When the 18-year-old started applying to colleges this year, the crush of messages flooding her inbox made her stop checking it.
‘I get 10 emails a day just from two colleges,’ said Fitzgerald, a senior at Hersey High School in Arlington Heights. ‘If I go a week (without checking) we’re talking 100 emails easily from schools I’m not even interested in.’
Email is not the default for most teenagers, but it remains the primary avenue for colleges to communicate with prospective and current students. That can mean aggravation for college-bound teens and their families at the time of year when schools send critical admissions and financial aid information mostly via email.
While parents are used to being the main conduit of important information about their kids, the college application process marks one of the first times when the communication has to go directly through the teenage applicant." …
D’s HS purposefully communicated with students via email so they would be in the habit of checking well before it came time to apply to colleges.
Students should also consider not signing up for emails when they do their standardized testing. At least then you are only getting communication for the colleges for which you applied.
DS’s high school and teachers did nearly all their communication through email. 9th grade was ROUGH for DS while he adapted, but finally as a senior he’s pretty good about at least keeping up with his school mail.
The big regret I have though is not creating a completely new and shared account just for college stuff. Right now it’s going to his non-HS account which also gets a ton of other junk because he uses it for signing up for everything. Between that and all the spam college emails it really is a PIA to find pertinent emails. I’m glad several of the portals of the schools he’s been accepted to keep a record of messages sent out.
They will sink or swim. If they are old enough to apply to college, they are old enough to check their email. I don’t feel remotely sorry for any of them.
I told my kids this at the start of their college process. They mostly ignored me, unitl they couldn’t bear to listen to me badgering them anymore. My son, the youngest, did indeed miss an important email. He had to right the wrong by emailing an AO to ask in a groveling manner if an interview could be rescheduled. Good.
My daughter, now a senior in college, fully understands the importance of email. They do get used to it. But she also missed an important email back in the day. It was the one offering her admission from the waitlist to the college she now attends. But it sat unread in the inbox for three days before she read it. The ensuing speech from me was similar to this: “haven’t I told you 500 times that you check your email EVERY day!” It was probably colored with expletives and was also quite loudly delivered. Ha!
It’s also the main way my Ds colleges communicated with them as students. Very few communications came to home thru snail mail. Notifications of housing lotteries, registration, advisement, special events, info on student sports tickets, etc all came by email. So start pounding that message into kids heads now. I have a friend whose son just doesn’t check it like he should and missed the email about renewing scholarships. PITA to fix.
One of best things Uof SC does is have a parents group you can join and they send out periodic emails to keep you in the loop and have some insight into questions to ask child. Along with brief articles about things like encouraging overwhelmed kids to go to counselors or flu shot clinics, there was a calendar of important things like registration, career fairs, housing deadlines, drop/add deadlines.
best thing ever is to set up a separate account for colleges so the personal account isn’t taken over by college emails. AND I wholeheartedly agree about being very tight with sharing it when taking standardized testing.
kid has 3 emails set up now. Required HS account. Personal. College.
It’s been a very long process getting him to figure this all out; he’s a scattered kid. But Lindagraff - you are right. They can do this. If they can check their texts/snaps/etc they can certainly be trained to check emails!
We received advice to create a separate email for all things college, and one for only colleges applied to. That way once apps were in, the email wasn’t flooded with email from schools that weren’t in consideration anymore. Once a SIR was submitted, there was a school email…
Yep. My college uses email for all correspondence with students. If a student doesn’t check their email daily, they could miss a major announcement that impacts them significantly. If I make a change to my syllabus or the next class assignment, I communicate the change through email. This is also the way I inform my advisees about any changes in upcoming course offerings or advising appointments. I also expect that students will use it if they need to communicate with me outside of class. Each year I have first years that don’t bother with email. It usually takes less than two weeks before they catch on, but only because they missed a crucial announcement. Better to get students accustomed to it now.
We didn’t set up a new/separate email account for D20’s college search and I regret it. The amount of random mail from schools is ridiculous. Lesson learned. S23 will have a dedicated account when he starts applying.