My kid (SAT low 1500’s, 3.8 UW, private school, not STEM) applied to 11. List was pretty evenly balanced amongst likelies, targets and reaches. Only 1 T-10 in the list. It worked out well for them.

The list has 14 total. 1 ED, 10 EA. DC will add 3 more in RD if ED doesn’t work out.

19 on list. Will get it down to no more than 12. Feeling a bit of pressure to ED - but has no clear first choice. High stats, solid ECs, and the type of kid who would be happy at any of the current 19 on the list.

I think 5-6 right now but we need to start looking and making a list. Will do around 10-15 minimum.

Try to calculate the aggregated probability if you want to land on at least one reach.

Probably want an aggregated probability greater than 60% to be sure for landing a reach. Based on that, you can figure out how many reaches you should have. Assuming all high stats.

Did you kid edit list based on any recent test results (Aug and Sept SAT and ACT for example)?

Whittled down to 13 w/4 schools requiring supplementals

My kid has 11 on his list. He has 4 in so far with one acceptance. But this was at a school that he would rather not go to. Just too far away. But we (his parents) wanted him to get an early acceptance. Two more will go in this week. Those would have been sooner but apparently EA for these schools is rolling admissions. Lastly, he has 3 liberal arts colleges that he has shown an interest in, but we feel he is now leaning towards a bigger school.

Mine applied to 15. One was a super reach, 4 were reaches (2 because it's really that tough and 2 which were really lottery), some targets and some safeties.

Safeties were the hardest for my DC to select b/c they really didn't want to go to any of them. I think the problem we ran into is that DC chose safeties based upon which schools they were backing up. For example, Indiana was a backup to Wisconsin, but Wisconsin was a backup to Michigan. DC didn't really care about Indiana and various factors changed between application time and selection time. We were given lots of warnings, so DC added more schools, but Indiana, in this example, wasn't necessary. I don't think all safeties had extra essays.

DC was high stats and was aiming for T25 schools, so they had to apply to more schools. If DC was looking at schools with higher acceptance rates, I think a lower number would have been fine. It's hard to look at it objectively, though, on this side since I have seen how it all played out.

I think 12 or 13? But DD is chasing merit.

First kid (2022) did 9 schools, Second kid (2024) did ED which worked out, third kid (2026) is doing about 10-12.

First kid who was aiming for a super-reach school had 5 on list, EA worked out for her so was one and done. Second kid applied to all 6 New England state school flagships and that was it. Fewer than the norm these days, but honestly in both cases I was grateful.

My kid’s limited them to 10.

Anonymous wrote:DC1 had 16, all of the with multiples supplemental essays and interviews. Too much work. Got into 13. DC2 also 16 but some have no supplementals and less interviews.

My First did exactly what yours did—so much work.

My second isn’t going as many. It was a waste of time and $$$. We got scared by everyone else’s warnings that turned out not to be true.

^ obvs if he doesn’t get into ED in Dec - then he’ll do more.