Here’s the silver lining to the cloud:
At least by running the NPC on all of those schools, you eliminated a bunch of schools from the “might/will apply” list. Thus saving you $$$ in application fees. 
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D26 received a big packet of info from Harvard in the mail yesterday. This is ridiculous because:
- does D26 have a 4.0 UW GPA (or close to it?)? No.
- does she have super high SAT/ACT test scores (i.e., above 1500 SAT)? No.
- Is it affordable? No.
- do they have a major she’s interested in? No.
- does it have a campus culture that would work well for her? No.
- does she have a ‘hook’? No
The letter that Harvard included had lots of flowery language in it, made it sound like they think D26 is such a perfect student for their school and all that. Blah blah blah nonsense. This is clearly a tactic that must work well because, otherwise, they wouldn’t be sending something like this to my kid.
It leads one to possibly conclude that they’re just doing this to beef up their application #s so their acceptance rate can remain low. And that’s a pretty lousy tactic, in my opinion. Univ of Chicago does this a lot, too. Univ of Chicago has also sent stuff in the mail to my kid and she isn’t in the target range of that university either…like does NOT meet the standard accepted student profile.
It’s all a bunch of marketing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. For my kid, I wish Harvard would just go away and shut up.
If your kid is applying to Harvard, I think that’s great and I wish your kid and your family many good vibes in the application cycle because it’s an amazing place for the right kind of kid.
/end rant
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Yeah, our eldest daughter received multiple recruitment packets from U.Chicago as well. Each one likely a little more costly than the last.
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It’s amazing how much they spend on those!
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I hate these messages, makes the kids think they have a chance. We are in a competitive Bay Area public school, the only kids out of a class of 500+ senior students that went to the IVYs were athletes. Ones that were super stars, set school records, were all state etc.
I don’t think even having a perfect GPA and 1600 SAT would get any of the kids an acceptance letter so sending it to my S26 which is not an athlete and doesn’t have perfect stats is a waste of everyones time.
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YES! And honestly - it’s fine. I met with her mentor today and we’ve mostly finished the list - yay! He had some really great suggestions. I think she’ll end up with 16 -which is a ton -but we have to do some $ chasing so I think it will be okay. A bunch of them have EA admissions -so I’m hoping that means at least SOME positive news early next year.
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Case Western sends us something every other week. We’ve never shown ANY interest in Case. I’ve never even gone to their website.
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Yup. Yale sent my daughter the equivalent of a short novel. Literally a book. She’s not interested.
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If D26’s AP exams from 11th grade turn out like I expect they will, she’ll end up with a 3.55 unweighted GPA/4.24 weighted GPA for grades 9-11. I think that’s pretty respectable even with getting a C- in physics this past school year.
College Board has been posting AP exam score distributions at this website → 2025 AP Score Distributions – AP Students | College Board
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It’s sort of funny what the impact of all the random marketing materials are in our household. It makes it all feel like a business. Everyone trying to out-market each other. We too got the Yale book and almost daily Case Western stuff, etc. It’s like the old “used car salesman” trope. You read the news articles like the one about Syracuse that started giving out big discounts to get people to enroll and how you’re a sucker if you enroll early because they might still drop the price. It certainly makes it hard to have much respect for a lot of colleges.
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@TheMonaLisa Just wanted to briefly get back to you on this. The short answer is we really liked Kenyon a lot as a school for D26, but, and it is a huge but, none of the three of us could see her being in that part of Ohio for four years. Too small, too rural, and not diverse enough for our family (population of Mount Vernon the largest town in the area was roughly 90% white). We are really glad we went to visit, it is a part of the country we’ve never seen before and we thought rural Ohio was quite beautiful. But, in the end, it turned out there was no way that Kenyon could overcome its setting for us. But, it seemed like a school where students are enthusiastic, lots of opportunities and great community feel on campus.
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As my D26 starts to winnow her list of schools after visits, I started looking at Common Data Set information based on someone else’s post I read somewhere regarding percentage of students who get aid in schools (Section H2 in common data set). I was initially looking to see what merit aid looked like at various schools. But, while I was doing that, I noticed the section that gives the breakdown of need based aid (H2 (a), (d) & (e) give the relevant information. And I noticed, very different rates of students receiving need based aid at the schools we have visited that on paper do not seem like wildly different schools from one another. I’m curious, has anyone thought about the percentage of students who get need based aid as a factor to think about in terms of what the climate/environment at a school might be like? A school where a substantial majority of the students are well off enough to not qualify for any need based aid would likely have a very different feel from one where most of the students receive need based aid. To bring this question to life, here’s the information I found on some of the schools she visited (note: I did these quickly and they are rough, so forgive me if not 100% accurate, but I think they are close enough to illustrate the point).
Pitzer: 33% of students receive need based scholarships or grant aid;
Scripps: 40% of students receive need based scholarships or grant aid;
Pomona: 58% of students receive need based scholarships or grant aid
I figured I’d start with these three because they are literally consortium campuses that are touching each other and students can cross register. If I’m understanding the numbers right, Pitzer seems to be comprised of way more wealthy students than Pomona, and not insignificantly more than Scripps as well.
