How Strong - Music EC

wjb
Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:41:39 +0000

Re high schools that limit the number of colleges to which students can apply:

I’ve always felt that the majority of kids should be able to limit their college lists to 10-12 by researching their choices carefully, but I’ve also felt that it was not the high school’s place to impose restrictions on the number of applications students can file. But I recently had an eye-opening conversation with a college counselor from a private school where students targeting highly selective colleges had begun filing many, many applications, sometimes upwards of 20. To put the brakes on trophy hunting and mindlessly filing applications at every university in the US News Top 20 + AWS, his school began limiting applications to ten, and they also began announcing the limitation in the high school profile. Because colleges know that the high school limits the maximum number of schools to which students can apply, they also know that applicants from that high school are reasonably serious about their college.

I had never looked at the issue from the colleges’ perspective. This counselor also said that families generally accept the limitation gracefully, knowing that it gives their kids’ applications credibility with admissions offices.