A phone call is cool, but showing up in person would not be cool for me. Just talked to S, a recent college grad - he said it would have been very awkward. Receiving the big envelopes was all the ‘love’ he needed.
I saw a newsclip just last year of UMaryland doing this and I thought it was freakin’ fantastic. Why knock a school that wants to do the reach out?
And @zobroward : It did sound like you were recollecting a bad personal experience. Turns out you were just asserting neglect or indifference where you have no reason to think it exists.
Hmm, I like the idea of this! Grad schools go through a whole lot of personal effort to recruit students (faculty call to accept students, the department pays for students to come for a campus visit, grad students pick up admitted students from the airport and may even house these students, etc.), and I’ll admit that I felt flattered throughout the entire process.
I don’t quite know how I would have reacted if an adcomm member showed up on my doorstep and handed me my acceptance later (I think I would have probably peed my pants out of shock and nervousness), but I think the effort to make college admission more personalized is great.
Now if they show up with a big fat scholarship…hmmmmm.
And what is the message it sends to students who don’t get the hand-delivered admit-- that the school doesn’t care about their yield as much???
Students of today want to know they are special. I guess hand-delivering is one way of showing them how awesome they are. I say this only sort-of tongue in cheek. It’s a really different world today. I am floored by some of the things applicants say and ask. Colleges are just trying to figure out how to deal with the expectations of today’s student.
“And what is the message it sends to students who don’t get the hand-delivered admit-- that the school doesn’t care about their yield as much???”
Students and parents are more savvy, and emotionally stable, than this. Just as not every eligible, bright and (eventually) accepted student will get the glowing ‘likely’ letter, and we here at CC remind them that the absence of one does not mean they are not good enough to be/will not be accepted, families know that a host of criteria will determine where and when a hand-delivered offer comes to them.
There should be no real sense of slight.
I think a significant merit award shows more " love" than any personally delivered letter or even a phone call. That was how S sorted thru his admissions.