USciences is a stalker school for me, I haven’t caved in yet.
Case Western & Macalester have been over-the-top with mailings and emails, but at least the kid is actually very interested in both.
Colgate, Bryant, College of St. Rose and University of Minnesota have been major offenders as schools in which the kid has never expressed any interest at all. Trinity and UofMinn have also phone-stalked.
Most have faded away but Case Western and Renssalear (sp?) are stepping it up. As far as I know, he’s never expressed any interest. ETA: The cave was Loyola Baltimore, but it really fit with the other schools he was applying to so I’m glad it came onto the radar.
Fordham, University of Chicago, Tulane, Xavier. I caved to Tulane and got accepted.
My daughter’s most persistent stalker has been the University of Denver, which she has no interest in. The funny thing is that my mother was briefly a student there (didn’t care for it) when she was pregnant with me.
@QuadiNorth-My son got a lot of mail from Tulane when he was in high school, and he thought some of it was pretty lame. But he went to Tulane anyway (on a very generous merit scholarship) and now, as a freshman just finishing his first semester, he’s having a wonderful experience. When my husband and I visited him recently, I was thrilled to see him navigating New Orleans–a place that’s very different from where he grew up–and it made me glad that he decided against all of the usual-suspect colleges (e.g., Tufts, Wesleyan, Vassar, Connecticut College … ) where so many of his friends and classmates from here in New England applied and enrolled.
Tulane seems to be offering a great balance of academics and fun. Do I love everything about it? No, of course not. But it is gratifying to see my son so happy, and I hope that you give the school serious consideration, even if you only applied due to the onslaught of propaganda.
My updated collection of stalkers, which started as soon as I got my SAT scores back…
Fordham, Champlain, Siena, Hofstra, Iona, Clarkson, RPI, BU, and Rutgers. Some of these might actually interest me, however, the majority of the more interesting ones are Catholic schools… not really my speed. I was thinking about applying to Fordham anyways because they gave me a fee waiver, I love the location, and I’ve heard that the Catholicism is very tolerable even if you’re not religious. In the end, though, I decided against it.
Oh right. Clarkson. That too.
We haven’t got a lot of snail mail, but Columbia University has definitely been stalking D16. So far we’ve received 20 emails. We did visit and D16 does offer geographic diversity. It’s one of her top 4 choices, so we’re not really annoyed.
LOL at the folks getting unwanted emails from Christian schools because that’s our problem too. It’s like, “Trust me, you don’t want my kid at your school.” (clipped the explanation) Yes, there are exceptions. My friend’s daughter goes to Bryn Mwar and absolutely loves it. They’re very welcoming to all. It’s an all women’s school though, so it can’t be on the list.
Back to the topic, I know there were 2 Ivies that took FOREVER to stop sending my son emails even after he Unsubscribed from them. The one email heavy school we caved on was Franklin & Marshall because we wanted to add a few more schools to the list should he not get into his first choice. To be fair, we did sign up for their info and they’re not as bad as some.
On a similar topic, the flood of scholarship emails is killing my son. He can’t tell if he’s getting responses from the ones he’s applied to or if it’s a few shady companies that he ended up on the list of spamming him.
I wish we had thought of setting up a separate account just for college emails. It would have made life so much easier.
Where, generally, do those getting spam from Rutgers live? I’m guessing in our area, it’s just assumed kids will apply there. We’ve gotten maybe 2 mailers from them and zero email.
I received two mails from Columbia today. I think I get at least one every week.
I just found this thread and was always wondering why my daughter was getting so much mail from Washington University and Chicago. My daughter would be a reach for both of those schools in any case. I haven’t read the entire thread, but my thoughts on this are that these schools want to drive down their admit rate % by getting in more applications. That’s pretty cynical of me, but I think that’s what might be driving this.
I’ve gotten countless emails and brochures from WashU at St. Louis and UChicago for the past two years; it seems to be a reoccurring theme in the thread.
Providence has sent me tons of mail, and I’ve caved! It’s a reach, but why not?
Like others, WashingtonSL, UChicago, Tulane, Reed, and a few others have been offenders at our home. Their emails unnerved me, and I was only getting the parent ones. Jeez. The aggressive mail and email campaigns compared to their acceptance rates made us suspicious.
On the other side, we have found targeted recruitment - handwritten notes, phone calls, emails - to be highly effective from schools after we paid a visit. We welcomed those and my D is seriously considering one school - Mississippi State - which she initially visited only a whim. They have done an excellent job of selling their university and its top scholarship programs and opportunities.
U Chicago nearly enticed my kid. She loved their clever mailings and essays topics, but it isn’t the school for her. Macalester has been incessant. Wells College has been the worst, even after my daughter sent en email saying please remove me from the mailing list. In the same email she said “I am appalled that a college would send me mail filled wih so many grammatical and typographical errors.” They obviously didn’t get the hint.
For both my boys, it was also uchicago. And a close second: Columbia.
My daughter got lots of emails from different universities but I’m pretty sure they made no impact on her decision-making as she never mentioned any of them and when I asked her about them she couldn’t remember which colleges they were. I don’t remember either except that I know they included Columbia, Duke, Dartmouth—none of which she applied to.
The only one that did impact was UChicago because they actually sent a brochure by post all the way to China (we’re Americans living in Beijing) advertising their new molecular engineering program. She hadn’t considered Chicago or knew anything about it (she knew very little about any US universities), but it caused her to look it up, get very interested, loved their focus on “thinking”, the student culture, quirky application questions (the only application she enjoyed doing), apply, went to an interview, made it her first choice (tie), and … was waitlisted but not accepted. Thankfully she didn’t get her hopes up high due to the low acceptance rate (even though her stats and profile were in the range), and wasn’t too disappointed. (I was more hopeful than her, figuring Chicago wouldn’t bother to send something by post to China and interview her in China unless she had a good chance. But it seems they do that with many more students than I thought. I was more disappointed too—would have been a great fit for her.)
Ironically, the school at which she is now a freshman (RPI), did not send her any emails.
Too many students are led to believe that they have a good chance of being accepted by schools that send them glossy brochures. I am not a fan of this approach. It’s unfortunate that schools of Chicago’s calibre feel the need to entice students with brochures and gifts. That money could be better spent elsewhere. Just my $0.02.
@NerdyChica Totally agree. I’m assuming that universities like Chicago and Columbia do that to keep their application rates high and acceptance rates extremely low in order to maintain their rating and “prestige”. I know that I used to directly correlate a school’s acceptance rate with its prestige or how “good” it is. Now I realize that isn’t necessarily the case since there are strategies to reduce the acceptance rate “artificially”.