I’m a parent of an 11th grader and totally new to the college admissions process (other than my own nontraditional experience). I apologize if this has been asked a million times, I looked through a few pages of threads and didn’t see this asked, so I hope I’m not killing y’all with my question.
My son received a letter from Yale Undergraduate Admissions today. It stated “Using information obtained from college testing services, the admissions office has identified you as a student who may be a good candidate for Yale.” It a typical “consider applying here” letter he’s been receiving from a million colleges, but I was under the impression Yale doesn’t send out mass mailings to prospective students. Additionally, my son never had any of his scores reported to Yale, or any school for that matter, since he’s just a junior, so they wouldn’t have his name and address because of that.
Soooo, how common is it to receive this letter from Yale? I KNOW it means nothing in regards to having a good chance at getting in bc everyone who applies is brilliant and amazing, yet 93% get turned away, I’m just curious as to how common it is to have Yale seek you out?
I should add that I’m assuming the “info from testing services” is probably his ACT score from the Feb. 6th test, even though we didn’t have his scores reported to any schools.
VERY common. My daughter got these letters from every Ivy League school and many others. If we could do it again, I would have recommended not checking that little box when she took the SATor ACT.
Thanks for the info! Hmmm, don’t check the little box…I’ll have to tell him that, although I think it’s probably too late. We’ve been receiving massive amounts of college admissions mail for 2 years now…I’m pretty sure our mail lady will be happy when May 2017 rolls around!
If it’s a fit for him, I hope your son applies to Yale, because it’s a wonderful school. The letter he got has served its purpose if it made him consider doing so. You will probably receive an avalanche of letters from UChicago; see if they still send a “free” T-shirt
Having looked at the postage and printing costs of this marketing material, I have to marvel at the wasted resources. Today’s kids are as likely to read an email as a printed brochure, and the costs (financial and ecological) are very different. Snail mail should be reserved for T-shirts :)).
DS still (as a college sophomore) gets marketing materials. The schools are not suitable for a transfer school, and you have to wonder about the school’s list culling software. My sympathies are extended to the hapless school that sends out letters with glaring grammatical errors.
We created a new email account just for college marketing. It might be too late for you, but I recommend it, and doing so before the next round of testing might keep your mail lady’s knees from buckling under the load.
Its quite common. I remember being excited that Brown started emailing my daughter in her sophomore year after her PSAT testing. Its an automated system that takes scores they like and sorts out kids that might make the cut. Also if your kid listed certain schools that they are interested in while registering, those schools will start contacting you to apply.
As @IxnayBob said- it wont stop once they head off to their selected school either. Hofstra is convinced that my daughter should leave Yale and transfer to them. They say so at least 3 times a week. LOL
My daughter was impressed that the letter from Yale was on linen paper with the Yale watermark.
I was just curious if she got the URM letter as it talked about all the diversity several places or if there is just one letter for everyone - guessing based on high PSAT results.
it’s fun getting these pieces - up to a point. someone on the boards said once how the colleges are trying to get the students to want them – not the other way around.
I would never tell my kid to not check that box. I’m pretty sure I told her to be sure to check it. We looked at everything that arrived and may in fact have been alerted to a suitable college via a mailing or email. Even if a school was not suitable, sometimes their literature bought up something we had not considered before, to look for at other schools.
Surprisingly, we were not inundated with “junk mail.” More and more schools do everything via email now. Once my D ruled out a school, she sent all their future emails to a special junk email folder or hid them or something. I tried to get her to unsubscribe but apparently kids don’t do that. Just keep getting ten million emails as long as they’re not in their face.
And I definitely concur, even though these pieces sound very personalized, they are not, so don’t look at them as individual invites. But yeah, when we got that letter from Yale, I took a second look and talked to my D about it. She had uniformly excluded Ivies from her search and I wanted to be sure it was a thoughtful decision. FWWI, her counselor had suggested Yale of all the Ivies as one that is striving to be really inclusive and attract creative unusual students, not just future investment bankers.
Her counselor attended Brown which I thought was good match for D and has that creative aspect. Said counselor is an artist and was actually steering D more towards Yale. In the end, no Ivies made D’s list, no schools with single digit acceptances, nothing even in the teens, I don’t think.
I could have built a small house with the amount of wasted paper brochures! And most cannot be recycled
I wondered how much more resources could have gone to the existing students of these schools if everyone just cut back 25% of their direct marketing materials…oy vey!
This is only semi-related but perhaps helpful as it goes to the question of personalized outreach and what, if anything, can be read into it.
The Princeton admission office invites around 150 secondary schools to nominate one senior per school to be considered for the Creative Arts and Humanities Symposium held in October (before applications are due). About 90 kids are invited from the group of 150 nominations and all travel/food/housing expenses for the weekend are covered. There is no requirement that the students being invited to the Symposium apply to Princeton, but reading between the lines it is pretty clear that Princeton uses the Symposium as a recruiting opportunity.
I don’t have any idea if other Ivies have a similar “recruiting” programs (I know that Yale has a winter STEM recruiting weekend for likely admits - I think it’s called Yale YES-W and you should be able to find threads about it on CC) but perhaps other posters have information.
Funny, my D got the same type of letter from Harvard which we posted on our fridge as a joke. Anyone who has read my posts knows that as a die hard alumni from Yale, that there was not chance in heck that I was going to let my child apply there. No letter from Yale. Go figure.
The novelty of the letters and e-mails wore off quickly. She kept wanting to apply to some school in Colorado because of the sweeping mountain ranges on their brochures. Mind you, this is a kid that hates camping and the outdoors.
We also got the Yale letter. Fancy - and silly. They could sponsor a student with the money they spend on such activities.
I’ve been feverishly unsubscribing from every email and went immediately to SAT student services to remove our name from the mailing lists. These are pretty meaningless marketing materials and a huge waste of money and paper.
Hopefully we will not get a huge barrage from ACT. Going on to check to make sure we are not subscribed.
We got that letter last week. It was more elegant than most. A slim envelope gets more style points than a clunky catalog. However, now that I know about the free Chicago T-shirt, I’m thinking my daughter has been shortchanged!
I wouldn’t say the Yale feeler has “no” value, selective schools probably will not send out mailings to students that have no chance of admission at all. However, they do cast a much wider net than the numbers they can admit and the mailings are typically based on a single data point, the standardized test score.
I am glad my daughter checked the box as she learned of some schools that are potential good fits that weren’t on our radar. She also got invites to apply to summer programs that we had never heard about previously. As for the rest, there’s a bonfire in our future on May 1, 2017, or thereabouts. We should start taking bets on how many s’mores it will fuel.
WUSTL wins for spam longevity - it started in her freshman year, how Wash U got her name is anybody’s guess. And her chances of getting in are only slightly less slim as her chances of getting into Yale.
