Enough said…
Are you saying that some schools are not acting with virtue and nobility in their admissions process? Oh my gosh!!!
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I’m not sure why you are sarcastically talking about nobility and virtue - I don’t think anyone is arguing that, or that Test Optional is an act of nobility and virtue. Higher Ed is a business, and each institution is working to keep its business model flourishing. Finding qualified applicants and maintaining the school’s mission is their focus, not making sure every student who wants to attend their school (and is qualified to) gets to go.
What many of us in this thread have said (repeatedly) is that colleges and universities admit candidates to create classes that meet their institutions mission and objectives, and many of those colleges have found that standardized test scores are not necessarily determinative in meeting their mission objectives. Again, this only seems to bother people when it comes to highly selective schools, there are literally hundreds of colleges that were test optional before the pandemic (some extremely selective), some for literally decades.
Every year, there are posts from students and parents who sincerely seem to believe that mass marketing mailings from highly selective schools (somehow they are never taken in by less selective schools) mean that the student has a better than average shot of being offered admission by those schools. Pointing out that every business markets would have been an obvious point (to my mind) but clearly not so obvious to everyone.
College mailings are almost always marketing, not recruiting. If a parent and/or a student thinks they are something else - I hope they read this thread and at least hear someone telling them the truth about mailings. Schools want you to apply, that’s the only way they will be able to admit you (and they like looking selective). If a school appeals to you, go for it with eyes wide open that the very low admit rates are accurate for most applicants. Schools sending mailings doesn’t mean they know you, or that the school is definitely a good match (again, this seems so clear when it is Podunk U. sending stuff in the mail).
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Agreed. Parents rarely seem perturbed about Junior’s failure to be admitted to old state U (except if it is UNC, UVA, Berkley and the like). Nor does the avalanche of mail from from more ordinary schools seem to be an issue (or false advertising). Many people with super high stats kids just can’t seem to accept that no matter how great their kid is, the likelihood of being admitted to a Top 20 is slim.
Marketers segment the market to try to generate the customer behavior they want. In my son’s case, a flood of T50 material started flowing in once they got his SAT scores. I know his odds at several of these schools range from 0% to 0%, so they are clearly trying to squeeze another app out of us when there is no realistic chance of him getting accepted. Now, they are playing on the fact that his SAT is high enough that it is theoretically possible he could get into some of these schools, even though we know he can’t. In this case the marketers goal is to get us to send an application in order to help their stats, and the $3 it cost them to send the mailer, plus putting him on a mass email list, is clearly justified if he applies to a T10 school that he has no chance of getting accepted at. I get it.
Many of these schools do not need any outbound marketing, but they do it anyway. They are fishing for applications.
I get why the Tier 3 schools do it. A lot of these schools are under the radar, and they just have to spend some money on marketing, otherwise people will never hear of them. I am sure there is a matrix they have for who to target, although I have not spent a lot of time figuring it out.
Now, if I was a college marketing professional, I would run the College Board database against a parent FICO score or net worth database, to hunt down full pay applicants. I would be shocked if I thought of this before every single one of the T20 schools did.
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Offhand, I cannot remember the exact book, but there is a college admission book that starts with a deep dive on the person who kick-started college marketing. It really goes into how schools buy lists, how much the data costs, how tailored that data might be - more than most people can probably imagine. I hope someone else on the board might remember better than I, and share the title.
The marketer’s (and college’s) goal is not to just help their stats - though maintaining position on ranking lists is a institution mission/goal at many schools I am sure. The college’s and (marketing) main goal is to find the best possible students to craft each year’s class for that institution. Getting more qualified applicants than needed is what every business dreams of - then they can fulfill their mission more easily and with exactly what they think they are looking for.
Coke has the largest market share of any soft drink company - they haven’t reduced their marketing. To think that any/most successful businesses reduce marketing in response to success seems antithetical to the practical experience of the world.
Colleges’ institutional missions change focus. Constant marketing (and tweaking said marketing) allows them to target and craft what the institution has decided it wants each admission cycle. Build a huge new science facility? Maybe you want to increase STEM enrollment for the next few cycles. Decide to try to increase minority enrollment? Different marketing plan than if trying to increase full pay families.
Personally, I don’t think these schools are trying to trick people into applying just to juice their numbers. I think they are trying to make themselves sound appealing to many many students, because there is almost no downside to the school getting lots of applications. They can hire more readers, and finding those students that best fulfill their mission is literally their job. More options = better choices (in the college’s eyes). Colleges can (and sometimes do) add required supplemental application materials to both persuade/dissuade applicants. I know both my oldest children have found supplemental sections at different schools exciting or a real turn off, which lead to some ‘nopes’ at application time for my oldest. If she didn’t like the essay prompts or short questions, she realized the school probably wasn’t a good match. She wasted neither her time nor the college’s.
Students have power to craft their college list. They don’t need to start with the most well known, most selective schools. And yet, I think that is exactly what most highly qualified students do. It makes sense, they are 17-18, and no matter how smart, they don’t even know what they don’t know.
However, the reason they want to apply to those schools (by and large) is for the perceived prestige. These students can’t be both ignorant of the college process and naively unaware of marketing, but also carefully able to discern why Harvard/MIT/Williams is ‘perfect’ for them, and no other school could come close. Those two things are pretty contradictory. This is where more parents need to be hands on if their kids don’t understand this part of HigherEd. If high school seniors could figure this all out themselves, they wouldn’t need parents/teachers/GCs.
