<p>I know some people in my school aren't applying to Penn b/c of the "recognition" issue (yes strong prestige whores whom i hate) Is this a growing trend? </p>
<p>*** Furda do your job its not that hard. I'm sure 70% of CC's population could do a better job.</p>
<p>"What's with the decline/stagnation in app[l]icants?"</p>
<p>It's called senioritis. It happens every year.</p>
<p>^^elaborate</p>
<p>i honestly think it has to do with marketing. think of the number of people who received harvard viewbooks without asking (50,000ish). now compare it with those who got one from penn (really, really low).</p>
<p>no one i know got a penn viewbook without requesting it. so yeah..</p>
<p>when "shot in the dark" applicants think about applying to ivies just for fun, they quickly overlook penn because ... well, a ton of people don't know it's even an ivy. </p>
<p>if i were going to apply to ivy league schools "just for fun" the only ones I would immediately think to apply to would be HYP, maybe Columbia or Dart.</p>
<p>funny how wharton is great for marketing yet penn admissions isn't so great with it.
a lot of people don't know about penn / never received info about penn, so naturally, they don't apply.
i requested my viewbook about 5 times before getting one (about two years after my first request and maybe after i was done my penn essays...)
if i didn't grow up around penn, i probably wouldn't have thought about applying.</p>
<p>you go to penn? which campus?</p>
<p>probably because the people at penn smell really bad</p>
<p>and because people like muerteapablo and ilovebagels dissuade a lot of collegeconfidential posters from applying</p>
<p>@crystalpineapple: why, university park, of course!</p>
<p>i think the thing about wharton is that nobody ever says wharton school at penn, they just say wharton...i feel that ppl treat it as almost a seperate institution.
i definitely agree about the lack of marketing thing...i found that many ppl either think its a state school or "the dumb ivy" (at least that was my experience....)
i requested a viewbook and never got one...</p>
<p>yea...not good enough marketing....ppl always think it's a state school lol....it's name isn't a snobby elitist name like PRINCEton or Harvard</p>
<p>hey penn has wharton yet they still lost more money than alot of ivies in the stock market.....</p>
<p>I don't really think they're hurting for applicants. Just because they don't see double-digit increases every year doesn't mean they are doing anything wrong. The OP complains about 'prestige whores,' but the only reason the number of applications would concern you is if you're looking for a lower acceptance rate, and therefore, more prestige.</p>
<p>So I'm not the only one having problems with not receiving viewbooks..</p>
<p>
[quote]
no one i know got a penn viewbook without requesting it. so yeah..
[/quote]
I know one person.</p>
<p>kmatimber2, i could not have said it better myself. i TOTALLY agree</p>
<p>Penn's undergrad admissions marketing is pathetic. It's no wonder Wharton set about doing its own, and doing a much better job of it. Eric Furda will be feeling the heat from the trustees to increase apps in line with peer schools...but I don't know if his tenure as admissions dean at Columbia prepares him for the aggressive marketing efforts Penn requires.</p>
<p>Columbia has more name recognition and NYC...it doesn't need to be SOLD the same way that Penn and Philadelphia do. Furda presided over a huge increase in apps at columbia, but that's just a function of his riding on a demographic bubble and plummeting NYC crime rate.</p>
<p>I nominate myself for head of Penn Admissions marketing department.</p>
<p>i hope you guys realize that having more applicants (as a product of more advertising) will just make it harder for you to get in...so be happy that not more people know about it</p>
<p>Do you want to know why? Because a lot of students on the Penn board are extremely sarcastic and belittling. I am having a really bad impression of Penn right now. Whenever I call Penn, the people on the other side of the phone are extremely impolite (unlike my beloved Cornell~).</p>
<p>These small things are all important! I know a girl who turned down Harvard Med School because her interviewer was extremely impolite and the administration seemed really messy and disorganized to her.</p>
<p>The stagnant app numbers is probably due to the fact that there's simply a limit in the number of kids who will ultimately apply to a school. Penn gets so many apps as it is!! there's just gotta be a cut off at some point. you can't get every high school kid in the country applying to Penn... and you shouldn't want for that to happen, either. Penn is one of the most improved schools in the country, in terms of reputation and rankings, over the past 20 years. there are other things to make a school more enhanced, well known, and just overall better than increasing a silly application total.</p>
<p>
[quote]
i honestly think it has to do with marketing. think of the number of people who received harvard viewbooks without asking (50,000ish). now compare it with those who got one from penn (really, really low).</p>
<p>no one i know got a penn viewbook without requesting it. so yeah..
[/quote]
Me neither, I had to request it. But really, how often does a viewbook actually introduce someone to a school and encourage them to apply? I may be naive, but I'd already had a rough list of schools that I wanted to apply to, and the viewbook supported my decision, not made it. o.o</p>
<p>hey, maybe penn is low-key for a reason.. maybe it doesn't prefer to publicize itself because it wants students who truly want to go to penn for penn, not for the "status" and "social image".. Penn doesn't want superficial students/people who only care about labels and status.</p>