A colleague from Japan recently wrote asking if I knew anything about the National Honor Roll. I knew very little, but was immediately suspicious when I learned it was an honor students had to buy.
Today I learned from another colleague that the National Honor Roll is, indeed, a scam, perpetrated by marketing companies that are mining data on college-bound students. The best source of information on this is another blogger who writes a blog called “The Blog That Ate Manhattan.” You can see her post here.
Parents–and kids–need to be very wary of these sorts of scams. Young eyeballs are worth a fortune to marketers, because they wield a lot of buying power and are relatively unsophisticated consumers. And parents of teens who may be grasping at ways to help their kids stand out in the college admissions process can be easily duped.
So beware of anything that looks too good to be true. It is.
