S23 applied to more than 10 which seemed like a ton but was fine for the circumstances. He was chasing big merit $, and he ended up with great choices.
Some were safeties affiliated with parental employers. Most were private Tuition Exchange schools, which is a competitive and and unpredictable scholarship program (parent employment benefit).
Only one was reach-y, the rest were targets or safeties for admission. Only the parent employers were financial safeties. In retrospect, he could have applied to ~5 fewer schools. But the supplementals were none or minimal for most, so no biggie. He ended up withdrawing one app early on and ruled a couple others out quickly.
Had he narrowed his list more, the school he’ll be attending would have dropped off the list because we didn’t think it would come in at budget. We were really surprised when he got full tuition, so he’s glad he applied.
Our next kid will apply to far fewer, I’m sure. I don’t think he’ll be competitive enough to go for big merit aid. He may even just apply super early to one safety parent employer with rolling admissions and then go from there.
S1: 13 schools (1st kid/test child). 7 UC’s, 3 Cal States, 1 OOS and 2 CA Privates
Admitted to 5 UC’s, 3 CSU’s, 1 OOS (free application/rolling) and 1 CA Private. This was several years ago so the number and list would have definitely changed in this test blind/optional competitive climate.
S2: 11 schools. 4 UC’s, 6 Cal States and 1 OOS (free application/rolling). Admitted to 1 UC, 5 CSU’s and the OOS school.
We were full pay and merit was a plus but not required.
I believe the national average is 8.1. Common App allows up to 20 maybe?
Anything above 8 to me is madness unless parents are doing essay writing or a lot of copy paste happening.
My daughter applied to 5 in state public schools.
Son applied to 8. 3 in state, 2 public OOS with auto merit and 3 private schools.
Sometimes the public school counselors encourage this behavior. At our competitive public, there is one counselor who deals with anything college related (except GC letter of rec) for >400 students per grade. Each student gets one meeting mid-way through Junior year. At ours, the counselor undermined the message of application moderation that we had been preaching and told our kid when he asked that he was “competitive” for any of the top school which just caused him to apply to more reaches. We even tried to lead the witnesses a bit with questions designed to encourage more moderate expectations or targeted focus and the counselor didn’t take the bait.
FWIW, S23 was completely uninterested in any advice from us on the college process. We were fairly worried he was in for a disappointment, despite claiming he would have been fine with his safety. He applied to ~20 schools and largely relied on last minute modifications of a handful of essays done for early apps and it still worked out great for him. Probably 2 of his top 3 finalists for where he went might not have made the list if he had stuck to a small quota initially. Arguably, they could have been on the short list if he had done far more pre-acceptance research on schools and realized how great a fit they were for him, but he didn’t and so his broad net worked out well for him.
Ironically (since I unsuccessfully lobbied for fewer applications up front), part of the reason he applied to so many was when he was finally done with his list which was mostly reaches, I talked him into adding a few (relative) targets with later application deadlines and usually no supplemental requirements. I was hedging his relatively lack of target schools. Turned out not to be necessary (though he got into all of those additions, so at least I can say I picked logically) but obviously we couldn’t have known that up-front.
My daughter applied to 20, kept adding more. It was a lot of essays (and definitely no parental help, I’ve had 5 in college and have never even seen a college application or had anything at all to do with the process. I’ve never even contacted a college for any reason. None of the schools she wanted to apply to had auto merit.
I’d have tried to talk some sense into the kid. Did you pay for 20+ application fees?
I saw my daughter one evening sitting in her room with my wife and crying when she was applying to colleges and making a list. She is quite driven but not an elite student. I basically took a look at the list and cut it down drastically. The stress to me was not worth it. Now she is thriving at UNC and we could not be happier. My second rodeo was even better with DS23. He wanted engineering. We used our experience as parents to come up with a list for him. It was all super low stress.
That is absolutely true, but it goes to the heart of what someone defines as a safety. A lot of the veterans here are talking about schools with extremely high admission rates (75%+) or guaranteed admission for certain stats (UC Merced effectively for some CA students), Texas publics, etc. Whereas many parents and students think of a safety as "It may only have a 45% acceptance rate but based on 400 applicants in the last few years from my school, there’s never been someone with my stats who was not admitted. The former is still pretty safe. The latter is the rapidly moving target. But some never have and never will have considered them safeties even if the admission trend had been more stable than it has been lately.
Of course, kids who get in ED effectively apply to 1, hooked or unhooked.
Kids with an excellent affordable EA or rolling admissions option may not need to “load up” on safeties.
Kids who need merit may have a lot more schools as they want to compare offers.
Our CC recommended 12-15 for unhooked kids applying to LACs because it is impossible to know how they fit into institurional priorities. This is less important for kids applying to larger schools that don’t need to make sure they’ll have enough oboes for the orchestra or enough kids who will take Latin.
Likewise, kids applying to highly rejective schools may apply to more because they know the odds are against them and they want to be assured of choice.
This is all to say that a lot or a few really depends on the type of schools being considered.
There are no students who apply ED to their top choice, but EA or early rolling to their lesser choices that offer that? Of course, they withdraw the latter if admitted to their ED school (although some of the latter may deliver admission at the same time or before the ED school), but that is different from not applying at all.
There definitely is a lot of this. Pretty common where we are for kids to have done multiple EA’s plus maybe an early public school app like the UCs in addition to their ED.
The challenge we have run into is that many of the EAs school now release their results in January, so it doesn’t help you reduce the number of applications you have to send out.
She really wasn’t stressed, she hates having any downtime, and since she applied for fall 2021, she was in online school about 2 - 3 hours a day, and wasn’t working. Her sisters are exactly the same way (her brothers are not, my oldest son applied to one college, as did my husband). She did get some fee waivers. She also couldn’t goon college tours do to Covid, just walked around some empty campuses. In the end, she did not choose one of her least expensive options, but to one she applied to very last minute (Clemson, she decided going south would increase her chances of in person classes, for a kid who thrives on being busy, Covid was not fun). She also took the act and sat 3 times each, and missed the test taking, weirdo.