Dartmouth skipped S in this mail cycle. Come to think of it, I’m not sure he’s ever gotten mail from them. I remember mail from all the other Ivies but I guess he wasn’t quite up to snuff for Dartmouth rejection bait, or nothing memorable anyway. College mail is still trickling in, maybe one or two pieces most days although some days are now college-free. Ironically, he’s received multiple invitations to apply to the UTD McDermott scholarship…all of which arrived well after he had already submitted his application. One was a letter to us, the parents, urging us to encourage S to apply.
@Astro77 my daughter accepted to udel honors. As @AmyBeth68 mentioned in addition to merit money (which you can get a pretty good sense of by using the npc on their website). In February they announce a weekend invite for distinguished scholars to compete for about 10 full rides, books etc Plus $2500 stipend for some educational pursuit. However it appears that everyone of the 100 or so students that get invited get an additional 20k or so in scholarship money.
It is a really beautiful campus. One that I never really knew about until this process.
Yeah, I don’t think D has ever gotten anything from Dartmouth, either. She has a good friend, from her HS, who is a sophomore at Dartmouth, so her school should be on their radar. Maybe they don’t offer her major? Although she still gets mail from other schools that don’t have a Linguistics program. Who knows.
Edit: nope, they do have Linguistics.
:-??
Funny but the week before thanksgiving were going to go up there to take look to see if see might want to apply before the January 1 deadline. However they are on trimester calendar so there are no students or tours from the day before thanksgiving until January 2. Going to look at vandy next Friday instead
@melvin123 S18 got the Dartmouth magazine this week. I love Dartmouth for him, but net price calculator was unkind.
Dartmouth is a terrific school. They’ve just never sent my D anything before so I kind of felt like the mailer was, to use @traveler98 's term, rejection bait since my D has obviously not been on their radar before and she hasn’t taken any recent tests to warrant her newly getting on their radar. I do think it’s interesting that some of your kids are open to adding schools to their lists now. I also think it’s interesting to try to figure out why schools go for some kids and not others with their mailings. It’s obvious that Dartmouth skipped some high stats kids and went for others with this mailing. I wonder whether it had to do with the date of the tests the bought (but again, my D’s are old) or maybe the states of residency or major. I obviously don’t know, but I do think it’s interesting.
@burghdad enjoy the trip to Vandy! My niece moved to Nashville last year and absolutely loves it there; she said it’s a terrific young persons town.
Hmm @melvin123 S has gotten lots of stuff from Dartmouth, so not new here. We also got some handwritten notes from Oklahoma, and then mail from multiple random schools. Plus a huge thick envelope from University of Minnesota that I’ve been wanting to open for 4 days (S is out of town until tonight).
We still get mailings from the schools who have National Merit scholarships. We got one mailing with a glossy brochure from a state school on 12/2 offering him huge merit money if he completes his application by 12/1! I felt like calling them to complain about the wasted trees and costs of that mailing. This is taxpayer money and our environment.
In fact, I’d really like it if they eliminated thees fancy brochure mailings that go pretty much straight to recycle in our house. Its such a waste. Do people really decide where they are applying from this?
@stemmmm some of the brochures have kicked off good conversations at our house, and we did end up in our visiting schools that might not otherwise have been on the radar. Some of those schools are now on the list. So for us, I think this was successful.
I’m glad to hear that. I hate thinking that its all going straight to trash.
@traveler98 Yes, thankfully the photo is very appropriate. I took it and he is dressed in khaki shorts and a t-shirt for dinner. It’s a great picture of him. They did not specify any particular photo style. Thanks for the reassurance that it’s probably not a big deal.
