Chance me / Match me: CA resident , Rising Senior [3.78 GPA (3.68/4.05/4.23 for UC), 1500 SAT (1530 super), <$300k total to degree, computer science/engineering or aerospace engineering]

I agree with @tsbna44 about there not needing to be a specific number of schools in each bucket. A school’s admission rate is a correlation of how popular a school is in comparison with how much space it has to accept students. There are excellent schools at all levels of selectivity and there is no requirement to have schools with low odds of acceptance on a list. The only category that I strongly urge applicants to have at least two schools in is the Extremely Likely category to ensure choice at the end of senior year.

In terms of how an applicant’s list is balanced, one thing I think is important to consider is the applicant’s mental and emotional makeup and how they handle rejection. For some people, rejections are like a fuel that they use to be even more awesome wherever they land. For individuals like that, a reach-heavy list can make sense. For most people, however, rejections are a mental and emotional blow. I find that most people do better with more acceptances than rejections. So for a kid that tends to handle rejection more like “most” people, I would be likely to have a list with more toss-up, likely, and extremely likely schools than lower and low probability schools. But again, this is very individual-dependent and not a one-size-fits-all situation.

Additionally, I believe that a school should only be on a student’s application list if they are happy to enroll and attend for four years and there is a path to affordability. So I would not fill up a list with tons of extremely likely or likely admits if a student would not be happy to attend there come spring of their senior year.

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Yes this is a particular issue in CA where adding more UCs or CSUs to those you’ve already applied to is simply a matter of checking a box and paying the fee. It’s common to be overloaded with admits to safeties that you really don’t want to attend (UCM, CPP, etc).

The question then is whether to visit a few safeties in advance to find ones you are actually interested in so you can cut down your list. Or just pay the fee and hopefully not worry about it because you are admitted to some better schools. I would suggest at least thinking about whether you’d take a WUE/OOS auto-admit school over UCM etc (which you probably don’t need to list anyway if you are local or statewide eligible and applying to other UCs). You can apply early and get your admission to say ASU or U of AZ before you even submit to the UCs in November, and that is often a big relief for many people, given how long the UCs make you wait.

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I’d call it a likely (probably on the lower end of likely, but still a likely). Out east, some other schools your kid might want to consider are Clarkson or Rochester Institute of Technology (both extremely likely) or Stevens Institute of Technology (toss-up). You’ve already got WPI on your list. And speaking of MA, Wentworth in Boston would be another extremely likely admit.