<p>I was quite surprised to receive a recruitment letter from Yale (I haven’t gotten the Harvard one D= ). I didn’t think they even needed to increase awareness, though it does make sense that they could be reaching out to students who think that Yale is financially out of their reach.</p>
<p>It seems like Yale times its letters very late compared to other universities. Princeton also sent its letter quite late. I wonder if there’s a strategy here - the people in the admissions offices might be paying attention to the fact that memory best records events happening first and last in a sequence of events. So by advertising nearer to the end of junior year maybe they hope to make a bigger imprint. I have a suspicion this timing is actually quite intentional - U of C started advertising to me weeks and weeks before anywhere else did, and I remember their ads vividly (though that may be attributable to how wonderful and funny and quirky the ads were).</p>