@PetraMC my daughter gets mailers from schools where she has absolutely positively no shot at acceptance. Her stats are so below their averages that it’s laughable to me that they think she would even apply- but then I realize that she doesn’t know the intricacies of their accepted student’s stats like I do, and if I were more naive she would probably be happily throwing apps away.
Here’s the thing, if these colleges didn’t have some success with this, they would have stopped doing the physical mailings a long time ago. Direct mail is the least effective, lowest ROI that companies do, that most have stopped. It’s all email, google search et… I know the colleges are also sending tons of email, which makes a lot more sense (cheaper, easier to measure).
The responses on this thread of people who know the deal about the mailings, are not the primary targets of colleges, these would be more secondary. They’re targeting first gens, kids whose parents grew up in another country, lower SES, internationals, i.e. people that think these emails mean interest. They would only need a few hundred, maybe a thousand, to apply, collect the app fees, to cover their costs.
"One of the reasons that the cost of college is much higher today is because colleges have many more expensive administrative and marketing personnel. "
These mailings have been going for a while though, I got letters in the early 80s, before the first usnews rankings came out. In fact I got the Rose Hulman card that was mentioned earlier, in 1982 I think, I know dating myself!
DD20 had the opposite experience - she received almost NO mailings from colleges! Long story short - she didn’t even registertake a PSAT till her junior year. On the day of the test she was sick and never took the test. The counselor was required to turn her blank answer sheet in since she was a no show. We were surprised when we received a lengthy test analysis with her score of 320!
Apparently 320 is too low for even the most most marketing happy schools to waste a stamp on.
She did get deluged by one small non-competitive state school - the theme of their marketing was “you’re more than just a test score.”
At first she was highly offended - but it became the family joke. She has since received at least some marketing of the absurd out of reach schools. Once she actually took her SAT and had a reasonable score.
She understood the reason - but it still stung a little when all of her friends were “complaining” about all the mail and she wasn’t getting any.
Duplicate post
My now college daughter somehow got onto a mailing list in 9th grade although she didn’t take SATs/PSATs until 11th grade. We laughed at many of the mailings - some were from for profit places and some were for top schools like ivy league schools. U Chicago sent tons of mail all 4 years. Very few were actually looked at since the novelty wore off fast.
My daughter’s friend, however fell for the marketing. She isn’t a great student by any means and most of you would be horrified by her test results - her SAT was under 1000. Her grades were not always honor roll level. She applied to U Chicago and Harvard. Her belief was they would want her because she offered diversity since she attended a religious school. She was surprised to get rejected by both. I asked her parents why they didn’t discourage her from applying to save time and application fees Her mother was like well I figured she would stand out from other people applying so get in that way.