The nonstop flow of college mail is ridiculous, especially at the end of junior year and the start of senior year when senior Kellie Chiou and other seniors have to seriously sit down to narrow down their application list. Chiou receives several a day from countless schools, throwing away the majority of the brochures, pamphlets, postcards and posters.

College should only be sending such mailings to qualified students.

While the basic idea of colleges advertising through mail and email is to make students aware of the school as an option is understandable, many of these college have an ulterior motive.
The ranking and the prestige of the college correlates directly with a low acceptance rate and the impression of high specificity. This motivates the college to increase how many seniors are applying, so they have a greater pool to reject. The flood of mailings seem to only have the goal of increasing the number of applicants.

Colleges often send beautifully packaged envelopes and pamphlets to students with no chances of being accepted. The advertisements falsely raises the expectations of the student and many times, they end up spending about $75 per application simply for a rejection, according to an article in the Washington Post. Each envelope deceives the recipient into thinking that the school truly wants them as a student, and not for rejection.

The individual colleges should take the lowest SAT score they accepted from the previous year and use it as a minimum requirement for students to be contacted. This will decrease the number of applicants, and therefore, increase the proportion of people who are accepted into the school versus those who are rejected.

The single digit acceptance percentage will probably rise; however, the applicant pool will be much stronger as students are not brainwashed by flashy post cards or emails, but self select the most appropriate colleges to apply to after extensive research.

As tens of thousands of seniors across the country finally exhibit the grades they pulled all-nighters for and pour out their hearts in the form of personal statements, colleges should rethink the process that breaks the hearts of over 90 percent of these students starting with the obnoxious brochures that mislead students.