As always, here at CC, interesting discussions.
But I can’t believe that no one has asked yet what school the kid-with-24-applications got into!!
Answer: Stanford. Full-pay.
So mull that one over…
@SouthernHope Full pay, as in Stanford pays? Or no merit scholarships?
Full pay by the parent! (or at least that’s my understanding). I guess Stanford has great financial aid but if a parent has over $300,000 in savings (or in house equity), there’s no financial aid…and perhaps he didn’t qualify for the tippy-top to then get merit.
Ah…thanks for this. It’s funny, if the kid could get into Stanford, I wonder why they applied to 24 schools? Not judging (mine applied to 16), it just seems with stats that high, you’d think they’d have the confidence to apply to a lot fewer.
@Momofmrb so that’s the twist to this whole thing! And I also wonder, what 5 schools rejected him? 
So not fishing with a wide net because he needed merit, just so he’d have a lot of choices. Yep, limit the applications to a reasonable number.
" if the kid could get into Stanford, I wonder why they applied to 24 schools? "
Imagine the difference if he had only applied to the 5 rejections and the 4 waitlist schools. That risk is what causes students to apply to so many schools.
I have seen people suggest applying to rolling schools so you know you’ve got some acceptances. The problem with that is, of course, rolling schools aren’t affordable to everyone, and you don’t know which scholarships you’ll get until the spring many times. So then what?
Rolling schools that my son applied to that ended up being unaffordable: Missouri S & T (OOS), UCCS (OOS), SDSMT (OOS). He got scholarships at each one, but they weren’t near enough. UTD only became affordable in late April after we filed an appeal, but that was too late to visit.
The one rolling schools that was marginally affordable because of the automatic scholarship was UAH, but it only became really affordable in late April when my son found out he won a yearly Corporate NM scholarship.
I admit there were schools on the list that I knew would be unaffordable (out of area Cal State schools: SJSU, CSULB, and Cal Poly SLO), and I should not have allowed him to apply to those.
And some schools that I thought probably weren’t going to be affordable (but were worth a shot) ended up being surprisingly marginally affordable.
Surprisingly, though, even our local Cal State, SDSU, came out to be much more expensive than I thought because they didn’t include any Cal Grant, and only a small Pell Grant, even though when I ran the NPC, it always included a Cal Grant. And, the way state schools apply outside scholarships is totally dependent on what the EFC says. I didn’t fully understand this until I began to get f. aid packages and began to ask f. aid offices about applying outside scholarships.
In the end, though, only the one school that met 100% demonstrated need was the one that came in at our EFC. All others gapped us.
And btw, the fact that this student got into Stanford, but got rejected by other reach schools (and maybe even match schools) doesn’t surprise me. I have seen more than a few students get into exactly one reachy-reach school (including my own middle son) while being rejected at all the others. The top schools really do each have their own way of doing admissions.
@momofthreeboys says “Wow i would not want to be responsible for yield.”
I have been wondering about this too - without coordination, the most selective colleges are all going to be making offers to the same pool of kids. I’m now expecting to read about about yield horror stories after May 1 this year for those colleges that miscalculated demand.
I’m sure this year won’t be much different from other years, yield-wise. That’s one of the reason the acceptance rates drop - playing it safe by accepting fewer students, putting MANY on the wait list. Need more after 5/1? Go to the wait list. For the selective schools there will always be someone willing to accept later in the game. Overshot? Forced triples.
My D applied to 7 schools - one was a true safety (and offered not a full ride for NMF, but full tuition and room), 2 elite Lacs (but she had gotten into their fly-ins so she knew she had a good chance), and HYPS, bc we were looking at meets full-need schools. One of the last four was an SCEA school that she applied to and got in in December. In our case, we ignored the 3 safeties / 3 matches / 3 reaches rule – figured if worse came to worse, she would end up at her true safety. We had fee waivers for all, but there was no question for her that she wanted to keep the number of applications down. It took a lot out of her to write those additional essays, and she didn’t see the point. We also had heard stories from a friend whose kid last year applied to 20 schools (and got into 18 of the 20), that he regretted applying to so many. In the end, this very tightly edited approach worked well for her. What we did not know was how much aid she would receive, but after seeing her SCEA school’s offer, we were thankful and grateful.
Speaking of overkill, here are the results from one CC poster (frenchtoastlover) who applied to 27 schools, including all 8 Ivies -
Ivy Decisions:
Accepted:
Yale (SCEA)
Brown
UPenn
Dartmouth
Harvard
Columbia (LL)
Waitlisted:
Cornell
Rejected:
Princeton
Finally, here’s a summary of all my decisions. I will post about my reflections and regarding my decision process around May 1.
