My HS junior is getting all these college recruitment letters, postcards, and whatever. Amazing thing is most of them are for colleges FAR out of state.
With the high cost of college nowadays, I wonder where they get the money for these?
Thing is we are not rich and he isnt some top student. So why would a college in Illinois want a kid from Kansas?
Is any other peoples kids getting these?
You may have answered your own question - especially if the out-of-state schools charge extra for students from other states.
I was in high school twenty years ago and I got tons of college junk mail. Doesn’t everybody?
Because your money is just as good as the money they use in Illinois.
The “high cost of college” doesn’t mean colleges are hurting for money. It means they are charging high tuition.
(of course, some are hurting, but they probably thinking casting a wide net for students may help.)
Sophia gets them all the time and started getting them as a sophomore (just one or two, but we were surprised they started so soon).
My youngest is in 8th grade and has started receiving them already. Not a bunch, but enough that I started noticing, for some reason they seem to have started early for her. Heck, I was still getting a couple a year up until my thirties.
I’ve kicked around the idea of grad school and my social media feeds are full of grad school ads.
In high school, every time I took the ACT or SAT, I got tons of snail mail from colleges all over the country. Seems like nothing has changed. I probably also signed up for stuff at college fairs. A 16 year old will do anything for a free T shirt. Oh, wait, I still do that today at street festivals!
The actual price is rarely the sticker price unless you make a lot of money, so be careful not to reject anything just because it looks expensive. I’m not talking academic scholarships, either, just straight-up FAFSA- (or their own form)-based tuition reduction.
But yes, everyone gets these. Some people interpret them as a sign of real interest by the school. I wouldn’t do that.
Is it a BAD sign if I didn’t get ANY attempts at college recruitment when I was in high school? I think I got a single recruiter from some local Christian University 3 years after I had already left high school.
My daughters started getting tons of college recruiting mailings as soon as they took the PSATs.
Remember the immortal words of Judge Smalls.
My then-9th-grade daughter signed up for a bunch of colleges’ mailing lists during a College Fair at her school a few years ago. She therefore gets plenty of both snail mail and e-mails from places all over the U.S. – even schools that were not at the college fair. I’m sure her name is also on some broader “thinking about college” mailing lists that are surely floating around.
The purchase of mailing lists is cheap. the rewards of landing a student are large. It’s simple math, which colleges should be good at…
College prestige is closely connected to exclusivity, and so they want a lot of applications to reject. It actually really pisses me off, because I’ve had some really un-savvy kids who thought they were a lock for more selective schools because of all the snail mail they got from them. In a few cases, this made them reluctant to apply to safety/match type schools. I have had to have some awful conversations about this where I played the roll of “teacher squashing your dreams” (to be fair, I always support ambitious applications–but I insist on back-ups. But I am sure some kids just hear me say “you aren’t good enough for Harvard”.).
I thought this was normal. My kids in high school have gotten lots of ads from far-flung colleges, just as I did way back in the '70s.
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[li]Diversity of student body - x% of our students are from out of state / not from the 3-county area.[/li][li]Not being local means you won’t be a commuter student - more money made from dorms.[/li][/ul]
This is definitely part of it, but I don’t think it was nearly as big an issue when I was applying to college back in 1980, and I still got a ton of mail.
We have been through this relatively recently–our daughter graduated college in 2017, and our son is currently attending and set to graduate in 2020. They both got astonishing amounts of college marketing materials from all over the country. That pretty much started as soon as they got an account with the College Board to take a standardized test.
Cost was never a huge issue–we are fabulously lucky that our kids are my in-laws’ only grandchildren, and they set aside sufficient funds to cover most of college for both of them. Despite that, both got a fair amount of scholarship money, so we wouldn’t have paid the rack rate anyway. Purely by test scores, our daughter was top 1%, and our son was top 10%, but, because he’s going to a less selective (though still quite good) school that has a reasonable endowment, he’s gotten quite a lot more money, which the school has increased since he started. For this year and next, his scholarships will cover fully half the nominal total cost to attend ($70K next year). That makes it pretty much the same cost as our local state school–which has very little scholarship support due to state funding cutbacks.
The marketing materials, along with discussions with high school counselors, may help your kid find schools that you wouldn’t’ve thought of, but that would be a good fit (and might be cheaper than you think). Manda JO is quite right, though, that students need to apply to at least a few schools that they have a good (or guaranteed) chance of getting into along one or two “reach” (though not impossible) schools.
One other note: there are a number of schools with large endowments that guarantee zero tuition or even entirely free rides for students from families with lower incomes. They are trying to get those kids through school with little or no debt, which I think is admirable. Don’t know if those are schools your where your kid can get in, but, again, do not take the posted prices as set in stone.