There’s a difference between seeing an ad in a newspaper and having a targeted mailing delivered to your house. The schools do have some knowledge of where the student falls on the spectrum. D was a strong student, but certainly wasn’t a candidate to get into an Ivy. That didn’t stop all of them from snail mailing her repeatedly. Maybe the schools are looking for that one hidden gem in a pool that falls well below their bottom 25%, but I guess I’m a bit more cynical than that.
I wonder how different it is from someone taking the ACT multiple times?
Someone has some criteria on how to grade both students and schools.
Both students and schools are doing the things they can to pump those numbers a little bit.
I don’t think it’s just about juicing numbers, because the higher scores in both cases makes more options available.
In the case of the student who goes from a 28 to a 31 ACT score, more schools and scholarships become available.
In the case of the university, a larger pool of candidates becomes available, AND the selectivity goes up too, which in turn helps the ratings go up. The alumni are happier, and kick in more to the scholarship funds - more than they would if the selectivity went down. And now they are more desirable to that 31 ACT student too.
“We want you to need us,” say the schools to the students.
And the students say to the schools, “we need you to want us.”
Symbiotic or co-dependent? I haven’t a clue.
HOLY $%#^! WHY?
To dismiss this possibility is sticking your head in the sand… They are likely doing it for multiple reasons, not the least of which is to increase the number of applications in order to maintain exclusivity.
It’s advertisement, plain and simple.
Same reason I get mailings from Tesla…
I feel like the job in many college admissions offices today is to generate as many rejections as possible, to boost selectivity. So tiresome
I think a good many of you are sticking your heads in the sand, too, when you don’t acknowledge that generating no-chance applications isn’t the sole reason, or even the main reason, for these mail campaigns. Yes, it’s advertising, and it’s advertising to a targeted demographic, but the targeted demographic isn’t limited to students likely to be accepted (or at least to receive serious consideration) at these colleges. It’s those students and all of their friends, the peers who influence each other in their views of colleges, and who influence the cohorts behind them in school. If Rolex or Tesla could identify a group like that with as much precision as the colleges can (thanks to the fact that an entire peer cohort, more or less, is taking standardized tests and applying to college at the same time), they would be doing mailings, too.
Yale and Princeton sent my son catalogs, about 1/4" thick and half the size of a sheet of paper.
He did have perfect math scores on the SAT, so that was our thought. Also, 2000 might be 25th percentile or below, but even HYPSM do admit some non-athlete students with 2000 SAT scores.
My son is multiracial, so we thought that might be why he was getting more materials from top schools than some of his friends. He also got some kind of “Minority College Admissions” magazine which was full of ads from Ivies and other top schools, barely could find more average schools in that publication.
My intended point in #78, though admittedly not stated clearly, was that it is just as silly to blame the schools as it would be to blame yourself nor your kid for this. Unbdoubtedly, though, some parents do blame themselves when their snowflake ultimately gets rejected from somewhere special. And inevitably, some great, hardworking kids blame themselves for being too dumb or for not working hard enough. To me, these people are being foolish. @ospreycv22 is correct that plenty of great parents whose kids do not go on to college - but my point is that many of these non-college-bound kids get these mailings too.
Apologies to anyone thinking I was intending to escalate the mommy wars.
We also get targeted mailings, some of which are hilariously off the mark. My wife gets frequent mailings from the GOP asking her for money, once even including an (apparently) autographed photo of Bush and Cheney. She also received a brochure from a company offering tours on a luxury airplane starting at $100,000 per person. The only reason we can figure that she receives these is that she is a doctor and some association or journal sold their list.
That tour company is obviously only interested in selling tours. The list it’s using is not perfectly calibrated, but perhaps it does identify enough customers to make it worthwhile. I don’t think these college letters are much different. For the college, the only downsides are the cost, and the potential for hurting the feelings of a subset of students receiving the letter.
For a while we were getting mailings for high end golf resorts - who knows what triggered that. We certainly don’t play golf.
Even if your kids are not X College material, they might see something in a brochure that makes them think a friend would be interested.
Another way of putting this is that these mailings aren’t targeted to you specifically; they’re targeted to some group to which you belong that the sender thinks may contain enough appropriate targets to make it worthwhile. This is true even if the letter has your name inserted in several places by a computer.
If schools can get data from CollegeBoard and ACT, then they could be more selective in whom the send mailings. Not sure what exactly they can buy.
We get all the mailings from realtors, country clubs, NetJets, Worth magazine, etc., most of which find the recycling bin before being opened.
What I am upset about is that, even though I’ve had a deposit on a Tesla X for more than two years, they don’t send me any mail 
Tbh, I’d just as soon they save their money and start building my car 
My daughter received a fair amount of mail from engineering schools, although she had no interest in engineering. My thought was that her math scores were high enough to make it worth the cost of mailing her brochures.
Geodemography: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/24/political-campaign-style-targeting-comes-student-search
In short, the colleges (and College Board) put together data to fine tune their marketing.
My daughters, beautiful to breathtaking, get none of the mail I get. Twice I have been invited to join the Ms. State Beauty Pageant, and the Young Women of Distinction for my area. I get catalogues for those hideous dresses, and notice of photographers in my area who have a long history of shooting for such pageants. My girls think it is hilarious.
"There’s a difference between seeing an ad in a newspaper and having a targeted mailing delivered to your house. "
This is a major “big whoops” to me. It’s EXACTLY like how the local pizza place, beauty salon, car dealers target me with their mailings - for all they know I am gluten-free, cut my own hair and ride a bike - but I’m part of a demographic that they are interested in ( in the case, people who live in a certain zip code and have disposable income), .
I think it is utter naïveté to read any more “personalization” into it just because the mailing has your name on it. I frankly would be horrified if my kids had read anything into these mailings other than “oh, we’re on a mailing list.” And being “resentful” of it is silly - it’s like resenting the Mercedes dealer for sending me a brochure when I can’t afford a Mercedes. So I throw it in the trash and move on, problem solved.
Colleges don’t report the correlation between income level, grades/test scores, and admit rate. So it could well be that a student from a full-pay family has good chances at admission with lower grades and test scores. His chances could be better than the college’s overall statistics. In the article I linked to above, colleges can set a filter for students with B averages and above–and there’s a fear in the article that colleges might mine the data to find wealthy families.
To add another weird mailing…
Occasionally I will get mailings for baby items often with congratulations on my new baby. Both of my “babies” are in college now!
I have noticed that I get those after buying gifts off other people’s registries. Maybe they assume I’m the grandmother and will be buying lots more baby stuff. 