Johns Hopkins, Puget Sound, Jen Miller of Texas Tech, Case Western, all of those have been stalking me. As the eldest child in my family, I have no experience with these mailers, and it took me a while to realize that receiving this mail doesn’t mean the school wants me there. The worst is when schools I know I have very slim chances of getting in to (probably even less than most students) send me personalized letters that say things like “we want you!” or “you’re this close to being accepted”. Even though I know I shouldn’t read in too much to the letters, it still always gets my hopes up.
Kingnerd you from Colorado
UCLA is my D’s newest stalker.
RPI stalked the entire HS graduating class of 2017 at 12:30PM ET today with a special priority application invitation.
UChicago biggest offender at our house in snail mail and emails. I thought we may cave on a recent trip to Chicago because we did set up a tour after getting all the mailers and since we were there, but my D cancelled it because she didn’t like Chicago (no offense intended anyone). The other one that sends tons of stuff is Vanderbilt.
Case Western- an email every week to both child and parent, all through 10th grade and summer.
In terms of “caving” (i.e, applying): So far it’s not of interest to child who likes social sciences more than the hard sciences it excels in. But interests can change, so who knows?
KingNerdill, thanks for the honest post. It is one thing for colleges to send out booklets and brochures, but the personal letters are shameless. Especially when you figure they’ve seen your SAT scores and the other info about your GPA and ECs. But welcome to College Confidential! You can learn a lot here. Just ignore the ‘chance me’ threads.
@nitro11 I don’t see who that’s important or why you’d ask…
Oh yeah, also, I think the biggest offender recently has been Brandeis. I received 7(!!!) emails from them in the past 4 hours. One from the school, one from the dean, and five from the admissions office. It’s ridiculous.
Not that my kids caved, but my son who leaves for his chosen college in 2 weeks, just got junk mail from a local private school, saying that now (August) it’s not too late to be part of their freshman class in the fall. He never applied.
They know nothing about him other than maybe zip code and maybe some range of SAT/ACT (certainly not his exact score). My older one who is half way through college still gets email from local colleges trying to recruit him over the course of the last 3 years !
Notre Dame has been contacting me a ton and I am only a Sophomore in High school. Is this a good thing?
@jrams7 IT doesn’t mean anything. They are trying to amp up the number of applications they get in order to lower their acceptance rates and make more money through app fees.
Jen Miller from Texas Tech. I get so many from her/them. Also Tulane, even though I only looked at like 2 emails from them. Nebraska, and they always have stickers or some random thing to offer you. Arizona State as well. I just recently (after November 1) started getting emails from UKansas, but I’ve gotten SO MANY from them in the last 3 days…And CSU-Pueblo, but those have died down recently. Most of them really did die down for awhile, but just when you forget about them, the November 1 deadline comes and they all come back out. Most of the other colleges I get a lot from are schools I’ve shown interest in at some point or even now, so it really does make sense for them to be contacting me.
Also, just a note to all high school students who haven’t taken a standardized test (ie SAT and ACT and their other tests): If you don’t give them permission to give your email & info out to colleges, that decreases your risk of getting mail, though you’ll inevitably get some.
Wooster Polytechnical Institute…WPI. We lived in Germany at the time and they were sending stuff every week. I said to my daughter who was intending to major in math “They must really want you! Go ahead and apply.” She got in and got a $15K scholarship…making it “only” $45K for us…NO THANKS.
@bopper You took the bait. :))
Brandeis is the first one that comes to mind. One of their professors sent me this long story about a discussion on Kanye West during a Hip Hop & Culture class, which put me off almost immediately. It’s like they just said, “Send the Kanye West email to that black girl in Queens with the decent PSAT scores, that’ll show her our school is right for her!” =;
Sarah Lawrence is one too, as well as NJCU, Dickinson, and Buffalo. I still don’t particularly care about any of them.
When my son was a high school senior a couple years ago, he heard repeatedly from several Ivies but not from Princeton … at least not right away. Then all of the sudden, towards the end of October, he received at least a couple emails from Princeton in close succession. I later found out that Princeton’s Early Action application numbers had dipped a tiny bit that fall, so the Tigers were probably putting on a last-minute full-court press to reel in a few more kids to reject. My son, however, did not take the bait.
I got a bunch from Carthage, over and over by mail. I wanted to apply early to my colleges because I really need to be considered for scholarships. Then I had Case Western keep sending me emails… even though I thought it was a long shot, it wasn’t on my radar, I applied because of the free application. It is about an 8 hours drive to visit so I took advantage of the optional alumni interview from my area. Since I really didn’t think I could compete with other applicants with their high test scores and high GPA from their first three years, I didn’t even really research them…until the interview. My questions were answered and I got a totally different view on the college. She said I was a great candidate for their university and gave me an excellent report to the admissions team. Now I don’t even mind if I have to take out a large loan to go there. If I get in - which I will know next Saturday, I will put down the deposit right away and won’t even wait for the school I had as my number 1 (UMD-College Park)! So, in this case, “stalking” paid off. Also, if I got any email from a college that waived the application fee, I would apply to if it had high percentages of their pre-med students getting into graduate school and have my undergraduate major either as a stand-alone major or as part of a biology track. USciences was one of those. I got accepted plus they gave me $56,000 scholarship (over 4 years). So, it does pay off - especially if they waive application fees. The only application I paid for was for UMD.
I’ve received many from the schools mentioned plus many schools that are way below my scores and gpa. I highly recommend unroll.me it’s a website that shows you all your email subscriptions and easily lets you unsubscribe from them. I recently did this so fed up with the amount of emails I was receiving from colleges I would never even consider applying to. Want to know how many schools had me on their list? Over 200! That is just ridiculous. Some even had me multiple times! Something is wrong with this sort of system.