<p>My sons applied to 4 and 5. Each had a very good rolling admission or EA school by early to mid-December, so only applied to others they were really interested in. We were going for money, so not the tippy top schools. </p>
<p>Older son (high stat kid applying to very selective colleges or selective programs at what would otherwise be match schools) applied to 8 - 6 reaches, 2 safeties. (He was accepted by 4, waitlisted at 1 and rejected by 3.)</p>
<p>Younger so applied to 7 - 6 reaches and 1 safety. One of his reaches became a safety since he got in EA. He dropped 2 schools he’d considered applying to when the EA acceptance came in. (One was another reach, the other a safety.) (He was accepted by 4, rejected by 3.)</p>
<p>Ds1 applied to 11 schools – more than I liked, but we needed good FA. Accepted to nine, one no and one WL. My only regret is not making the WL school an ED school because I think he would have gotten in and it was his first choice. I was too worried about the money to go ED. Thankfully, he loved the LAC he attended. Worked out great.</p>
<p>DS2 applied to eight schools. Yes from six, one no and one WL – the same school that WL’d his big brother! He got into his no. 1 school EA, but it was a long wait until we got the FA that said it was doable.</p>
<p>If it weren’t for our FA needs, they each could have easily gotten away with 5 or 6.</p>
<p>The number of applications is far less important than the alignment between the student’s qualifications and the expectations of the colleges they apply to. Applying to colleges as if admission were akin to a buying lottery tickets isn’t wise. Choose your reaches, matches, and safeties well and you don’t need to apply to as many colleges. Just make sure that your “safeties” are true safeties, i.e., you could imagine attending the college and you could afford to. If you are especially concerned about the availability of financial aid – esp. merit aid – then a willingness to attend a lower-ranked school may increase your odds of getting such aid.</p>
<p>For our older child all but one of the 7 colleges he applied to were matches or safeties (relative to his credentials), and 1 was a lottery reach. He got into the 6 matches and safeties.</p>
<p>For our younger child, who applied to art programs, two were safeties (for one of them a portfolio was optional); for the other 4 it was difficult for her to assess her talents vis-a-vis the pool of applicants since so much depended on the portfolio. However, she told us that if she didn’t get into one of the colleges, she would enroll for a year at the local community college, work on her portfolio, and apply again. That possible outcome was the only real concern that we had about the process. It was a relief as well as a surprise that she was admitted to all six.</p>
<p>Really who can pay full for multiple kids? </p>
<p>When I was in high school, there were some students whose first choice college was a safety (e.g. LDS members with reasonably high stats who wanted to go to BYU), so it was one and done for them. Others applied to one state university with community college as their safeties (some of them did later transfer to the desired state university). Of course, most of the state universities and most of the private schools were nowhere near as hard to get admitted to as they are today.</p>
<p>@nepatsgirl
</p>
<p>Exactly our situation, and the same number of schools, too.</p>
<p>S’12 applied to 7, I think. Got into 5. 2 were affordable, luckily one was his top pick. His didn’t ask for anything but FAFSA, though, D’15s mostly want NCP info and that may or may not happen.</p>
<p>Why not apply ONLY to affordable?<br>
No sense to apply to an UG that you cannot afford. Looks like a huge waste of everything.</p>
<p>My son visited around 25 schools, applied to 12. Two safeties, 5 match, and the rest reach. He was rejected by all 5 reach schools, accepted by the others. </p>
<p>In retrospect, we could have scratched a couple of the high reach schools off the list, when it became obvious that he wouldn’t have attended anyway. We could have scratched a match school that did not offer merit aid when we decided it was not attractive enough to pay full fare. Casting a wider net of “match” schools was done in hopes of maximizing merit aid, although financial aid was not a top consideration.</p>
<p>I don’t begrudge any of the applications he made, though. The decision on where he ultimately enrolled came down to a hard look at his three top choices once the acceptances came in, including attending the accepted student days. His final selection came down to a State University with a full-ride offer and two private schools that offered generous merit aid. My son made his pick, and is very happy, and mom and dad are happy, too! </p>
<p>The list my daughter put together was based on a number of factors
- They had her major
- NPC indicated it could potentially be financially feasible given merit/need based aid
- They had merit aid to give for someone with her stats
- They were within one day’s drive - she visited every campus she ended up applying to</p>
<p>The issue is that the population has increased (especially the population of overseas students applying) while the slots at popular schools has not kept pace. My D’s classmate is applying for 20 including a possible ED through questbridge</p>
<p>There seems to be an underlying tone that applying to more than 8 colleges is greedy/foolish/stupid. Frankly, I don’t think that one can set an universally appropriate Celling on applications. When my kids were appling, we had some very wierd reactions. Fast forward three months and those same nay-Sayers were picking their jaws off the ground while my test OPPITIONAL no AP d struggled to decide between a full ride and and 70% ride ride at atop school. </p>
<p>Daughter applied to 5 or 6 I think. Got accepted by all but one, but realistically was only truly thinking about going to 2 of them.
