Hello,
We have 7 schools on my junior’s list so far. Two safeties, four matches (but still competitive), two reaches. Full pay but some merit $ would be helpful for the smaller liberal arts colleges on the list. Should we add more matches to increase chances of having more options with merit? How many schools are kids applying to these days? I only applied to two back in the olden days!
Thanks
It depends how much you want merit, usually get the most from safeties, not matches, where stats are at the very top of students they accept.
Last I knew, the single most popular number of applications was still just one, and most people were doing 5 or less. The kids who have really long lists tend to have one or more specific factors leading to that.
My two cents is for just admissions purposes, that list as described seems fine. If you are chasing merit, though . . . .
Big merit is most likely when a college is trying to woo an applicant it believes is very likely to have other very competitive offers, such that merit may be necessary to have a fair chance to land them. Often then the best bets for big merit are colleges where admissions alone would be likely, perhaps likely enough to count as a type of “safety”. Often this is indicated in part by the applicant having numbers that would put them into the reported top 25ths for that college, perhaps significantly above.
So if chasing merit, I would not necessarily load up on a lot more “matches”, if that means colleges where the applicant is more in the middle of their expected range of enrolled students. I would try to find more of what I would call Likelies, but ones that were particularly good fits.
If you do a full Chance Me/Match Me, people here can generate leads to check out which might fit that description, the final decision of course being up to the applicant.
Don’t look at merit per se.
Have a budget. How much are you willing to spend ?
Then you need a list to achieve it. Reaches, targets and safeties are irrelevant.
You need a list that includes at least one assured to meet your cost that you know you’ll get in. And others that can hit.
For some, it may be 1-2 schools. For some, they might apply to 20.
It depends on your cost expectation and how you are building to get there.
Merit is the wrong thing to base on. Some schools are cheaper full pay than others with merit.
So start with a desired budget and build from there.
Good luck.
Others have already talked about how the amount of merit aid received is often commensurate with how strong a student is in comparison with the applicant pool to the college. That is true.
That said, however, there are some schools that are “buyers” and tend to be very generous in doling out merit aid to anyone who is admitted, moreso because they have very high sticker prices and find that families are more enthusiastic about receiving a scholarship to have a lower net price than if the school just had a lower sticker price to begin with.
Jeff Selingo has a list of colleges that are “Buyers” (bigger merit likely) and “Sellers” (less merit likely) that can be helpful here. This aggregator also shares the percentage of students without need receiving merit aid and the average amount of merit for a large number of colleges:
https://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/dataverse/merit-aid
(Hmm, for some reason the link doesn’t want to work for some folks. If it doesn’t, just do a search for Dataverse Merit Aid and it should pull up.)
And if the college is not listed there (or one otherwise wants to confirm the data, always a good idea), one can go to the college’s Common Data Set. Look at section H2, lines N-Q. If your family would not qualify for need-based aid at that school, focus on lines N & O. If your family would qualify for need-based aid, focus on lines P & Q.
So if the schools on your kid’s current list are likely to give your son enough merit aid to make you happy, then there’s no particular need to add more schools. Or if they are not, your family can be more strategic about which schools to add, regardless of whether they are a match/likely/safety.
Additionally, in case you are not aware, many schools will ask for a student’s academic stats in the Net Price Calculator. If a school does so, they will likely include the minimum amount of merid aid that a family might expect at the school.
Also, verify that your family really would be full pay. If your kid’s looking at liberal arts colleges, try the NPCs at Amherst or WIlliams. If you’re full pay at one of them, then you’ll be full pay at pretty much any liberal arts college. But some schools are very financially generous, even to families that have significant incomes.
I think less than 10 is ideal. We were not that disciplined tbh.
I don’t think this is the case. The national average is around 6 and is rising every cycle.
The ~6.5 number seems to be from The Common Application, which does not cover all colleges, and the colleges it does cover are probably on the more selective side.
Also, it is possible for the mode to be 1 while the mean is a significantly higher number.
Do they have one safety they would be happy to attend? That’s the most important number.
Each situation is different but more than 10 seemed like overkill and muddied the waters trying to to whittle down acceptances. Then there’s more essays and visits.
It might help if we knew their interests and the list of schools.
I know a bunch of “one and done’s”.
Sometimes the kid is Val, high scores, and the top choice is the state flagship where the kid is an auto-admit. They use rolling admissions; kid applies in October, gets in three weeks later.
Sometimes it’s via binding ED. Kid gets in- the rest of senior year is going to debate championships and playing varsity softball for the last time.
Sometimes the ONLY affordable option is going to be a directional state U, kid applies and gets in, there you go.