Are those great schools? Yes, obviously. But so are many others. Schools aren’t forcing students to apply to only the most selective (most rejective) schools. These are choices students are making, and if the students highly qualified for Top 50-100 schools, they should be able to both deduce and extrapolate from available information without rose-colored glasses of unrealistic hope.
They (and their parents) should also accept that if a school goes Test Optional, it’s not for any other reason than the school has found successful students (for the institutional mission) unhampered by lack of test scores. And there are students they want to admit who don’t want to take those tests, or the tests don’t accurately reflect the student’s ability. They get to see if those schools are a match for them as well, without stressing about a piece of their application that might not showing their strengths.
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This applicant fishing is new. When I applied to schools 30+ years ago, schools were pretty up front that I should not bother if I had no chance. Now, they want you to try.
Schools in the Top 10 had acceptance rates that averaged 16% in 2006. Today that is probably around 5-6%.
The percent decline generally gets less severe the lower ranked the school gets. These schools have not gotten smaller, and in fact, most have gotten bigger. But they maintain the aura of selectivity because they have gotten more kids to apply.
Personally, I do think these schools are trying to trick people into applying just to juice their numbers 
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If I remember correctly, you recently posted about how an AO at competitive college basically told your child that they lacked the statistics (class rank) to get admitted. Doesn’t that seem to suggest that, at least at that school, they aren’t trying to trick people into applying in order to juice their numbers?
Oh they are looking to juice their # of applicants to reduce their acceptance % and continue that perception of exclusivity.
But talking to someone face to face, one on one is far different than emails and letters to faceless individuals sent by marketing agencies, not university employees.
It’s naive to think colleges don’t want more apps. Just like Tesla wants more reservations than supply when they have a new car.
Not everyone is buying but they like to portray that everyone is.
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I don’t think anyone has suggested this. I tend to agree with @beebee3, who wrote, “I think they are trying to make themselves sound appealing to many many students, because there is almost no downside to the school getting lots of applications.”
The question is, what’s the upside? IMO, it seems like by casting a wide net, the colleges feel like they are more likely to get more of the applicants they truly want to admit, even if these applicants represent only a small percentage of the total number of applicants the colleges attract through marketing.
The TO strategy is a good example of this strategy, as it has not only uncreased the total number of applicants, it has increased the number of applicants from the demographics that many schools are trying to attract.
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Correlation is not causation. Increasing URM and first time applicants has been a focus at T20 colleges for years. They didn’t need Test Optional for this to happen.
But if we are looking for correlations, I do believe that the challenges at Tier 3 and Tier 4 universities attracting applicants is related to the marketing machine that the top colleges have become. The top colleges have created an “Ivy or Bust” mentality among students, and this is impacting the interest and incentive for lower tier students to attend college. The fact that the non-competitive colleges are struggling to attract students is irrefutable.
TO is a component of that marketing machine. If TO is responsible for getting an extra 20 URMs into Harvard, why isn’t it responsible for discouraging tens thousands of URMs from attending open admissions colleges around the country? Is that tradeoff worth it?
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Well they are the same. Tricking people into applying lowers the acceptance rate and thus brings the perception.
Higher selectivity helps in the rankings.
Schools will tell you rank doesn’t matter. Trust me every AO is tracking every rank, looking to find points that use in marketing. And prospective hires are using them to recruit future talent.
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Want a business school case study? Check out 3 decades of marketing by Northeastern….if I recall someone on this thread has a kid there….without housing.
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What does one have to do with the other? I don’t believe there is any data indicating that encouraging outstanding URM’s to apply to Harvard somehow discourages URM’s from trying to attend college at all. But maybe I’m mistaken, Do you have data supporting your theory?
As for the rest, you’ve expressed these viewpoints before, then ignored responses providing you with data and information to the contrary. So it doesn’t seem productive to go through it again.
Hmmm . . . I don’t believe I wrote anything about the rankings, nor am concerned with the rankings, so I don’t know if this is true or not, but didn’t rankers such as USNews drop selectivity as a factor in the rankings?
So far as I can tell, colleges really are trying to entice the exceptional (but rare) applicant who wouldn’t otherwise have applied.
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I am not moderating this thread, but can see the flags starting to roll in. Perhaps you all might want to lay off the ad hominems and get back to topic (or at least not beat the off-topic marketing discussion to death) before the thread gets shut down?
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I must have provided a dozen links in this thread, which you and others have ignored, so I agree that this discussion is not as productive as I would like.
The problems with the lower tier, open admissions schools is irrefutable. These schools are a critical part of our overall higher education system, and the only path to a college degree for hundreds of thousands of young people. I have multiple family members that graduated from schools like these, and one of the schools that a sibling went to is literally hanging by a thread, surviving semester to semester. The “Ivy or Bust” marketing is absolutely a major factor in the challenges these schools are facing today. And TO is a key driver in that “Ivy or Bust” mentality.
And no one in this thread has provided a relevant link that addresses that issue.
This isn’t true. I’ve not only read the links, I’ve provided you information from those same links which directly contradicts your theories, including this last theory you claim no-one has addressed. For example: Test Optional Admission Data - #121 by mtmind
Folks, let’s please stay focused on the topic and not nitpicking about what other users say.
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I’ll ignore your rude comment and focus on the sentence you added later in your edit.
I am somewhat familiar with what has transpired at Northeastern, and the “case study” seems to cut both ways. The marketing wasn’t geared solely to increase the number of applicants, it was geared toward attracting more of the type of applicants that Northeastern was trying to attract. While you may object to this wide-net approach, it seems to be working.
Call it a game if you’d like, but the benefits to the college go beyond merely lowering the acceptance rate.