<p>So recently I’ve been getting an inordinate amount of college mail from universities I am in no way qualified for. This one from Brown is quite laughable, “Dear Mark, here at Brown we appreciate difference and the need for diversity”…from Penn, “As the first African American dean of admissions, I invite you to take a look at the opportunities for minority students here at Penn”</p>
<p>But the most offensive was a mailer from Dartmouth I received this morning that depicted a group of African Americans smiling and supposedly being very casual as they studied under a tree on campus. Nothing wrong with that, right? Well, my neighbor got the EXACT SAME MAILER, same font, same exact words and information except the people under the tree were white!</p>
<p>If this doesn’t cross the line, I don’t what does.</p>
<p>That is a rather ridiculous way of recruiting minority students. If they really respected diversity, they would have students from all different backgrounds in a photo together and send the same mailer to everyone. They are sending the wrong message in that situation, especially since you had access to the “other” mailer.</p>
<p>Get used to it (and not just from universities). Politicians seeking election often send out mailers listing their endorsements. They often guess at the race or ethnicity of the voter and send out mailers with different lists of endorsements depending on the guess of the targeted voter’s race or ethnicity. Companies advertising themselves also have different mailers, sometimes in different languages based on assumptions about who is an immigrant from a specific country.</p>
<p>Apparently, marketers (of universities, politicians, and ordinary products and services) seem to think that race or ethnicity based appeals work, even though it may backfire with people who actually think about such things.</p>
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<p>They probably send a mailer with a diverse group of students to recruiting targets who declined to state their race or ethnicity, or who checked several categories, on the standardized test demographic information section.</p>
<p>Get used to it. I still get solicitations for all sorts of things written in Spanish and have not been in college for decades. I don’t even read Spanish but my last name is very Hispanic so there you go.</p>