The national average has a lot of the “I applied to 20 schools because I needed five safeties and ten reaches and then threw in a few matches because my guidance counselor said I have to”….
It seems to me the number of schools to apply to depends largely on how strong your student is. For example, if your student is very strong (e.g., 1540+, top 3% of senior class, pointy EC’s, compelling recommendation letters), then a wise strategy is to apply to relatively more of the wealthy but super-reachy private schools, along with a meaningful number just below that first tier.
The super-reaches are hard to predict at an individual school level because they all look for somewhat different things (“institutional priorities”), but applying to many of them helps because it increases your odds in getting into at least ONE super-reach. And their wealth means that they can cover your family’s financial need, if any, which frequently makes them cheaper than attending your state university.
Then, the ones in the next tier (for example, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, USC, Rice) are also worth applying to because they hope to attract the student profile your kid represents (knowing that such kids tend to attend the super-reaches), and will offer generous merit aid to entice that kind of profile to enroll at their school.
This is not correct. The admissions odds if you apply to 10 8% admissions rate schools do not magically become 80%. And once the student reaches burnout (which happens- how many “why us” essays can a kid write at a compelling level?) the odds of admissions actually goes down. We see kids posting in a panic in January ‘I mistakenly uploaded my JHU essay to U Penn, will they notice?” Yes, they will likely notice once you describe your passion for Baltimore’s Harbor district which is in Maryland, not Pennsylvania.
Both our kids applied to 3.
One was their reach they applied ED (first choice). One was our flagship state school - auto admit. For the 3rd school, D24 applied to an OOS public and D26 applied to a target school that didnt require a supplemental essay.
Had our kids not been accepted ED, they probably wouldve applied to 5 more reach schools with the flagship being their safety.
If you’re looking for merit, I’d recommend casting a wide net. D26 applied to 16. 2 safeties, 6 targets, 8 reaches. Her financial aid offers differed wildly, even among schools ranked exactly the same, so we were glad she applied to so many. Looking back, she could’ve eliminated a couple of the reaches that she wasn’t crazy about, but admissions are unpredictable. Honestly, many of the supplemental essays overlap and can be recycled, so it’s doable to apply to 12+ schools if your kid starts early. Yes, they’ll need to dedicate time to interviews, online sessions, etc but it can be done. Our final price tags ranged everywhere from $8k-$52k, so lots of variation. These were all LACs.
It really depends on budget and list composition.
If someone is full pay, and is applying to only Hail Mary full rides - then they need many or are bound to fail.
If the budget is $40k and they are applying only to schools that could hit but aren’t assured to, then they need more.
If they have at least one that is an assured in that will hit the budget, then the # can be what they want.
There’s no exact answer - it depends on how someone plans to meet their goal. Smart list building can be a minimum of one and then expand to however many you want.
Some apply to more simply because it’s a five minute exercise - so sometimes #s are inflated not with stress, but with ease.
Good luck
Our original college list had around 18. More research and clarifying narrowed that to around 9. We visited 5 over spring break, and that knocked two out. So my kiddo’s current list to apply to is at 3. There are 4 others still on the under consideration list and we will visit 2 of those (the other two will probably be removed unless things change). So short answer is 3-5 depending on how the next visits go. 4 of them are “likely” schools and 1 is a “match” school.
We had 6, but weren’t chasing merit. Still got it at 3 of them, 2 of which were a surprise - lesson here: a good SAT score can make up for a middling GPA, so i don’t know if I missed stats, but it’s worth aiming at a high SAT/ACT. You can get merit going TO of course, but if you can increase your odds, do so.
But our list was short. Almost everyone we know applied to over 10 - either chasing merit or prestige. Our list breakdown was similar to yours but I agree with others that you want more safeties/likelies if you’re chasing merit.
My kid is applying to 15 schools, including 4 UC’s, which use a single application. He probably doesn’t need to apply to five safeties, but we don’t know how much merit he will receive and if he will still like the schools after we visit them. He will start working on essays over the summer, and his list seems manageable.
Kid 1 applied to 16. She was chasing a specific competitive EC and cast a wide net to try to achieve it because she had to get accepted to the school and the team.
Kid 2 only wanted to apply to 2 safeties. I made her apply to more and different types of schools to keep options open. Ended up applying to 10 which was definitely overkill and kind of driven by me, sorry to admit. Decided just tonight to go to one of the two safeties she always said she wanted from the beginning. Lots of effort - ha. At least some of the application fees from some of the schools were waived …
Wouldn’t you only need one safety that is assured for both admission and affordability?
The reason merit seekers may need more applications is because there is less visibility into the likelihood and amount of non-automatic merit scholarships, so they are best listed as reaches (even if the college may be likely or safety).
