Apologies for the awkward thread title but I am pretty tired. Hopefully you’ll understand what I am asking below.
In many houses across the country, the college application season generally kicks off early when colleges begin sending out postal mail to prospective applicants, typically junior year of high school. I remember the first time receiving a Harvard or Yale packet in the mail and having this feeling of “wow!” come over me and my kids.
I know that generally speaking, the mail you get from colleges does not correlate with their interest you. In most cases, colleges will send mail to candidates they feel will likely apply (and hence boost their application numbers - and revenues). Getting a packet from Harvard does not mean Harvard wants you - just that they think you should apply. As a parent, I learned that lesson the hard way after my first kid applied to schools.
Some colleges send a pamphlet or a packet here and there, but others seem to send quite a large volume of mail. For us, the two schools that inundated us with postal mail were WUSL and U Chicago. We didn’t apply to UChicago, but we did apply to WUSL and will find out the results on March 20.
What was the school that sent you large amounts of mail to your house? Did you apply, and if so, did you get in? Of the schools where you applied, would you say that the schools that sent you the most mail produced more rejections than admissions, or was it the opposite?
Again, I know why colleges do it, but each person’s story is different, and I was just wondering if there was someone out there who was inundated with mail from some school and actually got admitted. This is not a serious, data gathering exercise- just something that had me curious over the last several years.
I actually saved all of the mailings my son got to see how much there would be in the end. Over 7 pounds of paper! U Richmond and Elon were the two that were the most prolific senders by far. Mine did apply to Elon but not because of the mail. He was accepted.
Interesting!! I don’t recall mine getting any mail from Richmond (until after applying…even then I don’t recall much). Was accepted with Pres Scholarship.
U of Chicago and Colorado School of Mines were both relentless in their mailings and emails and no, my D didn’t apply to either. If anything it was a big turn off.
For one, Oglethorpe. For the other (by a wide margin) WUStL. We felt like we’d lost a penpal when the season ended.
She never showed any interest in WUStL, didn’t know anything about it, wasn’t interested in medicine as they seemed to think she was, she didn’t apply and didn’t attend. But boxes of mail.
It isn’t kids who are likely to apply. They will send mail to anyone who meets a bare minimum threshold, and probably even those who don’t, depending on who they hope to attract. When test scores were still not optional for most/all of HYPSM, they sent mailings to any kid with a high test score. They sent stuff to my son, who had no interest and no chance anyway. He put it right in the recycling bin.
UChicago sent a lot, and CWRU of course, and Tufts also sent a lot, for some mysterious reason. I’ve heard lots of people complain about the volume of UChicago and CWRU mailings but not Tufts!
S23 applied (and was admitted) to CWRU, despite their mailings being both more prolific and less graphically appealing than the others.
At some point I will start another thread and list the information we collected with my youngest, HS Class of 2022. We saved all of the mailings from colleges from 10th grade to end of first semester of 12th grade. I suspect that we had fewer mailings due to Covid - mailings seemed to be less than my two others (HS Classes 2013 & 2016).
In all, we received 477 separate pieces of college mail from 169 colleges. The breakdown of the mailings was 307 postcards, 142 letters, and 28 “books”. We received the most from CWRU, though I suspect that result was skewed as we received the bulk of those after she clicked on a CWRU email that she was “interested”. In second place was UChicago with 21 mailings, third was Hartwick with 19, and fourth was St. Mary’s (Maryland) with 13.
She received mailings from places that she was never going to apply to - and she would never be admitted to - including Columbia, Cornell, Harvard and Yale. Mailings were probably due to the PSAT/SAT score, which were not tippy top but pretty good, though were a mismatch for her 3.5uw GPA (some As and Bs, with two C+ on the final transcript).
She received a few odd ones, including SCAD and School of the Art Institute Chicago, though these might have been from AP Art History (took junior year, got a 5).
Middle kid got a lot from UChicago, though she really wanted to go there. She visited twice, first time to see the school and talk to a coach, next time to go to a prospects camp. She was academically qualified, but was not high on the coach list. Deferred EA (they did not have ED back then), waitlisted, contacted by coach who tried to help but too late at that point - ultimately rejected. UChicago sent one of her recommenders a very nice blanket, though that didn’t seem to mean anything in terms of admissions.
Just an update - DC rejected from the school that bombarded us with the most postal mail - WUSL. Looks like I will be having a bonfire this week - glad I kept some of their mail!
In the past Northeastern has been mentioned as a school that sent out a lot of mail. Maybe now that they get just under 100,000 applications, they have decided to save a few trees.