Accepted:
Yale, Brown, UPenn, Dartmouth, Harvard, University of Alabama (Automatic Full-Tuition), University of Michigan (LSA, EA), University of Southern California (w/ Trustees’ Scholarship), UC Berkeley (Regents’ Candidate; didn’t receive), UC Irvine (Regents + CHP), UCSB (Regents + Honors), Columbia University (w/ Likely Letter), UCSD (Regents), Washington University in St. Louis, Wesleyan University (Early Write + Allbritton Fellowship), UC Davis (Regents + UHP), Sarah Lawrence College (Presidential Scholarship 24k/year merit), Bowdoin College (w/ Faculty Scholar Award), UCLA, Middlebury College (February Admission), Haverford College, Amherst College, Vassar College
Waitlisted:
Stanford, Cornell
Rejected:
Princeton, Wellesley
I guess that is why many selective colleges have super low acceptance rates. In the old days you may have applied to a few and now some are applying to all! Shoot you could probably fund first years room and board with those app fees and fees to send in your test scores.
Guess DS in the minority with 6 applied to and 4 acceptances.
I would not worry too much for colleges and yield. They know exactly how many potential cross admits they have and who are they loosing to. At our admitted students visit at Caltech yesterday they told us they admitted 500 for their 200 incoming class. If those small schools can manage, it is much easier for large schools. In the meantime they all make a killing in application’s fees.
Son limited his search to 5 instate schools because of generous , guaranteed state sponsored scholarships based on his stats . He’s never been interested in the Ivies or top tier schools. He was accepted with merit at every school, as well as the Honors Colleges at every Honors college he applied to. He was able to have all of his info needed to make his decision by the beginning of March. It made the process much less stressful and for that we are greatful. More options don’t necessarily mean better options IMO.
@sbjdorlo - Re: SDSU and Cal Grants - My family could definitely be the anomaly, but for all my children, when they received their Aztec acceptances, the big Cal Grant was not listed at all until the Cal Grants were officially awarded by the state in June, then their university accounts were updated to show the amount awarded. Most of the other colleges that accepted my kids did include a Cal Grant amount when they sent their financial packages in March (the amount listed was very close to what was eventually awarded), but SDSU didn’t do that with my kids.
@Fish125, that’s super interesting to know! Unfortunately, we didn’t know that at the time, so it came off the table. Well, to be honest, my son didn’t want to attend at all since it’s 10 minutes from our house. But wow, I think that’s not a good thing to leave it off when someone is dependent on it to attend. CSULB, Fullerton, SJSU, UCSD and UCI all listed the Cal Grant along with the Pell Grant right away. I found dealing with out of state privates to be much easier, to be honest.
Re. post #71 that @patsmom shared: very interesting!
I will say that my very high achieving URM son, even with it being our first time around and not knowing how they would accept homeschoolers, only applied to 10 schools, and withdrew from one of those. So in essence, he applied to 7 reaches and 2 safeties.
It was a painless process, but he was also laser focused on his major(s)- math and possibly a double math/physics major-so that make it easier to fine tune the list. For kids who don’t know what they want to major in, it might be harder.
And he only applied to the two Ivies that we visited and knew; he wasn’t interested in any of the others. These two, Penn and Princeton, were on the list because our Christian friends had recommended them; also, Princeton had strong math and physics, and Penn was super social and fun.
Three other schools were STEM schools-Mudd, Caltech (got on the list at the last minute cause the baseball coach was “recruting” my son, believe it or not; otherwise, my son would not have applied), and MIT.
Then just a couple of others for good f. aid: WUSTL and Vanderbilt, and the two safeties known for good aid, UTDallas and Pitt.
In the end, he was deciding between MIT, Mudd, Princeton and UTD (McDermott Scholars). He was admitted to all his schools.
So-very different list from my high achieving URM than so many that post here. But we were blissfully unaware of prestige of any school back in 2011. We didn’t even realize how popular schools like MIT were. Prestige is one thing my kids don’t really get into. I wish I didn’t have to deal with it in my line of work, but it is what it is.
Bottom line of this thread. There is no “right” number of college applications to submit. It depends on the family and student. My first son applied to 9. My second applied to 21 five years later. Things have gotten out of control, but it’s definitely not the fault of the kids! For second son, 16 apps might have been a better number, but we erred on the side of having a lot of safeties and matches, because all were sounding more and more competitive. Both sons ended up at one of their reaches, but those results were not predictable, especially when they were both rejected early on by their ED reach schools.
One and done for my kids - the state flagship 5 miles from home. Go Badgers!