When you sign up to take the PSAT or PreACT, most students check every box. Yes, send me mail. Yes, send me updates. Yes, share my information with colleges.
In fact, I remember specifically being told to share my information with colleges. Effectively, it’s a good idea. Colleges can see my grades. Surely they can see all of my hard work, right?
Well, the answer is no. Nobody at the college admissions office is sifting through hundreds of thousands of students’ information. The reason we check these boxes is so college systems can check if a student fits their criteria, and then begin the bombardment.
Whether the criteria are GPA, SAT score, ACT score, major interest, or simply providing a college with your information, checking this box will share your student data with thousands of college systems, resulting in a deluge of emails and physical mail.
Colleges try to sway you, putting your full name on letters and emails, making the packaging unnecessarily big, or including the major you put down as interesting in the letter.
To be completely honest, I was pretty shocked the first time I read a college letter.
“Wow, they know me? Colton from Ursinus College is really reaching out to ME? Even sending me mail?”
No, Colton is not reaching out to you.
Moving past the nature of the messages, the real issue lies in the fact that nearly every single piece of mail received from colleges and universities goes into the trash, and serves no purpose.
Most students by some time in sophomore year realize that they mean nothing, and are purely for the sake of marketing and exposure for these colleges. They are not “personalized,” and are only sent because students meet a certain set of criteria.
What irks me about this is that students receive tens of millions of letters per year, and the overwhelming majority goes to waste. Meanwhile, everyone’s concerned about the environment.
According to the New York Times, in 2018, Harvard alone sent 114,000 recruitment letters based on high school student test scores, and admitted ~2,000 students that year.
According to the Washington Monthly, Northeastern University sends a whopping ~200,000 “personalized” letters to high school students each year.
In 2014, around 50,000 students applied to Northeastern, and only 2,800 were admitted一 an astronomical amount of waste.
This data is based on the limited amount of data available regarding paper college mail, and the numbers are already colossal.
This begs the question, how can this make sense in a world where we MUST be increasingly conscious about our environment that we constantly destroy?
I think the most obvious answer has been available to us since the 1980s, when commercial email services became available.
Instead of creating monumental amounts of waste on letters that don’t actually hold substance to students, colleges and universities should stick to email. They already bombard our inboxes, so why not exclusively do so?
Or, even solely send mail to students that the college or university is actually interested in recruiting and meeting.
As an alternative to that, colleges can also host more and more events at high schools or even outside of high schools in order to find students that are interested in that college, and the students that the college are interested in at said events.
One perspective that I really agreed with comes from Nordic News, the student newspaper of Inglemoor High School. The idea proposed is that colleges prioritize more personal communication, and minimizing waste in the process. They should send things like socks, notebooks, or some sort of merchandise that would actually go to use, and leave more of an impact on students that doesn’t just go to the trash.
Considering that colleges typically spend from $429 to $623 on marketing per student, I think that colleges can fit this into the budget.
If not, at the very least, colleges can tighten the criteria they require to send mail to students in an effort to minimize waste.
