<p>My D is having trouble narrowing down her applications to a dozen! Is that too many?</p>
<p>Depends on your ability to pay all the application fees and her ability to get all the required essays in. That’s a lot of writing to do, each of which needs careful attention. If she truly loves each of these schools, and you’re confident she can get GOOD applications completed during senior year coursework and activities, then perhaps. I would suggest fewer, but it’s not an outrageous number. Just make sure it’s a good mix or reaches, matches and safeties. Good luck!</p>
<p>12 is not too many, especially if there are top tier schools that have low acceptance rates. Like it was mentioned in the post before me, if you can afford the application fees and she has time to put quality work into the secondaries, then you should be ok.</p>
<p>Thanks for the replies. Affording the app fees is not an issue. I was much more concerned with her ability to knock each essay out of the park. I’m hoping to get her # down to around 9.</p>
<p>Even with nine schools, the process will be time consuming. It can be helpful to start work on essays in late summer once applications are posted and before senior year begins.</p>
<p>Niceday. That’s a great idea. She is already brainstorming the common app essays. </p>
<p>If we narrow the choices to 9, what is a good mix of reaches, matches and safeties?</p>
<p>@ BigDaddy88: You’ll probably find no consensus in the answers to your last question. I would suggest three of each based on our experience this year. Couple of caveats to that advice, though:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>You have to be brutally honest about what is truly a reach/match/safety for your daughter. We all want the best for ourselves/our kids so there is a tendency for us all to be too optimistic. I realize it’s stating the obvious but if a college has a 15% acceptance rate, that means 85% of kids will be rejected. Which side of the coin is more likely, honestly, to be the outcome? Be guided by the admission statistics from previous years unless your daughter has some other hook that might give her an advantage (e.g., recuited athlete, URM, first generation college, geographic diversity, legacy etc.). These hooks really can make a difference because Adcoms are constructing a desired class profile and are looking to fill out holes in that ideal profile.</p></li>
<li><p>Make sure that your safeties are not too safe. Many Adcoms are sensitive to candidates using them as safety schools and often waitlist candidates that should be easy admits by the data alone. They are playing the yield game and will be reluctant to offer a place to someone who they think is likely to go elsewhere unless they have no other options.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>The process is almost comical. If you have great stats you may still be under qualified for top schools and overqualified for safeties!</p>
<p>Welcome to the joy of college admissions!</p>
<p>If she has to write additional essays for each application, it could be overwhelming. It depends on what kind of writer she is. Both of my Ds did not enjoy writing, so it was a chore.</p>
<p>Make sure you consider the affordability of each school before applying. It makes little sense to apply, be accepted, and then discover that you can’t swing it financially.</p>
<p>How do you know about affordability until after your accepted? 99% of privates are unaffordable without merit and/or need aid…</p>
<p>That is another tricky part of the process. One factor to remember is how the Feds calculate what you as parents are expected to contribute from a needs-based persepctive. They assume you will contribute 47% of your adjusted gross income from your previous year’s tax return PLUS 12% of your eligible assets (i.e., they exclude your primary residence and any tax protected retirement accounts such as 401(k)s) - if my memory serves me right. So you do the math to see what you can afford. Merit aid is very hard to predict, but your are unlikely to get any from a “reach” school unless you have one of the hooks I talked about in my previous post. Also, each college’s common data set (which should be public information) will give you some sense of how many kids got needs-based aid and how many got merit aid + what the average award was.</p>
<p>Good luck. I know it seems frustrating right now but there is an end to this, eventually, and hopefully it will be an end that you and your daughter will celebrate with good news!</p>
<p>Yikes! 47% of AGI will completely knock us out of any need-based aid. Fortunately, we have saved a decent amount…so a merit award around $10-$15k will make most schools affordable.</p>
<p>I had the same reaction when I heard that statistic from the financial aid officer of a local university! It is sobering. In the interest of full disclosure, the bar does get lowered from there if you have more than one child at college, but I can’t remember the numbers for #2, #3 etc.</p>
<p>Given your comment on merit awards, definitely check out the common data sets for colleges you are interested in. It gives you some sense of their policies (no guarantees, of course).</p>
<p>47%!? I don’t believe that is correct at all. We have certainly never paid anything like 47% of AGI, let alone an additional 12% of ELIGIBLE assets (if we had them). Our federal EFC has been more along the lines of 25%.</p>
<p>It doesn’t seem like 47% is right. If you’re talking about federal standards, work through the formula here:</p>
<p><a href=“https://studentaid.ed.gov/sites/default/files/2012-13-efc-forumula.pdf[/url]”>https://studentaid.ed.gov/sites/default/files/2012-13-efc-forumula.pdf</a></p>
<p>Start on page 9.</p>
<p>For my family, our EFC was 16% of our AGI, because we make <70k/yr. Parental assets are assessed at 5.6% less an asset protection of 40-50k depending on older parent’s age, not 12%, and we had about 10k over that asset protection. Using rough estimates, for our income level, our AGI was about 14% of our EFC. I doubt even private, Profile schools assess that much. Student assets, on the other hand, are assessed at…20%, I believe.</p>
<p>Before your D applies to any schools, run net-price calculators on all of them. Every single one. Take unaffordable ones (without merit) off the table. Don’t have her waste time applying to schools you can’t afford.</p>
<p>Sorry, typo on my part. I meant to say 27%, not 47%, was the number offered by the college financial aid officer as not being an unusual parental contribution. However, @hudsonvalley51 and @purpleacorn are absolutely correct to point out that the formula is complicated, so the final % paid per child does very much depends on the level of family income and number of children in college. All I can say is check the formula to work out what eligibility, if any, you can expect.</p>
<p>Sorry for any confusion I may have caused.</p>
<p>Net price calculators are available now on every school’s website, but they vary widely in their accuracy. Some schools have put a lot of effort into customizing them and making them capable of predicting both merit and need aid with precision. Others just use the off the shelf model software. </p>
<p>For any of them, small mistakes in the input information can lead to big swings in the predicted aid. garbage in = garbage out</p>
<p>Whew! 27% or less makes me feel much better!! We are self employed, so we can max out our retirement contributions and deduct things like health care costs to lower our AGI. </p>
<p>My D is interested in several schools who claim to meet 100% of demonstrated need. So, if the schools will actually meet that need, we will be in good shape at any school.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the responses!</p>
<p>Bigdaddy-- if you are considering CSS Profile/private schools (which are usually the ones that meet 100% of aid), they can and will add back deductions when considering how much your family ‘makes’ each year.</p>