Your acceptance rate is very low, would I have any chance of getting in?

Answered

Dear Abraham,

We at Williams College appreciate you taking the time to write us. Like hundreds and thousands of colleges, we have a very sophisticated method of marketing to our potential students. We work closely with CollegeBoard and ACT.org and purchase names from their database in bulk. We also partner with CollegeVine and other blogs and portals that have deals with colleges to provide names of members or who have asked to be contacted by the school in the connections section of the app.

We may in fact received your name from multiple sources since you are a high-achieving high school junior.

The fact we have contacted you has no bearing on your ability to gain admission from our school unless one of our coaches contacted you as recruited athlete prospect for one of our D3 Varsity athletic teams.

What we and all top colleges are trying to do is to get as many qualified applicants to apply to our college next season so we can improve our admissions statistics. It always looks good to the higher education community when we have a record amount of applications as we have had in the past few cycles. We hope we can break last year's record of 15321 and collect more application fees as well. The more applicants we get, the lower the acceptance rates are because we only have about 550 seats available.

If you are low-income, we will give you a fee waiver and encourage you to apply because it will still help us get to a record amount of applications this upcoming cycle.

Since we reject close to 92% of applications, it really doesn't matter if you are fully qualified because we want you to apply anyway.

Best,

Williams College.