They Know Whether You Opened the Email

Your kid signed up for a college's mailing list. The emails started coming. Nobody opens them.

That's being recorded.

I'm going to be careful here, because this is the part of my presentation where people either get paranoid or decide I'm exaggerating, and neither one helps you. So here is what's actually going on.

Many colleges track demonstrated interest. Not all of them. But a lot, and more than families assume.

They can see whether their email was opened. A good number can see what happened after that. Did the link get clicked. Did your kid land on the page for the major they said they were interested in, or did they bounce somewhere else and spend most of their time there instead.

There are colleges running algorithms on this to predict whether admitting your kid is worth the seat.

That sounds cynical until you understand why they care. Colleges are measured on yield, the share of admitted students who actually enroll. Admitting a kid who won't come is expensive for them. So they are trying, in advance, to figure out who is real.

Which means demonstrated interest isn't a courtesy. It's a scoreboard, and you can get on it.

Here's how, roughly in order of weight.

Visit the campus if you can. That's the strongest signal there is. It's also not feasible for a lot of families and colleges know that, which is why the rest of this list exists.

Meet the rep when they come to your high school, or catch them at a local college fair. They keep track.

Attend the online info sessions. And this matters: your kid registers, not you. The name on the registration is the name that gets logged. A parent signing up on a kid's behalf can quietly produce a record with the wrong person's name on it.

Follow the college on social media. Instagram, whatever they're active on.

And then the one almost everyone gets wrong. Once you've signed up and they start emailing, don't ignore the emails. Open them. Click through. Spend a minute on the pages that match what your kid says they want to study.

That last piece is worth sitting with. If your kid tells a college they're passionate about engineering, and then spends all their time on that college's site looking at the dining halls and the football schedule, there's a version of that college that notices.

Now, the sane amount to care about this.

Do not turn your family's evenings into an email-opening ritual. Demonstrated interest is one factor among the twenty-odd that go into a decision, and it is nowhere near the biggest.

But it's close to free. It costs you attention rather than money or talent or four years of preparation. And most families are giving away the free points because nobody told them the game was being scored.

There's no privacy here. Given that, you may as well use it.

Onward.

-Andy "Open the Email" Lockwood

P.S. Demonstrated interest is one of the cheap points. There are several others hiding in this process, and almost none of them are the ones families exhaust themselves on. We map them out inside the Lockwood Inner Circle, same material we use with our private 1:1 college advisory clients. A dollar gets you in: lockwoodinnercircle.com