My daughter took the PSAT recently, and the bumph from colleges has started rolling in. The majority of the stuff she gets doesn't actually provide information about the college. Instead, she opens the envelopes to find chirpy letters asking her to "take our personality survey!
" to see "how well you'll fit in" at college X or university Y!
Their goals are transparent, even to a 14-year-old, and she throws all those letters away immediately. She has kept a couple of mailers that provide
actual information about
actual programs that interest her, however.
I honestly wish all of this would just stop. Failing that, which I know won't happen in the foreseeable future, I just counsel my kids as best I can. I will say that these personality survey letters are nurturing a newfound and healthy cynicism in my daughter. This is probably not what college X and university Y intended.
If my son hadn't ticked the "leave me alone" box on his PSAT form, he might very well have logged on with his personal ID code and filled in all kinds of nonsense just to mess up their analytics. But he was showing signs of cynicism at a young age, and it is now full-blown in 11th grade.
