I am a victim of college spam. When it comes to mail, I always used to be pretty old-fashioned. I believed in the traditionalism of handwriting letters, the sincerity behind thank you cards.

Then I made the singular mistake of checking “yes” somewhere on some standardized test sometime during the long, arduous process of junior year. Little did I know that “I would like to receive information about colleges and scholarship opportunities” meant “Please increase my odds of death by paper cut.”

From fliers to pamphlets to letters to infographics – the floodgates have officially opened.

I won’t deny it; there are brief moments in the thick of it all where I let myself feel flattered. I’m a teenage girl, and we like to feel wanted.

But even so, I am not so incredibly distracted by Harvard’s glossy-paged novel-of-an-advertisement as to forget that they have tens of thousands of students applying. The majority of whom will look just as good, if not better, than me on paper.

Yes, Harvard, I am “special.” But am I really that special to you?

Just the other day I received a piece of mail (from a university that shall not be named) that had “Dear Elise” handwritten on the mailing envelope. Such a thoughtful touch. They then proceeded to address the letter on the inside, “We need students like you, Sharon.”

Like I said, it’s nice to feel wanted.

I get the reasoning: sending mail through the post helps grab the attention of students who may not have been considering that school otherwise.

But, and I almost can’t believe I am saying this, sending emails gets the word out too. I realize, as well as any other kid with an “unread” inbox quota of 1,816, that email spam is its own monstrous invention. But from a broad perspective – it’s actually a big step in a better direction.

First of all, it doesn’t cost as much money. Simpson Scarborough is a marketing and strategy firm that specializes in higher education, and by their approximation, higher educational institutes spend about 1% of their net revenues on advertising. Harvard’s total net revenue from 2013 amounted to $38,603,268.

In short: that’s nearly 400,000 dollars that could have been allocated, well, anywhere else. Improving the food. Improving the dorms. Improving the scholarship opportunities for all of us trying to figure out how to pay for six-figure educations.

I don’t want to say that universities are murdering trees for the sake of wasting 400,000 dollars… but universities are basically murdering trees for the sake of wasting 400,000 dollars. The environmentalist in me wants to curl up into a fetal position and cradle my copy of David Orr’s Earth in Mind.

The majority of college mail can be recycled; it’s true. It is also true that a significantly smaller number of it actually is. Many schools don’t put the recyclable logo on their spam, and many families simply don’t bother.

While emails may crowd inboxes, at least they won’t crowd landfills.

Then there is always that nifty thing known as the “unsubscribe” button. The one they like to tuck down at the bottom with the baby text. Mail coming from the post has no unsubscribe button. I’m actually not really sure who you’re supposed to contact to stop the onslaught. I wish someone would tell me, though.

As it stands now, if every piece of college spam were a guy, I would be filing a mountain of restraining orders. It’s not you, Southern Methodist University. It’s me.

Me and my exhaustion from sifting through your “catchy” one-liners and scripted interest. If I could go back in time, I would find my slightly-smaller and less-put-together junior self and pry that pencil from her overeager hands.

“It’s not worth it, Elise,” I would tell her. “It’s really not worth it.”