “personalized letters” that know everything about you (or that your child put on the PSAT) and then already give you a username and password. Makes me think these colleges buy some kind of software as they all look exactly the same! Bet that stuff is big business. I throw nothing away and won’t til he starts college and likes it:-)</p>
<p>Not checking the PSAT box does not help. My son didn’t sign up for mail and got tons of it anyway. </p>
<p>@#26</p>
<p>@patertrium </p>
<p>That would be nice, but any additional information that would help over represented kids (in the applicant pool) assess their real chances of acceptance is not something the most selective schools are at all interested in sharing. When none of the accepted 3.6 kids’ profiles look at all like yours, how interested are you really gonna be in applying with your 3.6? Ambiguity, to put it nicely, serves these schools very well.</p>
<p>The best marketing we received was one school gave S1 an application fee waiver. Wish we had a basket full of those!</p>
<p>@texaspg “Someone mentioned in 2015 thread that University of Houston person called and talked for a while and she figured out he might be calling all 16000 of them. Now that is a school which is pursuing every NMSF out there!”</p>
<p>This very well might be true. A friend of mine who works one of the student fellowships at UH’s Honors College mentioned to me that she has to call a number of kids’ whose parents get indignant at the idea of such a low tier school trying to recruit their precious little gem. One person flat out said, “My son will be attending Duke, thank you very much,” and hung up the phone. Lol give me a break, people.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>There is a good and bad side to being marketed to. Bad side is junkmail and or phone calls but the good side is the free offers. One of the big things I advocate is for the student to check mail everyday including spam or allow a parent to check because a good student gets several of these but someone needs to read all the emails but also should have allowed collegeboard and others to market their information.</p>
<p>@tiredsquibbler - I like UH. One of the parents from my D’s batch said what is not to like about free education with room and board which is what his son got for making NMF at UH.I don’t believe he is spending anything more than gas money to visit his parents who are local!</p>
<p>@TiredQuibbler That’s a great insight from the school side. Thanks. It gets me thinking however that there is really an overwhelming amount of competing institutional marking material coming through the mail slot (and gmail inbox). It’s interesting to me that all this competition doesn’t seem to do much to lower the cost of college. Perhaps it’s that brand (help me out Marketing majors!) becomes king in such a giant market. I mean if Yale picks kiddo, then I’d have to think twice. Perhaps it’s worth sending him to the east coast and paying the premium. Why? Well Yale’s reputation precedes it plus that reputation got us to attend a local seminar which was great, led by Yale science department heads. University of Houston on the other hand - how would I know? Why should UH assume that we in CA would know a thing about it? The lone institution that sent the application freebie was genius I thought in that it made us look much closer at the school and we found out it’s got a lot to offer. So I think that’s one avenue. Another area where lesser-known but great institutions could rise in stature is through their online coursera (or other) courses. I was very impressed with Univsersity of Toronto comp sci after going through a few of their online courses. Another opportunity would be to spotlight the graduate school projects and hint that the undergraduates might get to help on some of this cool stuff. When you read MIT’s EECS’s <a href=“http://www.eecs.mit.edu/”>http://www.eecs.mit.edu/</a> - there’s kind of something there for everybody.</p>
<p>as a parent yes, i get excited to see all this mail coming for my son,then I ask him to look at the name and zip code, because in that we can tell what the true source of the solicitation is. For some reason when he used his middle initial on ACT we got certain schools and when he applied using the common app with a zip code plus 1 number we got another batch of schools…</p>
<p>I believe the first physical mail my daughter received from Harvard was her acceptance packet 
Before that, it felt like she had received mailings from every other college in the country.</p>
<p>In Yale’s defense - the Yale Viewbook was perhaps the most seductive mailing my daughter received!</p>