Some other SLACs we visited or will visit that I looked up, for more context:
Haverford: 41% of students receive need based scholarships or grant aid;
Occidental: 50% of students receive need based scholarships or grant aid;
Wellesley: 50% of students receive need based scholarships or grant aid;
Oberlin: 59% of students receive need based scholarships or grant aid;
Agnes Scott: 87% of students receive need based scholarships or grant aid;
I will note, that Agnes Scott’s number is way different than any of the others here is not surprising, it is a very different SLAC than the others demographically in all ways, and one feels that very quickly when looking into the school and visiting. But, because we loved it so much, and it is a private LAC, I thought I’d include it for context on the other end of the spectrum we visited from Pitzer (by the way, we loved Pitzer too, so I am not of the view that one end of the spectrum is necessarily better than the other).
Anyway, I found this little tidbit fascinating and went down a bit of a rabbit hole on it, but am curious if anyone thinks about the wealth makeup of the student body in this way in making decisions. The fact that it was all there in publicly available statistics was eye opening for me.
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I’ve run across this before as well, and it can be interesting to also add in the non-need based scholarships. For example, at Scripps, while 40% are getting need-based aid, another 15-20% are getting some merit aid too. I suspect it’s just how they want to allocate their aid, so instead of getting a more bar-bell shape with a bigger “missing middle” of incomes, they get more of those upper-middle class folks that may not qualify for aid, but need/want a discount.
The NYTimes has an interesting tool that tries to map out who attends various schools by income distribution. It’s pretty limited in number of colleges, but it’s interesting to play around with. I particularly like to see the difference between public and private colleges.
All that said, my D26 and I have toured a few places where you could definitely feel like there was a lot of money floating around.
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I wonder how effective this marketing tactic is.
I mean, my kid has thrown every single college mailer in the trash without even looking at it. She must not be the target population for a lot of these schools cuz she really hasn’t received that many at all.
We got that Yale book last week, too. My D26 looked at it and said, “OMG save the trees much?” 
She also has zero interest.
What’s funny is my D22 read it cover to cover, just out of curiosity – because her school also has residential colleges and residential college theatre, in which she’s very much involved. She’s a kid who probably could have gone to Yale and thrived. (Not so much D26.)
UChicago’s marketing game is over the top. I remember D22 getting a brochure from them that was completely personalized, with her name cut out in special font – it was nuts. I haven’t seen the personalized UChicago stuff this go-round. Most of what we’ve received from them has been tame, lol.
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It’s possible she checked “no” on the question on standardized tests where they ask if they can send your contact info to colleges.
OMG- the school mailers and emails are out of hand!!! lol
The worst for D26 is Rose-Hulman and University of Chicago. They send so much stuff!
She refers to these two as her university stalkers!! 
She is having a lot of fun at her art program in Ireland. Makes me so happy to see that. I was very worried about how she was going to handle it all. But so far so good: she has an anxiety disorder- so we just never know how things are going to go.
They got free time in town today to wonder around on their own. She of course hunted down an American themed restaurant (it was cowboy/Texas themed) to get some food. Of course she got the chicken tenders- lol.
She is a very picky eater, so she has not been eating the best while at this camp (the food looks awesome- they have a dedicated chief!!- but this is going to waste on D26).
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@beefeater thanks for this. I hadn’t thought about the theory of a school intentionally allocating enough money to merit aid to attract students more evenly across the wealth spectrum. Makes sense that some schools might prioritize this.
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We really liked Syracuse on our tour and my D25 was admitted. Too expensive (she got OOS merit to Wisconsin and decided to go there)! Anyway, the new admissions data for class of 2025 is in for their school on SCOIR. My kids go to a large pubic outside of Boston and the admit rate for their school for Syracuse was 81%. Up about 20% over last year. They admitted over 40 students. I was shocked. More info for those that find this info helpful as I have a D26 too. Northeastern was a 56% admit rate for their school. Granted we are just down the road and that likely includes the abroad starts but still….. a far cry from their 6% acceptance rate. Clemson was selective from our school with a much lower admit rate than National average although my daughter did get in summer start as she was TO. Seems like many OOS TO kids often get the summer start. Noticed that trend. Looks like about 20 applied to Clemson and about 5 got in although the higher stats kids don’t apply there in big numbers. Also, 14 kids got into Michigan!!! 12/14 had SATs over 1500….. As usual their school places super well at regional state schools so no real changes there. Illinois got a bit more selective. More WL movement overall than last year. They usually send about 50 kids to T30. About 12 or so to ivies. That remained about the same. Boston College was very focused on high test scores and it seems only one TO student was admitted. School admit rate was 25% - again regional relationship is good with BC. Wisconsin admitted about 20 students. Seemed more focused on gpa than test scores although high test scores helped. We don’t send as many to the south although some. UNC, UF, UGA don’t have as big of a number applying. Lots of kids going to Maryland, PSU, Indiana. UMass surprised many kids and seems to be less of a safety in state. Places like Bucknell, Colgate, Lehigh seemed to be much more lenient on stats for ED.
To keep in mind, this can be helpful data but it’s one high school.
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Thinking about the discussion of aid as a proxy for wealth distribution on campus. I’m thinking that’s a good angle, but that different campuses probably also have different cultures about this, in other words, how in-your-face some of it might be. So admitting this might be wrong impressions from some of what I’ve read, but as an example those southern schools where people totally redo the dorm rooms with their own furniture etc may just “feel” different to one where you can’t move furniture in or out so things like that are not immediate displays of wealth. Of course that can come out in other ways (one of D19’s suite mates in freshman year was top to toe Gucci when they moved in and I knew immediately these girls were not going to be bffs, lol) but i do think school culture would have something to do with it. I’m not sure how much of that aspect one can pick up from a school tour though.
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