<p>The number of schools you should apply to really depends largely upon your field of interest. Sure, in certain humanities (for instance) you may only need to apply to 5-7 schools as long as you choose well, in other fields (for example, clinical psychology) 12-15 is quite common (12-15 is the minimum recommended, 15-20 is also an often cited range for the field). I would guess I am a strong candidate and I applied to 9 schools and have so far received 3 interview invites, 1 alternate/deferred invite, and am waiting on 3 schools that have yet to send out any invites (I have 2 years formal research experience with several publications and 2 yrs professional experience w/ a clinical population and 3 years with a subclinical population all directly related to my research and applied area as well as 2 1/2 yrs TAing, great letters of rec, 90+% GPA, GRE and Subject GRE percentiles and a second BA directly related to my area of interest). Assuming that I receive 1 more invite out of the remaining 3, that would give me 4 interviews. Of interviewing schools, most accept 20-40% of their interviewees, so assuming this 1/3 average, out of 9 schools, I will likely get 1-2 actual offers. With that in mind, I would suggest that it really depends upon the field. I know of people in Clinical Psych applying for as many as 20-30 schools they claim were well-chosen and not receiving a single interview! …Of course, my response to those people would be a simple question as to whether they actually considered their match with a POI there instead of looking only at geography, etc.</p>