Horror story: my now-college kid had opted in, so we too received the piles of daily junk mail and the hundreds of emails for countless months. Then, after things had finally died down sometime during their senior year, we suddenly started receiving a new regular stream of junk mail addressed to someone we'd never heard of! Aaaaagh!

Luckily it stopped after a week or so....

My daughter gets at least 500 emails a week. We had to set up a different email so she’d actually see when things needed to be done. Opt out!!

My son, now a first year in college, wishes he had opted out. He did not like getting all the college junk mail he received. And he also got lots of college marketing emails. If your child would like to get the mail, it is certainly important to underscore the PP's point that the colleges are trying to increase their stats. Getting a brochure doesn't mean you have much/any chance of getting in to that school.

It’s been great that he didn’t opt in

Opted out. Some questions seemed unnecessarily intrusive and distracting. I want my DC to focus on the test - not "what should I put down on this survey".

OP here, and thanks—a rare unanimous response from DCUM! I discussed with my kid, and he’s going to opt out.

Opt out. I had been told that opting in was required to be considered for certain scholarships and NMSF status. That was wrong, alas, and the volume of mail and email the kids received was so overwhelming it took a significant amount of time to deal with. The stated goal of the service is to expose kids to colleges they otherwise wouldn’t consider, but the volume was so staggeringly high that the only reasonable approach was to delete or recycle it all unread. I’d definitely encourage them to opt out.

Also, for anyone else who made the same mistake, I recently learned that the students can still opt out later, even if they didn’t do so initially.

Opt out. There was an expose on this a while back...I can't remember where I heard about it...NPR maybe? It's part of the whole college rankings scams/ driving the extremely low acceptance rates. Kids get mailed a million pieces of mail from colleges to boost their application pool (whether or not these kids are even in the ballpark of the school's SAT range). More applications = lower acceptance rate = higher ranking. Zero benefit to kids.

Absolutely opt out. Not only is it an endless flow of junk mail, it will clog up their email inboxes too with messages from schools they will never apply to.

Anonymous wrote:Both kids opted out. Easy to request info from the schools you like.

Amd not be unnecessarily swayed by pretty, shiny brochures from places that are otherwise not of interest.

Save trees and opt out!

Both kids opted out. Easy to request info from the schools you like.

On one hand, my kid really enjoyed all of the mail-- she felt wanted

On the other, it is a LOT of unnecessary paper (trees) and transport (USPS gas) and didn't do her any good in the actual decision process.

I’ve asked my DC to not opt in. DC is reaching out to colleges of interest and we’re not interested in DC’s inbox and my mailbox being flooded.

My DC has one SAT under his belt and I'm still advising him to opt out. We don't need the mailers.

Kid is about to take the PSAT for the first time (10th grade), and I’m wondering whether there’s any reason NOT to opt out of the College Board Student Search Service? Seems like purely marketing from colleges, which we don’t need. And I assume he could opt in next year when he takes it again. Any downside to opting out at this point?