I don’t know how old some of you are, but in the mid 80’s, I had a big box of mailings. My DS20 had about the same size box.
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I got a ton of mailings back in the mid 80s. Many from schools I’d never heard of.
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I’ve outed myself on other threads, but here goes…my actual day job (not my volunteer passions or adjunct work) was running a marketing firm. I started in the DM field in the late 80s outside of DC. Yes, I sent out all of the “crap,” from political to non-profits/schools; the bottom line is always money: application money, donation money… This is one of the most accurate accounts of what happens from a marketing perspective in the college world.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90557723/the-man-who-invented-college-spam-and-created-a-monster
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Great article. Thanks for posting.
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I was National Merit in the late '70s, and I got a ton of mail, day after day, including from the US Military academies, who I think had just started taking women. It all went straight in the trash. I remember one of them read, “It used to be that the number of National Merit finalists at (not at all selective college) could fit in a station wagon, but NOW blah blah blah.” Yeah, I thought, the number of National Merit Finalists at your school probably fits in a matchbox car.
And yet, I had idiot kids in my practice who told me that they were applying to highly competitive schools because they thought that a direct marketing outreach was a recruiting letter promising them admission! I’m talking kids with IQs of 80 (if that) who were submitting applications to highly competitive colleges, just because they’d received an email or a brochure.
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I wish I could say it was more altruistic. Parents need to understand at the end of the day colleges are a business, a non-profit business, but a business nonetheless.
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Wow couldn’t have said it better. We parents have a choice as to how to approach the application process. We don’t have to buy into the frenzy. I get that in some circles, it may seem like you can’t escape the madness, but you really can. Get off CC, don’t click on the USNWR rankings, stop using the terms “tippy top,” “elite,” and “first tier.” We have choices on how we want to live and what we want to teach our kids.
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Excellent points.
I’d add that fit is a luxury. Part of the rise in applications is due to ever increasing costs. Many ambitious but perhaps not wealthy students are aware that top colleges meet full need. So students apply, even when they have no chance. It’s desperation also.
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You make a really good point. Many (if not most) kids don’t have the luxury of shopping around for a school that checks off all their boxes. Most have to worry about finances above all. To me the biggest issue with college isn’t admissions (if you are willing to come out of the prestige bubble there are more than enough spots at various colleges) it’s the cost. Our state flagship, which used to be the affordable alternative, is now $30k per year and that is unaffordable for a lot of families. It’s cheaper than most privates, but still expensive for an average family. I don’t know how long costs can keep going up before there is pushback.
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I’d like to see a cap on the number of applications allowed. I know last year’s cycle (and perhaps this year’s) was unusual but applying to 15-20 schools only added to the feeding frenzy (and it was likely a love/hate for colleges who one the one hand were raking in application fees and boosting rankings, while on the other hand, burdening their AO’s.)
I know there are a million reasons that have been cited on here for doing it - but I hold fast to the belief that with a bit of research, a comprehensive list of safety/match/reach/super reach/merit/need-based, etc. can be done with 10 or less applications. It would force applicants and their families to give more consideration to their choices, rather than trying to shoot fish in a barrel. I wish I had a dollar for every middle-of-the-pack applicant who threw in an application looking for merit at a school that with a bit of research, would have told them that the chances were improbable. Or applying to schools thousands of miles from home when the parents don’t have any intentions of sending them that far. Or applying to too many safeties that they have no intention of attending.
Unfortunately, I doubt it will change. The machine keeps turning.
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I wish there was a CA on this board to give some perspective….at our school, the CA’s seem to have been a given a mandate of a certain number of safeties….encouraging my kid to apply to several safety schools they have NO intention of ever attending. I just said “No” to it all. Cut the list.
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I think 1 or 2 safeties is fine, personally, but the student needs to be excited about them and they have to be actual safeties (i.e. truly guaranteed admission and affordability). There is no sense in applying to a bunch of safeties you aren’t actually excited about and would never attend.
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That’s a very good point.
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Anecdotal, but of the roughly 10 kids I know that were admitted to MIT, none of them followed that advice.
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The # of safeties is an interesting question. So often, the kid who is “forced” to attend a school by virtue of have no other options is quite negative about it. Rather that being grateful for having someplace affordable to go, they feel bitter toward the school that would have them. I think that the counselors who encourage kids to develop a list that will almost certainly result in a choice recognize this interesting psychological phenomenon.
I fully agree that creating choice around undesirable options does nobody any good. It’s like offering a vegetarian the choice between beef, lamb, and pork. But there’s a lot to be said for good safeties.
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I got mailers 30+ years ago. I remember many. I wasn’t that great of a student. I mean I was your average A/B NHS kid, but not even close to Valedictorian or anything. I did learn about a lot of smaller schools in my state that I had never heard of and others through the mailers. Learned about some smaller schools like Brevard in NC and I remember getting one from Case-Western Reserve which I had never heard of. I think I got something from the Army, too.
I only applied to one college! UNC, which was good then, but not that hard for in-state students. We knew it was the best of the UNC system schools, though, for sure, and we could rank the rest with no help from USNWR. (They aren’t much different today although I think App State and UNC-Charlotte have moved up.)
BTW I just heard a story on our local NPR radio station about the growth of the UNC system schools. My D22 and I have been touring recently and seems like almost every campus is building to try to keep up with all the students who want to go to college. Of course, NC is growing by leaps and bounds too.
My kids have both pretty much opted out of the rat race.
My oldest refused to even think about college after a fairly angsty high school experience. Took the fall of 2019 off and then took 2020 off with the rest of the world. Got bored and got a job at Starbucks in 2021 and after about 4 months of that decided to go back to Community College. I don’t know if there are plans to transfer to a 4 yr school and I’m not really going there because I don’t want to jinx anything.
MY D22 definitely wants to go to college, but is pretty much interested in only applying to safeties. Her friends have told her to aim a little higher than some of them, but some of the safeties are good fits for her and I think will be academically engaging. She’s just not interested in a super stressful college experience and is finding it stressful enough going through the college app experience. I think she has two “targets” on her list right now and no reaches. She took the ACT once and has no intention of taking it again.
Oh, and my kids don’t look at CC. I told my D22 to stay off it. I just wanted to be on here myself so I could parse the info that would be useful for her.
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I think that’s another thing that has changed since I applied to college back in the Stone Age. We didn’t apply to reaches. We applied to places where we had a strong likelihood of being accepted. And as I said upstream, 3 applications was the norm…not 20.
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I applied only to UNC. Thought about applying to Duke to see if I could get in, but I am a Tar Heel born and Tar Heel bred and the only way I’d go to Duke was if I was a Tar Heel dead, so I saved the application fee. 
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Back in the day I did apply to one reach - Harvard. But at that time it wasn’t as crazy as it is today. I thought it was a reach, but not an impossibility. I was a good, but lazy, student. A NMSF who got a C in chemistry but 800 on the verbal SAT (no practice). I didn’t feel like I would be out of place at Harvard but wasn’t surprised to be rejected -especially since I needed a lot of financial aid. Needless to say things are very, very different today. I think that is the problem for some parents - they remember getting into highly rated schools with gpa’s/SATs lower than those of their own kids so they are shocked when junior is rejected.
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Students apply to many more schools because acceptances are much less certain at all colleges on their lists (other than their safeties). And the more schools they apply, the less certain acceptances at these schools become. The situation can only get worse with each passing admission cycle, unless and until we make college admissions a bit more predictable.
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