Prospective college students can now see into their post-high school futures — for only $79.95.
ThickEnvelope.com, a Web site created by two Harvard University graduates, provides high school seniors with a calculated probability that they will be admitted to each of the top 80 universities in the country.
To receive their evaluations, students fill out an online form that looks like many college applications and includes sections on academic achievement, test scores, extracurricular activities and unique talents. The program then computes each student’s probabilities of admission to the schools in the database.
ThickEnvelope also takes into account teacher recommendations by asking students to enter information about the teacher who wrote their letters of recommendation.
The Web site does not take interviews into account, however, claiming they only affect admissions in extreme cases.
But despite the service’s intricate evaluation system, some university and high school officials said they don’t think ThickEnvelope is worth the money.
“We cannot think how this site could be very accurate or very useful,” Rebecca Dixon, associate provost of Northwestern enrollment, said in an e-mail to The Daily.
Dixon said the Web site would not have enough information to determine whether highly selective colleges would admit students. Students applying to less selective schools also probably could easily figure out how likely it is that they would be accepted, she said.
The company’s Web site, www.thickenvelope.com, claims the service is effective because the statistical profiles of admitted classes at top universities look the same year after year.
Laura Blum, a high school junior from Los Angeles who visited NU as a prospective student, said she never would use the site, no matter how tempted she was to see the results.
“I think in theory it’s a good idea, but I don’t believe it could function in the real world,” said Blum, 17.
Blum also said she thinks the service is too expensive to justify its use.
McCormick freshman Abizer Sakarwala said he agrees with Blum.
“I would never trust it,” Sakarwala said. “There’s no way it can accurately predict admission to any college. There are always exceptions to everything — you can’t just throw this kind of thing into an equation.”
The Princeton Review has a similar service, Counselor-O-Matic, but it is free. The Web site scans a student’s less-in-depth application against a database of 3,000 universities throughout the country. It then groups schools into categories of “safety,” “reach” and “good fit.”
FastWeb, an online scholarship search, also provides students a list of colleges that might be good fits.
James Conroy, a post-high school counselor at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Ill., said he strongly discourages use of these computerized sites, because he does not think they are helpful at all.
“I think it’s making the whole process into something you can cut up and put into a computer,” Conroy said. “It’s only feeding the frenzy of students.”
