Starting in the spring of your sophomore year college mail begins arriving in your mailbox and emails in your inbox. It never stops until May 1st, of your Senior year, the day that you have to commit to a college by. This constant advertisement of colleges that you’ve never heard of is extremely annoying as it clutters your mailbox and inbox. The result of this constant advertisement of colleges leads to students exploring options that they might have never encountered, but it can also lead to students applying to dozens of schools, most of which they never consider seriously.

The most amount of schools that I know that one person applied to this year is 18, but remember that in the end you can only go to one. With many schools being on the Common Application all you have to do is check the box and click apply for the school. Even with the Common Application it is still a ton of work to apply to that many schools, visit them, and pay the application fees. The result of students applying to so many schools leads to increased competition that is never serious, which leads to decreased acceptance rates, and students being shut out of schools that they have seriously have fallen in love with and want to attend.

The spring of my sophomore year I decided that it would be an interesting experiment to keep all the college mail that I receive and see exactly how much I receive. The result, filled five shoe boxes, and weighed almost 30 pounds! The mail ranged from six inch by six inch postcards with a simple advertisement to a forty-plus page magazine advertising everything about WVU. I also kept a list of colleges that I received mail or an email from and that list ended up being 107 schools long! Ranging from colleges in the middle of nowhere North Dakota to Penn State or FSU. All of this is a result of filling in a few bubbles on the PSAT, SAT, or ACT, saying that you permit colleges to send you mai. The emails were even worse than the physical mail that I received. Some days I would receive six emails from different colleges, and you can unsubscribe from the emails, but sometimes it is just too much to unsubscribe from every email.

The advertisements from colleges at a point just becomes frustrating and shifts from advertising to harassment. Especially when it is the middle of March in your senior year and you’re still receiving emails everyday from the same college saying “You still have 3 days left to apply” no matter how many times you click the “UNSUBSCRIBE” button on their emails.

There really is nothing that you can do to avoid college advertising except to not put down your email or mailing address on any college forms. It is inevitable, but that does not change the fact that it is out of control.