<p>I know kids who got zero mail and all are in top 10 schools. You are better off without the junk mail imo. Do the research and choose colleges your DD likes based on quality, size, location.</p>
<p>While I agree that most of the mail is useless, some of it has been helpful: invitations to local information sessions, advance notice of admissions rep visits to the high school, information about college-based summer programs and application fee waivers.</p>
<p>I hear and understand what everyone is saying about the junk aspects of it and too much of it…but I have to admit that it’s been really fun for our family. My daughter (a junior) runs to the mailbox when she arrives home from school and we all exclaim over what she’s been receiving…and it’s also been great for her younger brother to become familiar with new colleges. My D is jaded enough to know that the letters don’t mean anything…but even I"m impressed with the paper stock and weight and the photo quality. 
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<p>My favorite was one my son got for a “high achieving low income student” when it was actually the other way around. </p>
<p>Transylvania U…every.week. I just want a t-shirt!</p>
<p>OP, we had the perfect test case in our house. One twin checked the “yes” box and the other checked the “no” box when they took the PSAT’s. The mail reflected that. :)</p>
<p>Older son - RIT. It wasn’t a good day if we didn’t get something from them. Younger son was Vanderbilt. We called them their stalker schools. Both got a lot of mail from other colleges as well but those two were memorable!</p>
<p>I think the mail is helpful as a 1st stage to additional research. There are schools on my D’s list that she would never have thought of without getting their mail.</p>
<p>I also look back on my own experience-- in absence of a mailing I never would have ended up at the school I attended.</p>
<p>I’m in grad school and still getting things from a handful of colleges.
I’ve called and begged them to take me off their lists. Stop killing the trees. Ugh. </p>
<p>Both kids checked the box. D’11 hardly got any mail. I don’t know why. I think she might have broadened her search if a few colleges had reached out. </p>
<p>D’14 got more, but not an excessive amount. Only one school coaxed an app out of her based on a mailing, but it was a mailing from a coach who was contacting qualifies for a prestigious track meet (Olympians run in it, but there’s also a day for the state’s best high school athletes). That letter would’ve come regardless of any boxes checked and it was way more personal than the usual barrage of junk mail. A couple of schools would have been good fits, but most would not have been. </p>
<p>I agree that most of the mailings and emails were from little schools we had never heard of. On the other hand, my S got mailings from almost all of the Ivies (where are you Harvard??), and that was a bit of an ego boost for him since he doesn’t really have the stats for that level. Of course, he wasn’t all that aware of the reputations of many of the schools. I had to laugh when he asked me, “Mom, is Columbia a good school?” He saved the catalog that Yale sent, the t-shirt from U of Chicago, and a couple of cool mailings from other schools. He did end up applying to USC based on the mailings he got as we had not investigated that school on our own.</p>
<p>Taylor University. We were getting something almost every day at one point. I don’t even remember where they are.</p>
<p>Colleges today track all the contact you have with them. We recently got a peak at a report that an interviewer had on my son and I noticed it had a date when he went to their website and asked for info. </p>
<p>Will doing that help them get into college ? It certianly doesnt hurt, and colleges are becoming more and more concerned about yield. Even the act of requesting junk mail can tell them you are serious about their school. </p>
<p>My daughter is only a freshman, but now that she has registered at college board’s website, the mail has started. If your student did not mark the bubble when registering for or taking the PSAT, SAT or ACT… you can still modify the registration at the college board website… and you too will begin to get overwhelmed with letters from colleges as well.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.collegeboard.org”>www.collegeboard.org</a> is the website, in case you want to register.</p>
<p>A view from the other side:</p>
<p><a href=“Bloody Monday: Not just for the NFL – Jon Boeckenstedt's Admissions Weblog”>http://jonboeckenstedt.■■■■■■■■■■■■■/2014/02/03/bloody-monday-not-just-for-the-nfl/</a></p>
<p>My D is a HS senior, and was inundated with mail. But it all stopped, completely, as of Feb 1. I guess they all admitted defeat at that point.</p>
<p>My son did not check the box his soph. year, so we thought we’d be free of the mailings that tormented his older sister. But for some reason, this year, he’s getting 3 or 4 per day. We have no idea why because he didn’t check the box his junior year either.</p>
<p>My daughters had a cappex account. It helped them narrow down schools that were a fit and also generated mailings…open those letters they sometimes come with an application fee waiver. Saved me hundreds of $$$$$</p>
<p>…got on today from Curry college (tier 3 or 4 school) …ummm thanks but no thanks. Applications were done a long time ago. My guess they are a little bit desperate. </p>
<p>One of the posters near the top of the thread said the mail helps you find colleges you might not have noticed otherwise… but a copy of Fiske can do the same thing, and a whole lot more efficiently and effectively (since the colleges write their own marketing brochures, so you only see the positive aspects in the mailings!). My suggestion to the OP is to get a copy of the Fiske Guide to Colleges and have your D go to the website of some colleges she is interested in. She can sign up there to get on the mailing list – then she will get mail AND it will be from colleges she is interested in. Also, someone suggested setting up an email address just for this purpose. This can be hugely useful down the line if she uses the same email address for everything related to college and shares the password with you. That way you don’t have to bug her all the time to forward stuff you need related to organizing college visits, financial aid forms, etc.</p>
<p>My daughter got a pretty overwhelming number of mailings. She liked to look at them, but really, the vast majority were from schools she wouldn’t be interested in (she didn’t want a small school and so many of them were small). Overall, I felt it was more of a distraction than a help and she would have been better off doing focused research on schools with the qualities and programs she wanted in the time she spent looking at thousands of mailings from places she clearly wasn’t going to attend. But she did enjoy getting so much mail.</p>