Based on experience and/or opinion, what is a good number of schools to apply to?
If you have the time and money, apply to every college in world. /sarc
It really depends on person to person, but generally you want a mix of safeties, matches, and reaches. 5-10 seems to be average. I personally did 20 apps but that’s just me.
Remember that you have to pay to apply, send test scores, and send the CSS profile if they take it. Also, the dates and procedures for submitting financial aid paperwork is not very standardized. So it is a pretty big headache to track and fulfill all those requirements for a lot of colleges. 8-10 is a manageable number.
And the supplemental essays can really slow things down. I think 5-10 is a good number. For some colleges you can use the same supplemental essay (perhaps tweak it a little), so that makes things a little easier. personally, 7-9 is plenty for me.
If you are targeting a good range of safety, match and reach schools and do your research, I think 8-10 is plenty. Apps are a lot of work and get expensive. People start getting silly when they view it as a lottery and apply to a bunch of reach schools, assuming they will surely get into one. It doesn’t work like that.
My kid applied to 12. She should have only applied to ten. At least two of the colleges were a waste of time and effort, because she had lost interest in them by the time she applied, but did so anyway. She interviewed and wrote essays for those colleges, though at least she had fee waivers. Even so, the time could have been better spent writing better essays, or studying, etc… Choose wisely, and you will end up at a college you want to go to, and save your self some valuable time in your senior year by not applying to too many colleges.
Both of my kids kept it under 10 schools. They both used EA/rolling schools to help them limit the number of applications. For example, my S got into a school he liked (it was a safety but he liked the school and could see going there) early on a rolling plan so he didn’t have to apply to any schools below that on his wish list.
The answer this is “it depends”. If you need FA/merit aid, you may need to apply to more schools in order to compare offers. If you can use the strategy mentioned by @happy1 and are holding an acceptance from a school that you like better than others on your list, you can save yourself a lot of trouble. (Personally, I think you can also save yourself a lot of anxiety this way too. You will know, even while you’re waiting to hear from other schools that you may like better, that you WILL be going to college at a place where you’ll be happy.)
If you’re targeting very selective (smaller) LACs, you may want to apply to more schools, though. This was our pool, and our CC recommended applying to 15. The rationale was that although DS had a reasonable shot at all of them based on his stats, he did not have a hook (and was not a recruited athlete), and it is difficult to know from year to year what the pool will be and whether a candidate will be one that meets one of the school’s need in that year. In this sense, while you don’t want to see it as a lottery, it is in a way.
It DOES take time to write supplemental essays. If you’re applying to schools that want to see demonstrated interest, it DOES take time to visit or reach out. Most applications cost money. Those, too, are meaningful considerations. If you apply to a lot of schools and are in turn accepted to a lot of them, you have only kicked the decision can further down the road, and it won’t be any easier to decide then. While accepted student days are often a great way to evaluate a school and potential fit, the timeframe for that is short and generally inflexible, so you could find that April is overwhelmingly chaotic and stressful.
@doglover803: 6-10 is an ideal number. That number will be different for each student but generally speaking, 6-10 is where most students should be. The most we would recommend is 12. In our experience, anything more than 12 becomes quite burdensome due to the amount of requirements (i.e., essays and supplemental writing, recommendations, resumes, potential interviews, testing, etc.) and students aren’t as likely to put their best foot forward in each application as a result.
Your list should include:
2-3 safe schools
2-3 matches
2-3 reach
Safety schools should also include at least a few financial safety schools, where you are very likely to be admitted and which you can afford.
I ended up applying to 21 – don’t do that! Keep it under around 10 – 6 reaches, 3 matches, 1 safety.