I didn’t realize the mailings couldn’t be recycled? I thought it was just paper…who knew?
I’m also one who also asked D to make sure she checked the box. We haven’t tired of receiving the mail, and if on the off-chance some schools track ‘interest’ by clicks on their email links, then that’s good. We click away on those that are interesting, and unsubscribe from the vast majority. No big deal. We also created a college email address, so either my D or I do this.
@mamaedefamilia - OMG I forgot about WUSTL. It seemed like we got something from them at least twice a week for two years!!
My kids enjoyed getting the college mail. I would add that getting a letter like this doesn’t mean a lot, but it doesn’t mean nothing–it does mean that your kid passed some filter.
I don’t understand why anybody would take these any more personally than the personalized mail inviting the XYZ Family at 123 Main Street to test drive a new BMW or try the new Italian restaurant in town.
Well, those two examples are different. It’s likely that BMW targets its ads more than the Italian restaurant does. This is why we get glossy ads for things like cruises (and sadly, more recently, for retirement communities). If you get a personalized ad for a BMW, that probably means that some algorithm somewhere calculated that you probably have enough money to buy one. It’s the same for a promotional letter from Yale. Not all college students get them, so there is some algorithm that says that this student may possibly be a plausible applicant. But it’s still a pretty wide net, so nobody should take it very seriously.
My daughter got the Yale one as well as many, many others. I’m not sure about the box-checking but the mail box is always full 
She just tosses most of them aside, although I try to at least see where they came from. Most are a waste of paper, because they are from places she will not apply to, but I think she liked getting all of that “college mail”, even though she KNOWS it is just marketing Course, now she just rolls her eyes at the sheer volume! LOL!
The best college mail my daughter received was from Carleton College - it included a frisbee, and not a bad one either!
I got a Yale one and from the rest of the ivies. The Harvard and Yale ones were especially funny to me, for some reason or another (probably because of how elaborate they were considering the fact that I’ll probably get rejected). But, it worked. I applied. Lol. But yeah, don’t take them too seriously.