<p>MomLive, I still understand why that would make a NMSF apply to a large number of schools. By and large, the schools offering big money for NM are going to be admissions safeties or low matches for NMSFs. A student might be interested in a handful of those schools, at most. They may also apply to other schools that are academic and/or financial reaches. But that’s no different than any other high-stats student. </p>
<p>condor30, where are you getting your data from?</p>
<p>My kids looked at a lot of schools, but only applied to places they’d be happy to attend. That meant the financial safeties were schools that stood on their own merits as far as my kids were concerned. </p>
<p>S1 had a list of 10 schools, actually applied to 7, S2 had 11 and applied to 8. Both dropped several schools after getting EA acceptances to schools that were at the top of their lists. We were lucky to have a flagship that was generous with merit $$ and that each S felt could work for him. </p>
<p>The feeling at our house was that it was better to focus on making the apps really sing than to send out lots of so-so applications. They spent a lot of time and effort on their “target” apps — the schools they wanted most and which were on the reachy-but-not-impossible-side. They got into every single one of those – I suspect the schools that rejected them looked at their essays and said “he sounds like a perfect fit for X” – with X being one of the target schools. 
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<p>Both my kids knew folks who sent out 20+ apps and did not get anywhere near the results they hoped. They also know folks who applied to the flagship plus mega-reaches and were not happy with the results. 8-10 schools of varying selectivity at our house was a reasonable enough number to have some choices come April, without going nutso getting the apps out the door.</p>
<p>D. applied only to schools that had a program that she was interested. All colleges accepted her and gave her lots of Merit $$, not all programs accepted her. She did not get into her #1 choice of program (she got close to $27k in Merit $$ renewable every year at this school) and happily went to her #2 choice. She applied to 6 programs (10 UGs, couple programs had few UGs). She had accomplished her goal and as a fringe benefit she ended up with Meirt $$ covering 100% of tuition and some part of R & B. </p>
<p>There is no general rule for number to apply, it depends on individual goal and where kid’s stats match to this goal (is it a bottom of range, top, in a middle…), what other aspects are important? What impression of campus? Very many less important variables that are different for each applicant. Pretty campus was one of top criteria for D. Do you see it for a guy? I do not think so, but again, boys are different, they are not all the same.</p>