S1 applied to one and said it was the only place he wanted to go and if he didn’t get in he’d go to CC. He wasn’t too concerned about getting accepted and is studying there now. S2 applied to only 1 and is going there next year.
More than 10 seems excessive to me but the schools sure bombard everyone with emails and snail mail hoping kids will apply. My kids have saved me a bunch on application fees from what I’m seeing here. I think a couple of my daughter’s apps were free based on her scores.</p>
<p>I really enjoyed reading the NYT article. I can’t even imagine how a kid could do 30 or 40 applications! </p>
<p>My kiddo has a fairly compact list of 9 - 2 “safer”, 4 target/match and 3 reaches. (Final app submitted over the weekend, YAY!) However, we got there after investing a lot of parental time and money visiting schools - several that she loved on paper/computer screen were cut from the list over the summer, so I can imagine that if we hadn’t the time or money to do the travel she would’ve had closer to 15 applications. </p>
<p>My daughter applied to 6 schools fairly early – in late September. She did this because there were all rolling admissions schools and her stats are not that great, so she could use every advantage she could get. She has now been accepted to four, one other wants her first marking period’s grades (just sent, and since her GPA for this past marking period was better than her overall GPA, I’m thinking she’ll get accepted), and the last one wants her first semester’s grades (so they won’t make a decision until February.) </p>
<p>Once she started getting acceptances, I thought it might be worth it to apply to one or two more schools - perhaps reaches that she at least had a shot at. But she said her gc was telling her that six was plenty, in fact she thought it was too much - and that you’d only apply to more in a highly competitive situation like muscial theatre.</p>
<p>I thought that was odd - her school is pretty good (rated in the top 30 out of 500 school districts in the state) and almost everyone ends up going to college. I can’t see where six applications is excessive. </p>
<p>Both of my kids applied to 5. They both started with 10, but liberal use of Rolling/EA/ED strategies reduced the number of applications in half. </p>
<p>I’ve often described my “algorithm”, but I’ll do it again.
If one can 1) rank the preferences and 2) estimate the probability of admission for each school (I used Naviance which at least factors out the GPA and SAT), then one can estimate the probability of attending as the probability of admission times the probability of being rejected my more preferable schools. </p>
<p>If one estimates the probability of attendance, then it’s pretty easy to see that it’s not worth spending a lot of time on an application you have a 2% chance of attending if it’s not your top choice. </p>
<p>Now my kids bought into this to a point. It was their preferences that they couldn’t totally nail down given the information that they had. When the EA acceptances came in for D1, only 2 more applications needed to be filed. D2 worked harder nailing down her ED school as her top choice and was admitted, but she filled out trivial applications for 3 other schools, and applied to a rolling school with a 11/1 priority deadline (neither safety nor trivial application), but the ED of course eliminated the rest of the schools. </p>
<p>My D is applying to 8. She’ll get into all of them. Or she should anyway. It’s just a question of merit money. I’d have been happy to have her apply to a dozen more schools but she finds applying and interviewing stressful. She’s got four clear favorites. We expect two on that list will come back with significant merit while the other two are merit long shots. My guess is her final choice will come down to accepted students days. </p>
<p>There are a lot of variables that affect people’s planning and comfort level, so I try not to judge the choices of others . We of course hope that D gets into her ED school and we will be done. But even though she’s high stats, it has a 12% acceptance rate so we have no choice but to be prepared to file more apps. That includes some northeast LAC’s we haven’t been able to visit because of cost, time and distance. I’m just glad that she was totally done with testing by the end of her junior year.</p>
<p>D had a friend who applied last year. He applied to 23 schools, basically all reaches or high match. He didn’t get into any of his top reaches and got into 3 of his high match/low reach schools. Everything worked out fine for him in the end, but I know he didn’t enjoy receiving all those rejections.</p>
<p>@ClassicRockerDad That sounds good if money is no object. But if you’re at the mercy of the merit or financial aid gods it’s probably better to hedge your bets and pay your app fees. </p>
<p>Yes, the rejections.
My D had pretty good stats, top 1%, applied to ~12, got in 10, got rejected by 2 reaches and those rejections made her feel pretty bad. Probably hurt her confidence some.
It’s something to consider.</p>