No, I don’t think so. Importing the taxes aren’t going to give them info on bank accounts and assets. When I got to review page the financial section couldn’t be accessed and was not highlighted
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It seems like that’s the way it’s designed to work, from what I have heard from other parents and our school’s college counselors. It seems weird and strange to me 
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I only had 2 boxes, 1 abt scholarships and the other about foreign money. I was able to consent to irs though
My comments regarding not needing to fill out FAFSA or CSS were for full pay parents. If you’re not expecting any need based money from the school, it doesn’t matter if they’re need blind or need aware.
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Colleges seem to relentlessly market themselves through salvo after salvo of emails before their ED,EA,ED2, and RD deadlines.
D24 showed me her dedicated email folder, with the same college sending her 4 emails in the same week. She tried to figure out how they got her email and the following sources came up:
- communications with college admission office to schedule visits
- communications with sports coach for visits
- registering on online sports platform
The marketing covers the whole range of schools with admit rates from 5% to 90%. These schools are essentially helping manufacture low acceptance rates which they associates with exclusivity, status, and quality of education. One could seriously argue their ethics.
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My two cents is I really doubt this is the actual motive.
I think the actual motive behind mass marketing emails for almost all colleges, even very selective ones, is they believe there are potential students they would love to consider out in the world who do not end up applying.
The problem, of course, is probably only a small fraction of the recipients who get a mass marketing email are actually in that category. But, the marginal cost to such “false-positive” emails is essentially zero–not even a stamp. Indeed, it can be more costly to try to figure out how to be more discriminating.
This isn’t just a problem in college marketing, it is a problem across the field of email marketing. All those other entities also doing mass marketing emails are not worried about acceptance rates and such, they just face the same basic economics–they have reason to believe there are a few potential customers somewhere on the list, and it is more costly to try to sort them out versus just emailing them all.
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If your child took the SAT (or ACT) that is most likely where they got her contact info.
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True though I have seen more than a few people on CC comment that they are extremely turned off by the non-stop spamming from certain schools. As in, enough to make the claim that it took a school out of the running for them. Assuming this is not internet posturing, then there’s an added cost: some people choosing not to attend, or perhaps not even apply in the first place.
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I’m in the higher ed marketing business (although not in admissions), and I disagree, at least when it comes to the “‘name-brand” schools—it’s not hard to sort, especially based on past behavior; any decent email marketing platform provides this functionality. Carpet-bombing with poorly targeted emails erodes the brand, which is something any decent university comms person works hard to avoid…
…unless having a single-digit admissions rate is critical to their brand, in which case the repeated, blanket admissions emailing aligns with their goals. It’s worth noting which schools do this and which don’t.
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The schools got the daughter’s info from the daughter reaching out to the schools directly.
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Recognizing you aren’t actually speaking for any admissions offices, would you think admissions offices are actually measuring applicant engagement via individual email views? That is, would you expect “candidate x opened up only 5% of our emails” (or similar) to be data they actually incorporate in their admissions decision, or is that more likely an urban legend?
I think this is highly institution-specific. But if a school says they don’t consider demonstrated interest, then I would assume clicks on emails aren’t part of admission considerations. For schools that do consider demonstrated interest, it likely comes down to the sophistication of their email marketing platform and data analysis capabilities (e.g., have they found a strong correlation between email clicks and yield?).
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When my D applied to her ED school (which does care about demonstrated interest), it asked the applicant to list 6 contacts with the school.
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Yeah, that would then be the practical question–is the number of additional desired students they ultimately get larger than the number of desired students they ultimately lose? No clue, personally, although usually marketing people have ways of trying assess whether the things they are doing are seeming to help.
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I agree with the other poster–it seems to be a sampling of colleges across the selectivity spectrum.
The only real pattern I see for S24 is he gets more from localish schools than a purely random sample would suggest.
Edit: By the way, I didn’t mean to suggest colleges don’t do anything at all to narrow lists. I was just meaning to suggest they would only do what was efficient to do, and would be fine with being over-inclusive once additional discrimination started getting too costly.
So, it makes sense to me some of these localish colleges implemented some sort of geographic strategy, because they probably often have the data to do that at an extremely low marginal cost.
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Thanks for this, daughter did the same and got an account. She was able to enter mailing address later in the process.
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If you haven’t read Jeffery Selingo’s book “Who Gets In and Why” I highly recommend it. In one section he talks about how colleges increased marketing to not only attract students from other areas, but also to drive up their application numbers overall. Which often resulted in driving down acceptance rates.
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Yep, same. But it never asked about a 529 account, just checking, savings. Or did I miss it? Ugh
Happy New Year! I enjoyed catching up on 300+ messages and seeing everyone’s updates. D24 has four apps left to finish. One due today, which I believe she has finally submitted, then one each on the 5th, 15th and 17th. I’m so glad this part is almost done for her. As for me, I have somehow entered some sort of zen state where I haven’t been thinking about her apps at all. (Don’t ask me how!)
Good luck to all in this final stretch!
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