247 billion per day. 2.8 million every second. What is sent in such exorbitant amounts and used by roughly 1.6 billion people internationally? If you guessed email, you guessed right. Pretty much everyone has an email these days, students included. And many students at Mariemont find their inboxes flooded with mail from a rather unsuspecting source: colleges.

     Institutions like colleges spend upwards of 1.8 million dollars annually just on marketing techniques like emails. Mariemont’s college counselor, Mrs. Elfers, says colleges send these emails because they work.

     “Colleges spend a lot of time and effort researching their marketing techniques,” says Elfers, “and so even though emails may be annoying to some students, overall, colleges find that student interest increases after students get more and more information.”

     A study done in 2008 found that by sending email newsletters, much like those colleges send high school students, organizations like colleges increased their profits and admissions by around 32% — a sizeable growth.

     So, what do students so with all these emails? Junior Mackenzie Shelley says she is bombarded with emails from colleges. However, Shelley says she doesn’t always take the emails too seriously.

     “Most of the college emails I get are random schools I’ve never heard of, so I don’t really look at them,” Shelley admits. “However, if I recognize a school I’ll usually scan the email.”

     Elfers says this is a common trend, since smaller schools are more likely to send an email and more likely to attempt reaching out to students through email than a big name school like Ohio State.  Small schools value relationships with students, so responding to emails could have a positive effect on admission, if that’s what a student is after.

     “I would suggest responding to those emails from colleges with which students want to establish a relationship, but save others to a different folder in your inbox,” Elfers says.

     Shelley says that a lot of the emails are the same—“Most try to make me sign up for college tours or ask me if I want a ‘College Checklist.’ None of them are really interesting.”

     Although the material in emails sent from colleges may be dry, this flood of email literature should not go immediately into the Junk Folder.

     As Elfers says, “Information is one of the best ways to solidify what one needs and wants out of the college experience.”