I recall an open house at UChicago back in 2009 where newly minted head of admissions Nondorf told the audience that his job was to raise awareness about the University of Chicago so that you could apply so that they can reject you.
Nothing underhanded about it. He was extremely successful in doing both.
It has to be tied to PSAT somehow…
Kid got bombarded after he took it and got 99 percentile. It’s a huge waste of paper…and you can’t even recycle most of it. Some mailers are the equivalent of a small phone book!!!
The mailing are not about artificially lowering their admit rates. That’s CC chatter.
They just want to get your attention. Period. You took the PSAT, stated some major, that’s pretty much all they know. They don’t know your scores.
CC thinks this is all some vast conspiracy. Doesn’t make it so. Smarter to really dig into the colleges and what they value and look for.
BS. It’s entirely about lowering their admit rates. They may not know anything about the students, but their objective is to increase the number of applications. Sugar coat that all you want, but that’s what they are doing.
You don’t know, frac. You may think so, I get that.
Your unqualified kid who receives mailings has zero impact on their application numbers and denial rates unless he assumes that mail makes him suddenly special and he applies. Wise families vet the various schools. Caveat Emptor. Chicago sent my kid mail, too. No way she was qualified. She did not apply.
Take a look at the accept/rejection threads at these colleges in the spring here on CC. You will quickly see that the accept rate of “qualified” students is nowhere near 35%. Most students who actually apply are top students.
And those “millions” of dollars “raked in” probably barely cost the price of running an admissions office. The idea that they go to all that trouble for a profit is not borne out by any evidence.
But people love a good conspiracy theory.
From every single admissions book that I read, and every single website I have seen, the odds of admission to HYPSM for a kid with an academic index of 9 is ~35%.
^I’m going to guess that that would take an extraordinarily strong student, and that many if not most students who do in fact get accepted are not 9’s–your post proposed a dichotomy of unqualified students vs. top students. with no middle ground. But the truth is that many non-tippy-top students apply and are accepted, by your reckoning, they shouldn’t be applying.
^^ Um, don’t think so. AI refers primarily to athletes and the actual Ivy minimum is 176, maybe higher now. Maybe you mean something different (or something has changed.) But when you get down to it, the only kids with anything like a 1 out of 3 chance are the very best, most holistically compelling, as judged by those adcoms, who then don’t get bumped by institutional needs (balancing majors, geo diversity, and more.) No one can look at stats alone and predict the chance. What some can do is predict enough is in line that a kid will probably get past first cut. Again, you have to see the whole picture to guess that.
If you get mail, sure read it. But then dig deeper.
I am not implying in any way that kids with AI less than 9 shouldn’t apply to the top schools. I am not proposing any dichotomy. I am also not saying that schools decide by stats alone.
I am merely saying that in my extensive review of books and websites related to college admissions, kids with AI of 9 have ~35% chance of getting into HYPSM, statistically speaking. That’s 7x more than the average chance of ~5% that is often touted.
My kid started getting college mail LONG before (like two years before) she took the PSAT. So…these mailings were not based on checking a box anywhere.
Did she take the SSAT/ISEE?
No. The first standardized test she took was the PSAT as a junior. She started getting mail the summer after ninth grade.
Then how did they get her name?
@lookingforward…good question. Many years ago, on this forum, I actually asked that question. No one knew. Others from her school also got mailings after 8th grade. The school does not give out information. DD did not request any college information.
We have no idea why she starts receiving college mail before freshman year of HS.
BUT I will tell you…once you start receiving it, it is impossible to stop it. We had boxes of the stuff…pre email.
Usually, the main tie-back is to the PSAT. But I suppose some colleges really looking for able prospects could have services that check local sports reports, newspaper honor roll reports, reports about who won science fair, whatever. Like leads generators. Dunno, either.
We had boxes, too. D2 had checked some pre-med category. Funnier was that, instead of pre-law, D1 checked something like law studies (criminal justice, etc.) She got email from every tom dick and harry school with the program or anything that level.
And then the phone calls started.
We (school parents) had another issue with certain mailings and the hs swore they hadn’t released names/addresses. Someone did.
Actually the mail that used to surprise me was the opposite. Why would a school with average SAT scores around 1500/2400 be targeting my top scoring kids? Even if they had been chasing merit money there were much better choices for them.
I did enjoy the clever mailings. “Our name is Mudd” from Harvey Mudd. Some of the U of Chicago ones. Though after my youngest was accepted EA they sent him a calendar with one picture more dreary than the next. Chicago has a beautiful campus - just stunning in the spring - but every single photo was steeped in brown or gray. We were really scratching our heads at that one.
I agree with garland that they aren’t doing it for the money or to increase their selectivity. Believe me, Harvard is getting plenty of applications without sending out a thing.
The only place I know that discusses the Academic Index in Michelle Hernandez’s A for Admissions published in 1997 - and I think it’s been about that long since she’s actually worked in a college admissions office.
@thumper1 No early AP test? My son started getting mail after taking an AP test in 8th grade.
No early AP tests. She took her first AP in 11th grade. No early anything tests.
Seriously, we never figured out how she got on some list. She got stuff from all kinds of places where she had NO chance of acceptance. None. Luckily, she had no interest in any of those schools!
We did think of one thing…she was a Middle School Presidential Scholar. But that did not necessitate her giving out her name and address to anyone. This was solely based on her grades in MS…and nothing else. Not exactly a recruitment dream! And years ago, folks on this forum agreed…that likely was not the source of the mailings.
I’d like to point out something from AP Stats that kids and parents seem to ignore. If, say, the top 10% of high school students think they might have a chance at an Ivy or similar and so apply, and these schools accept ~5% of the top applicants, then, what percentile does the accepted kid need to be at (supposing that there’s some holistic way of ranking kids)? Is it the top ~5%? No, it’s the top ~0.5%. I think “tippy-top” is more “tippy-top” than a lot of people expect based on 5% admission.