Sexism in major fields: @Gatormama points out an issue with audio recording tech—it’s male-dominated, and intensely. Unfortunately, the program that has taken that on most overtly is at Berklee College of Music, and that’s off my D23’s list because of her severe Seasonal Affective Disorder, and thus her need for a high level of wintertime sunlit hours. I hope there’s a generational shift coming along, though—better than a third of those focusing on recording tech at her summer camp were female or nonbinary. But yeah, for girls going into male-dominated fields (and, though some of the details are different, boys going into female-dominated fields), parents should probably sit down and talk with them about it. (In my kid’s case it helps, I think, that her mother is an engineer, and her older sister is a very successful engineering student, and her aunt is a mathematician, and all of them can speak to the overt and covert sexism they’ve faced and the ways they’ve dealt with it.)
Lengths of lists: I think people stress altogether too much about how long their/their kid’s application shortlists are. I think the crucial thing is whether there is a safety or two (and for the Big Merit Aid™ chasers that’s a financial safety or two, and for everyone that’s an affordable safety or two), and that it’s a real safety with effectively guaranteed admission that the student could be happy going to. If you’ve got that, then everything else is simply a matter of how much time a kid is willing to devote to writing application essays and the like.
Some important related statistics: Everyone should remember that of the college-going segment of the population of high school graduates, the median number of college applications is 2, and the modal number of applications is 1. I am convinced that the whole idea that there is a minimum number of applications greater than X is ultimately the result of an effort to drum up business on the part of college application consultants. (And also, this is a good point to repeat the reminder that participants on CC are not representative of the general population.)
Application difficulty levels: Tied in with all that, and with another nod to @Gatormama for raising this, but there’s a huge difference between applying to, say, most SLACs (though a few, like Kenyon, have very minimal applications) and most state flagships. I have a daughter at Mississippi State, and she jokes, not entirely unseriously, that the application there was so short and easy that she didn’t realize she’d actually applied until it told her it was time to pay the application fee. But she was applying to large public universities (because she wanted engineering), while her older sister applied to a lot of SLACs with multiple essays and such—and it was a much more intense process on a per-application basis for her. This is yet another reason that claims that X applications is the correct number, or that Z applications is too many, are silly at best—even if one student is applying to more colleges than another, the required effort for those applications may be lower, depending on which colleges they’re each applying to.