@melvin123 My D had her list firmed up by August. As submission time came, she started to doubt a few but went ahead and submitted anyway because she’d done the heavy lifting with the supplementals. As the weeks go by, she seems to be zeroing in on 3-4 favorites; those 3-4 that she originally doubted have just fallen further away. The remaining 5 or so are a toss up. As luck would have it, the ones she doesn’t care about are the ones we’ll hear from first. So the decisions she gets before the holidays won’t mean much, except as fodder for the extended family on Christmas 8-| With S21 we will be sure to vet his list a little better so we’re not flushing app fees down the drain :((
Regarding the late Dartmouth mailing, the timing does seem odd. I wonder if it was mailed earlier and got held up somewhere in the postal system. Not accusing your mail carrier of being a Newman, but sometimes things do get lost or delayed. D has never received a mailing from Dartmouth but has gotten stuff from a handful of Ivies with Yale being the most aggressive. The one conspicuous missing school is Stanford. She has visited several times and even stayed in the dorms for a sports camp; she added them to her CA then eventually crossed them off her list, but you’d think she’d be on their radar for mailings. :-/
The Dartmouth magazine arrived here too and D admitted that she enjoyed looking at it and actually considered adding it to her list. I think the mailing is timely in houses like ours where FOMO is alive and well as the applications deadline approaches.
Some schools that D has applied to have dropped off the list at this point. Add us to the team of players with wasted App fees but lesson learned for the younger siblings.
Of the Ivies, Harvard has sent the most solicitation but it’s mostly email. MIT sends a lot of very cool mailings via snail mail. Notre Dame has been aggressive since D’s freshman year and we have no idea why. She’s never visited or expressed interest. UChicago sends a ton (no demonstrated interest). Swarthmore is aggressive as well. We have received very little from Stanford or Cornell.
Isn’t it interesting trying to figure out how these schools target certain kids over others despite that their stats may be exactly the same?
It is perplexing to try to figure out the mailings, isn’t it? D has a friend who goes to a HS in an adjacent district. They have identical stats and ECs, yet they have heard from completely different colleges.
I will say that the mailings from Yale were very effective. All along, H and I have said that we are not paying sticker price anywhere, no matter what, but Yale made us hesitate.
I honestly think these schools have a far more sophisticated approach when it comes to choosing where to send these mailers. The College Board site has a lot of information (profile) on these kids, beyond just test scores and grades, including race, religion, zip codes, interests, etc. I’m a conspiracy theorist from way back, download a ton of data and then send your “worm” program to analyze it. When parents and students say the admissions process can be random or a “crapshoot,” in my mind, I disagree. There’s a complex plan in place for each institution and they execute it.
@AmyBeth68 and @burghdad , thanks for the feedback and info about additional $$ possibilities.
My DD has not heard yet from Pitt or Del. She applied a little later as we didn’t know they released results on a rolling basis.
It’s going to be interesting. Lol!
I’m glad my DD is practical and determined to make a logical choice.
I watched a YouTube video today on a College Admissions meeting where they were voting on applicants. The one AO was interviewed and admitted that in some cases he really can’t say why he did or did not raise his hand. :-?? He said something about going with a gut feeling sometimes.
It’s so subjective and can sometimes ride on whether the AO has a good night’s sleep! I hope our kids realize this when the inevitable rejections do come in sometimes. 
It IS very interesting to see which schools send what, although I’m not privy to the emails, only the mail. What @ShrimpBurrito says about identical stats and adjacent towns really proves the point and I wouldn’t be surprised if what @sushiritto says is correct. And @Kayak24 did your D take any standardized testing freshman year? How did she get on their radar that early? My D got mailings from Harvard and Columbia, but not from Yale or Stanford, even though she did an official visit at Yale. The schools that sent the most mailings to my D were Notre Dame and U Chicago, but I’m under the impression that both of those schools send out a ton of mailings so it’s harder to see a trend/reasoning. I do think that it’s helpful to applicants if they can figure out if they are being targeted for a particular reason, other than that they fall within X band on standardized tests. It helps to tell you what a particular school values, or maybe just what it needs in a particular year because maybe the year prior their class was too heavy on Y kids. And I can see from what some of you have said about getting Apply Here! fliers even after your kid has applied, that just because they spend the time in the beginning of the year setting up parameters doesn’t mean that they adjust them into the recruiting season.
S got us to buy ice cream to celebrate his first acceptance, even though it’s not the first choice.