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Intelligence
The Latest Salvo Against College Marketing

Intelligence

The Latest Salvo Against College Marketing

Jan 06, 2009By Michael Stoner

Why Colleges Are Just Not That into You” is the work of Zac Bissonnette, a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, who is also an editor with AOL’s personal finance site. Bissonnette is nothing if not contrarian. If you haven’t been following The Daily Beast, you might have missed his column entitled “Why Giving Money to Your Alma Mater is Immoral”. The article has already been picked up by Alternet.

The thesis of Bissonnette’s admissions article is this:

The charade in which schools solicit more applications than they needjust to improve their selectivity ratingsisnt just underhanded, its cruel.

Bissonnette quotes several stories that reporter Jay Matthews wrote about deceptive college marketing and mentions that Matthews …

told me he checked letters from 100 colleges the year his daughter applied, and only one, Harvard, had any language indicating that the letter should not be taken as a hint of impending acceptance. (Something youd figure Harvard applicants would be smart enough to figure out on their own.) These letters “create false expectations of admission, particularly in the many low-income households where the search letter is a new and unexpected feature of the process, Matthews says.


  • Michael Stoner Co-Founder and Co-Owner Was I born a skeptic or did I become one as I watched the hypestorm gather during the dotcom years, recede, and congeal once more as we come to terms with our online, social, mobile world? Whatever. I'm not much interested in cutting edge but what actually works for real people in the real world. Does that make me a bad person?