by JANET LORIN
Nicole Ederer was delighted when Columbia University and Duke University wooed her with e-mails and letters after she scored 214 out of 240 on her preliminary SAT college entrance exam junior year.
The 18-year-old high school senior in Thornwood, New York, said she spent about $780 on 12 applications after mailings from top schools like Duke, which sent a wall poster. She was rejected by Duke, Columbia and Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and plans to attend the University of Maryland.
“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, someone is interested in me,’” Ederer said in an interview. “They attract you with an e-mail and a few pamphlets and big envelopes filled with a ton of information and make you want to go to that school, and they don’t accept you.”
The deluge of correspondence from even the most hard-to- get-into colleges is raising false expectations among thousands of students, swelling school coffers with application fees as high as $90 apiece and making colleges seem more selective by soliciting and then rejecting applicants. College applications are soaring even as the number of high school graduates fell 2.2 percent this year from a peak in the 2007-2008 school year, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Jon Reider, director of college counseling at San Francisco University High School, advises students to view e-mails and mailings skeptically, especially from Harvard University, the most selective college in the country. Reider called its mailings “not honorable” and “misleading.”
“The overwhelming majority of students receiving these mailings will not be admitted in the end, and Harvard knows this well,” said Reider, a former admissions officer at Stanford University.
Selling Names
Consumer groups said that the nonprofit College Board, which owns the SAT college admission test, and its nonprofit rival, ACT Inc., are making money by selling personal details about teenagers. The companies collect information on millions of test takers and both sell names and information to colleges at 33 cents a name.
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