Why is D getting mail from schools that she can't get into?

D has done reasonably well in high school but is not top of the class. She just made it into the top 20% and has a 1970 SAT - respectable but not good enough for the most selective schools. So why do they keep sending her mail?

She gets both e-mails and snail mail from several. University of Chicago has been the worst. They are borderline stalking with the amount of stuff they have sent. Yesterday she got e-mails from both Cornell and Johns Hopkins. There have been other ivies too. She is starting to doubt her college list and wondering if she is aiming too low. But, we have looked at Naviance and she is far below anyone from her school that has been accepted at any of these schools. I’ve been telling her to just ignore them.

So why are they doing this? They will not accept her if she applies. Is this just to get the number of apps up so that they can then reject more kids? Is this one of the reasons that their acceptance rates are so low?

Don’t forget they also get that non-refundable application fee. U Chicago is definitely one of the worst!

Cost of application? 1000 hopeful kids times $50?

Yes. It’s all a numbers game. The only way to have a low acceptance rate is to have lots of applicants.

My S3, a HS Sophomore, is getting this mail already. It’s just weird. As for Chicago, I’ll give them credit for at least being a little clever. They almost poke fun at the whole process with picture captions like “main building when the weather is perfect” and my favorite “hey! a cat!”

someone here mentioned it’s all about getting the kid to want the school; not because the school really wants the kid.

Same thing here . . . Yale (which makes me salivate), Columbia, UChicago (love their mailings - especially the giant poster of Chicago), Vandy.

My son has good stats but c’mon.

Sometimes I wonder if they target by zip codes with certain minimum stats (sniffing for full pay?). We live in a wealthy zip code but definitely not interested in retail COA.

Toss the mailings. While people here will say these schools are NOT doing this to increase the number of applications, I can’t think of any other reason to send shiny brochures to students who do not meet even the minimum grades and scores. My daughter (solid B/B+ student) got tons of mailing from WUSTL, Chicago and Columbia. None were even remotely within her grasp so it was an easy decision for us to throw the stuff away.

The problem comes when kids like your daughter get the mailings. They are almost plausible candidates so they are the ones who would likely apply without realizing that when 90% of the kids are rejected, that means a lot of straight As, top 10%, 2100+ SAT applicants are also getting turned away.

Sometimes I wonder if somehow these mailing come from a third party working on commission, like paid fundraisers or magazine subscriptions. A lot of them do have a web address set up just for the student, so it would be easy to track.

This is so true, and it’s what makes me grateful for the CC community. If I hadn’t discovered this forum I think I would have pushed my son a little harder to shoot for one or two of these schools. He is one of those “almost plausible” candidates. Even if he got in, I don’t think it would necessarily be the best thing for him, right now. The foreign language requirements, alone, would drive him nuts.

My prayer is that he lands in the good school where he is challenged but not overwhelmed, and where he can thrive academically and socially.

@SouthFloridaMom9 – that’s exactly right. Having tough time trying to figure out where that place may be for my fifth (and last!) kid to go through this process. I would like to steer her toward that happy place, if only I knew where it was . . . Of the four who are done, I think two of them went to the right school for them. Only one of them seemed totally happy with her school. At least they all made it through, though. So, I know it is a kind lottery ticket, finding that elusive optimum environment, even if kid has good choices.

Because our daughter spent her junior year abroad and didn’t take PSAT, we aren’t getting those mailings this time around. I kind of miss it. UChicago, send my daughter something, lol . . .

I’ve been telling my daughter this also. Do you want to go to a school where you are at the bottom of the class coming in or would you rather be near the middle or top? If by some miracle she got into one of the more selective schools, I think she would be stressed out all the time.

Here is another active thread on the same topic.

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1731244-what-are-your-stalker-schools-and-have-you-caved-in-to-them.html#latest

I agree that for the vast majority of kids who receive these emails and mailings, this is wasted paper and band width. From the college’s viewpoint, getting the application fee and increased applications is a nice bonus.

However, in the colleges’ defense, I think there is one other reason they do such blanket mailings of kids with SAT scores in the bottom 25% – they are searching for the hooked kid who would never dream of applying to these schools, who don’t have these schools on their radar. Like the homeless inner city kid, the kid of a migrant farm worker. For these kids, a 1970 SAT score suggests real promise. I think the colleges think if they can get one kid like this from a 10,000-person mailing, it is worth it.

UChicago does not quibble on the application fee requirement: If you say you need the fee waived, you just check a box. The GC does not even need to approve it.

As for the rest of the OP’s comments, I guess my daughter opted out of being contacted by everyone. Almost nothing has landed on our door, other than the scant viewbooks and announcements of when the colleges she has reached out to will be in our area. And she has top scores and top grades.

How would the colleges know whether or not a particular child is qualified? I suspect the SAT folks just sell a list of everybody that took the test. Or does the College Board sell lists segmented by performance, e.g. Harvard can buy a list of the 90th percentile? That would seem in the gray area of breaching confidentiality.

They know stats somehow. D has gotten several mailings from less selective schools that say “your stats indicate that you will automatically qualify for xyz scholarship”. I’m assuming this is just based on her SAT performance since I don’t know how they could find out anything about her GPA. The ones from the more selective schools do include statements like “your stats indicate that you are the type of person we are looking for”.

A previous poster mentioned zip code and I do think that might enter into it as we are in an affluent area. Maybe they are looking for “stupid money” so to speak. They try to find parents who are so thrilled at the thought that junior can get into a selective school that they are willing to fund the application and then pay full price if the miracle happens.

This is a play on young people’s psychology. It is hard not to dream about going to UChicago after seeing the glossy brochure and being courted so aggressively.

Because they can’t know yet if the student happens to be a URM, they will bend over backward to get more of them applying. Be flattered.

When the kids sign up for college board, they have to answer a lot of questions such as gpa, which I think is the only thing that college board releases. They will not release the test scores without permission, so it is just answers from the questionnaire. I wonder if there is a way to decline sending the information out.