Every other week for the past year I have received the same form from Campbell University.

  If I was a student living anywhere near Campbell University, this could be considered normal.

  However, I currently reside in New Jersey, just over four hundred miles away from Campbell University in Raleigh, North Carolina.

 This occurrence begs the question of why the college process is often seen as a time for schools to recruit you. For a college, you are nothing but a booster to their reputation.

  If a college does not believe that you are good enough for them or you are good enough for their school, there is no chance that you will receive mail from them.

 If the college process is so selective, aren’t students disincentivized to follow their dreams and apply for the colleges they want to go to?

  Perhaps this is the case, and the college process should be treated less like recruitment and more like a discovery period for students to explore what colleges are right for them. If students are treated like recruits, the college process becomes more brutal than it should be.

  In the long run, a student is more likely to go to a place like Campbell University than go to Harvard. This is understandable because Harvard is Ivy, but colleges should not send out mail based on academic performance. “Academic Performance” should only be used as a reflection of the past performance of a student rather than a full reflection of who a student it.

   If they do, this is demoralizing to students and serves only as a “pre-rejection letter”: a rejection letter without the paperwork. The college process needs to change to help the students find out what they want out of college… and not flood everyone’s mailboxes with college mail that might not matter to them.