even colleges advertise

Now that the PSATs are over and colleges are looking at participants scores, everyone I know who signed up for them has been getting many emails every day. It’s exciting to see that colleges are interested in you, but when I showed them to my dad, he didn’t seem too convinced. Every email is similar and has the same message along the lines of, “challenging courses distinguish (whatever college that emails you) as one of the best schools in the nation.” It makes me wonder, is this a genuine letter or something that is just like a commercial? It’s so similar to advertisements I see every day that it’s hard to believe. It’s becoming like advertisements where there is so much clutter eventually nothing stands out. Of course I am interested in going to college and the fact that colleges are emailing me is exciting. However, with a closer look, I realize that underneath the individual college all of them are similar- private, Christian colleges. I than looked even closer and saw that the acceptance rate of these colleges are very high and the SAT score is relatively low. It seems that with these emails, the colleges aren’t necessarily interested in you as they say in their emails, but rather want the attention of many top schools- something many of these colleges probably don’t get based on their statistics. In their emails they also use marketing by offering FREE! posters for their college or a FREE guide to get our attention. However, at the end of the day, it seems that few people are interested in going to these colleges and rather find excitement that they are getting attention from places that is a direction in the future they want. It then creates emails which add to the clutter of emails we already have, making us less interested in the college than we were to begin with.