Is every email with you as the sole reciepient a joke? How can you differentiate between the mass emails and the ones where the're interested

There is no difference.

Think of business schools as any other business that wants your money. If SEARS or Walmart sent you an email, you would assume it's because they want your business. If random schools are sending you emails it's because they want your business too.

Oh - I forgot the killer identifier.

Is the school playing with its hair while talking to you?

You may well be in.

Didn't think 75 bucks meant much to these schools. If they didn't want all the applicants, why do schools have minimum standards?

I'm not saying they want the application fees, I'm saying they want you to pay tuition. I'm not talking about ultra-elites, but other schools that spend a ton of money on marketing.

When you say you're getting random emails from schools I'm assuming it isn't schools like Harvard and Stanford that are emailing you. For schools outside of the ultra-elites, they have to do serious marketing to bring in as many applicants as they can because they want to fill up their class and have a lot of candidates to choose from when they do so.

Yep, it's the all-important funnel. My college had a bozo of an admissions director sometime in the 90s. He decided to cut costs by not buying all those ACT/SAT scores that give the schools access to students. So they sent less promotional stuff, had fewer applicants, had fewer applicants of quality, and ended up with a smaller class. Maybe that's why they gave me so much money....

At any rate, you gotta get those applicants in the door. As many as possible.

Oddly, I've been getting stuff from some higher-ranked schools lately. I got something from Chicago a couple weeks ago. Does anyone know how to get off the GMASS list?

Even the top schools send out marketing materials. I think more important than the application fee (zero importance) and tuition (not much importance for the good schools) that they will get from you is the volume of applications they can generate. The more applications they get, the better their admit rate for a given class size and the tighter the yield. These are all indicators of in-demand business schools and will help them in the rankings. And if they manage to attract a few high quality students who wouldn't otherwise have applied, that's good too.