Georgetown Admissions Dean on UChicago Admissions' Practices

unalove
Sun, 27 Oct 2013 19:27:51 +0000

Hm. strokes chin

I have a hard time thinking about the question of whether Chicago does too much marketing without diving into my own background. Relevant information:

-- All four of my grandparents have college degrees. One of my grandparents has a graduate degree from an Ivy. My grandmother’s sister was one of the first women ever to graduate from a tip-top law school with a JD. Three out of four of my grandparents majored in the liberal arts.
– My parents share three Ivy League degrees. My parents had the same (fluffy) major in undergrad. Neither of them have a professional (JD, MD, MBA) degree
– My parents shipped my older brother off to yet another Ivy before I was old enough to start looking at colleges

I mention all of this information because it implies a lot about my college search, my college knowledge, and the assumptions that my parents and I made, including:
– that top colleges were not all alike, but rather were distinctive from each other
– that having a liberal arts degree would increase quality of life, no matter what the degree was in
– that the college experience was worth paying for, for what it signified to employers as much as what I might or might not learn
– that as long as money is money and hard work is hard work, I should find the school I want to attend rather than the school that’s hot at the moment

All of these factors helped point me in the direction of Chicago once upon a time. And my parents were more than happy that I was thinking about a school like Chicago, even though it was a) cold, b) far from home, and c) in another time zone. We knew people who knew people there, we had been to campus before. And, in fact, I don’t remember getting any mail or postcards from Chicago – I don’t think my PSATs were high enough for me to be interesting to them.

I mention all of this because I imagine that many CC posters and the ones that are most liable to complain about the abundance of college mail come into the college process with this kind of savvy. Had Chicago bombarded me with college mail, I would have though it to be a little too heavy-handed. But had I not had the kind of background I did, would I need a little more of a push to consider the school? Absolutely.

So in one sense it’s kind of elitist to say that a college’s marketing work is done, that enough applications are enough. Because there are always kids who don’t have the knowledge that they could, and that’s the role of a marketer, after all, to educate prospects on what they might not know. And provided that there are more kids every year who don’t have this information, I don’t have a problem with it.

Now, if only there were a way to predict information saturation and spread outreach efforts to where they’d be used best…