WUSTL’s printing policy, established in 2011-12, set a $40 yearly quota on student printing in residential hall computer labs, encouraging students to print only what they need and compelling them to think about their waste output. The new policy cut the WUSTL community’s net printing output in half, saving more than a million and a half sheets of paper. In addition, an increasing number of schools and departments across our campuses are pursuing a “paperless” office by shifting from paper to electronic records."
Wonderful. Getting students to waste less paper so they can mail more!
The stalker mail starts coming when the student checks the opt in box during the SAT sign up process that permits compatible schools make contact. My son did not check the box for that very reason and has received little to no mail. He was accepted ED at an Ivy, so not as if other schools were not interested. Tell you kids to not check the box!
I was stalked by Minnesota. Applied through the free Golden Gopher app during the summer just because I was bored and now I’m seriously considering it! I understand why some do not like when colleges send out hundreds of thousands of emails and letters. But there are cases where students can find a diamond in the rough through this. However, I don’t think elite collees should be doing this. I think they should send stuff out regarding aid, but not regarding admissions.
I took the ACT and Northwestern sent me an email with the subject “Nice Job on the ACT!” I got a 25 lol. They obviously did not mean that and were just trying to get me to apply to reject me. Thank God I did much better on the SAT.
Chicago is the worst offender - for shame! We’re in a top, local public high school, and Chicago inundates us with physical mail. Worst part is, they reject most of the (very well-qualified) kids from our school. Shameful!
The worst snail mail offender for our S-2011 was Evansville University. For our D-2014 it was Allegheny College with Evansville a close 2nd. I couldn’t even begin to guess about the email stalker winner as we just kept hitting delete.
haha wow I thought I was alone in this. There are way too many to keep track, including UPenn (caved), UChicago (did not cave), Fordham (caved), Susquehanna, Wake Forest, Hofstra, Drexel, Northeastern etc. Getting a bit too much haha
The most persistent stalkers of the upper tier schools were UPenn and Vanderbilt. We knew there wasn’t a chance at either one; the competition from our hs was just too intense. They did not give up, though, and some of the letters were personalized and from the department that he is most interested in.
My kids did check the box on the SAT, not because they wanted to be stalked, but because they wanted to go to school out of state and were interested in learning about schools that met the criteria they specified on their College Board profile. If they didn’t check that box, they might not have learned about some schools that ended up being of interest to them.
The problem with stalker schools is they don’t care about what the student specified on their profile. Maybe their not in the geographic region the student specified. Maybe they are a terrible fit for size or major. But the worst offenders are the highly selective schools reaching out - repeatedly - to students unlikely to ever get admitted. D had strong scores and good grades. She heard from every Ivy, the service academies, and quite a number of selective schools. That was fine, she enjoyed receiving those mailings. But Columbia was outrageous. Both Columbia and UChicago bombarded her with email and snail mail. Was she a good student? Yes. Was she likely to get into Columbia or UChicago? Probably not. I’m not sure what the marketing budget is at these schools, but I am convinced they are aggressively recruiting kids with little likelihood of admission because it helps them in the USNWR rankings (and they probably need those application fees to pay all the marketing costs!).
^ ^ It seems obvious to me that the top schools are trolling for applicants to make themselves look more selective. My D got mail from all the Ivies, Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon, Duke, Vanderbilt, Colby/Bates/Bowdoin, etc. Her SATs are not close to good enough to get in to any of them and even her PSAT was not that huge.
NYU rakes in over $4 million a year from application fees. If they spend $100,000 on stalker mail it is well worth it to them.
My kid’s gripe is schools that keep emailing her with reminders to apply by such-and-such date when she’s already applied and been accepted (cough…Case Western…cough). Clean up the email list, it just makes a bad impression.
@OHMomof2 -My son got a few of those too … plus there were the schools that urged him to come visit AFTER we’d gone to considerable trouble and expense to ALREADY visit. And these were not under-the-radar visits. My son was officially registered, received confirmation emails, etc. You’d think that someone might cross-check the invitation list against the roster of students who’d been there. Seems like a good job for a student intern or for a tour guide on a slow day!
While ultimately it wasn’t any huge deal to get these misguided missives, I agree that it can make a bad impression and can even make some students feel like chopped liver when their time on campus appears to have been ignored.
Chicago. My son was particularly adverse to signing up for anything so other than that we received very little in the mail or email, even from colleges we visited. He had very narrow parameters of what he wanted in a college and Chicago had never been on the radar. We aren’t even sure how they got his name and address, unless Chicago basically sends literature to every single kid who has a decent SAT score. Their stuff was never looked at, and instantly went into recycling.
Chicago. red’d the t-shirt too. I was sucked in even though I’ve been through this a couple of times- I mean…a t-shirt, really! Ironically, all the attention turned her off. Next culprit, WashUSL. This one she fell for though because she has friends who attend. Time will tell if she gets burned.
That was super annoying too. One LAC in particular did that, sent repeated invites to visit saying how important it was. Umm…she did visit. All day. Don’t you know she was there?
U Chicago, Washington University in St Louis and American University have been pretty relentless both with email and snail mail. We just delete and toss. Lots of wasted paper and postage for them.
How about the emails from the schools your child has NEVER applied to or shown interest in, and the subject line says “Admission Decision”, such as Tulane…who are they fooling?