The College Ad Overload

Ever since I took the PSAT earlier this year, I've been getting hundreds of emails, pamphlets, and fliers from colleges and universities all across the country. The huge amount of college mail I have received has created a few questions for me.  First of all, it amazes me that the colleges have a large enough budget to pay for all these mailings and email campaigns, especially when I don't see it paying off in a huge way in the end.  This connects to my main question, which centers around how  these mailings actually get students to attend their college or university. 

Most students will only end up attending one college, maybe two or three if they transfer or attend a different school for graduate school. However, based on the huge amounts of mail that I, and many of my peers have received, it seems like they expect us to attend many more.  I decided to look at one of the flyers I received from a college that sends me a lot of mail, Oberlin.  In this flyer, they made strong use of logos to demonstrate the attributes of their college, and also made many assumptions about the things that their students valued, like art, events, and big city life.   They also made assumptions about reality, saying that college, and more specifically Oberlin, is necessary for a person's success in the real world.  These assumptions are very prevalent throughout mot of the college mailings I receive, and they really do have an impact on the way I look at college and my future. I had always known that I would go to college, but seeing all these mailings, which are essentially ads, makes me realize just how many colleges there are, and how hard it will be to choose between them.
These ads are working towards satisfying our need to achieve and be successful, and also our needs to satisfy curiosity and our need for affiliation, all of which we can get through college, or at least is promised by most universities.   At my age, I feel these three needs very strongly, and these college ads promise it to us, but also make college seem necessary to give us these things.  We must realize that college isn't something that we all need to do in order to succeed or be happy, and we can all be successful with or without college to be successful, no matter what these college mailings promise.