<p>How do students (and parents) feel about colleges that use scanners at College Fairs to expedite the exchange of student contact info?</p>
<p>Those of you who have attended college fairs have probably observed that a growing number of colleges are using bar codes and scanners to add students to their prospect files and mailing lists without the inconvenience (and writers’ cramp) that can come from filling out dozens of name & address cards.</p>
<p>Some admission officials have noted that occasional students say “No thanks” and walk away when a college booth doesn’t offer a scanner. Other officials claim, “If a student shows that little interest in us, we aren’t interested ourselves.”</p>
<p>Many students and parents love the ease of the scanners while others insist that it makes them feel like a number not a person.</p>
<p>Most of you probably don’t have strong feelings either way. There are certainly more critical issues to worry about in the college search and selection process … not to mention in the world at large.</p>
<p>But for those of you who do have opinions on the pros and cons of this new college-fair technology, I’d be interested in your thoughts.</p>
<p>This sounds like an awesome idea. I would have loved this kind of tool for getting my name on mailing lists. When I chose a college, I did so in the absence of the internet or any other tool that would have provided me with lots of information. If I were to do it all over again, I would have wanted to get all the possible information I could before making such a major life decision.</p>
<p>We’ve only been to our high school sponsored college fair, thus far. It sounds like a time-saving concept and worth using for those mega-fairs, that have so many prospective students.</p>
<p>Do you think that the convenience of scanners will spur students to get on mailing lists at colleges that really don’t interest them? I know that students often do this at fairs, even when handwritten address cards are required. But will the scanners mean that this practice will become an epidemic?</p>
<p>I wouldn’t be surprised to see it cause some (if not many) students to just put their name on the list of every college at the fair. However, I’m sure that it wouldn’t take too long for colleges to find the students with true interest. Also, as we move deeper into the electronic media age, more and more college information is being delivered less expensively, so many of the colleges may not be overly concerned with the high level of early interest in their school that this technology may cause. I’m guessing that there are some benefits for the institutions, with this new method in place, such as saving employee work-time as they may have to do less manual inputting of prospective student information into their databases. They may consider the abuse of prospective students adding their name to schools they have no real interest in to be a minor annoyance. And then there is always the case of students who never in their wildest dreams, thought they would like a particular college, then having their mind changed by info they “inadvertently” receive. Time will tell, I guess.</p>
<p>While it’s true that some students may find appropriate colleges after receiving literature from scanner schools that they never expected to attend, I suspect that–more commonly–the quick fix that scans provide will lead to a barrage of propaganda–via email or snail-mail–that may make it all the harder for kids to distinguish among the good matches and the bad. Already, I think that most juniors and seniors are closing in on that saturation point.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the scanners do seem to have many pluses. So perhaps the next step is to create college-fair registration bar codes that incorporate information about a student’s interests, abilities, and academic record. So, then, if a kid who wants an engineering degree shows up at a college-fair table for an art school, or someone with SAT’s that barely clear 900 is in the line for Yale, then the scanner will make loud and potentially embarrassing noises to frighten the student away. (I’m just kidding here but perhaps the “Smart Scanner” has some patent possibilities. ;))</p>
<p>i wish this technology was around. my hand got SO sore writing my name and address on those cards that it actually hurt doing anything with that hand for a few hours.</p>