How many emails/brochures from colleges? Will it ever end?

Booklady
Sun, 07 Feb 2010 09:28:05 +0000

The following was posted here on CC a few years ago:



By the time you are actually admitted to college you will have received 10,784 letters, brochures, and other fliers from no less than 985 colleges. At least 500 of those will come from Washington University in St. Louis. Even more will come from some college that is actually near where you live that neither you nor your friends have ever heard of. The glossy brochures will all have beautiful pictures of their campus and smiling students. Those with cold weather will have nice early fall or late spring pictures, those from hot weather states will have pictures of fresh looking students walking about in February. If there is a beach within 50 miles, it will be in there. If they have large dorm rooms, a picture will provided; if they have small dorm rooms, you will get a picture of the students in the dining hall. If they have many classes with 500 students, you will get a picture of 14 students in a class for some obscure course that few ever take. If the area around the college is nice, you will see an aerial picture; if not, you will see pictures of the main part of campus that don’t show the huge security fence and wall that surrounds most of the campus. Ninety times out of a hundred the materials sent will not tell you how much it costs to go there except that they sometimes provide some small print that mentions tuition that existed before the last two 25% increases. And they will all say essentially the same thing: they believe you are a unique student who would be very happy attending their college, so please apply. If you keep them all, you will be able to fill a basement from floor to ceiling and start a paper recycling business. You will then eventually be accepted to a college that you may actually want to go to but which forgot to send you anything.