The modal number of college applications matriculants submit is one.
The idea of a “dream school” is marketing silliness.
2 Likes
Did anyone have the ACT yesterday? DS took it for the second and hopefully last time. The first time was bad planning and we’d gone to a concert the night before. The digital SAT kicked his butt and he scored 90 points less. He’s applying to service academies or I would say he was done. They say take it as many times as you possibly can and they super score.
This reply made me chuckle! I’m sure you didn’t mean it, but it came across as a bit … condescending? Or are you joshing around?
My sixteen-year-old articulates it as a “dream school” because that’s the term teenagers use – based on things like “my friend loves her sorority there” and “gee, I want to study international relations in this really slick building” and “ooooh, I can study abroad in Venice!” or “I need to move to Southern California because it’s warm there” or whatever. (Or sometimes, “My favorite color is Carolina blue.”) I’ve never heard or seen the term in actual marketing materials or actual presentations from actual colleges/universities.
Anyhoo, I’ve read that the average high school senior applies to between eight and twelve schools. What does this have to do with a teenager having a dream? Not much.
1 Like
My kid is not excited to leave the friends she’s had since K and home, so if she is excited by a “dream school,” which has a 50% acceptance rate, then I’ll take it. Hopefully, it helps acclimate her a bit to the eventual future.
I know some kids are more mature than my kid, but conceptually, it isn’t easy to imagine yourself no longer at home day in and day out. Having an “ideal” that helps bridge that gap may be a really helpful to for them to place/picture themselves somewhere different from where they’ve always been, no?
3 Likes
My son also seems ambivalent about going away to college. I don’t think he can imagine being away from home. The only topic that excites him is that he can study what he wants to study in college (math) and is hopeful to never take another history class again. (Although I’ve told him about how the core curriculum works at most schools!)
As of now he has one school on his list (Rose-Hulman) and doesn’t seem interested in discussing any other schools. I would be thrilled for him to be a Rosie, but I know weird things can happen in admissions and he may also change his mind about what he wants a year from now. I’m not sure how to help him add some more, but we’ll work on it this summer.
2 Likes
The idea of a “dream school” is dangerous when the chosen school isn’t a good fit financially, or it’s highly rejective.
My ‘25 hasn’t found a school they’re head over heels for. They’re dead-set against full price private school so that knocks out all the schools that meet-need and don’t offer merit.
3 Likes
@dfbdfb is correct. Per data straight from the Common App, the most common number of schools kids apply to is: 1. By a lot. And then 2. And then 3. And so on all the way to 19, after which there’s a little blip up to 20.
Note too that the data cited excludes kids who only apply ED. Obviously if they were included that would make the skew even greater.
3 Likes
I had no idea!
Most ED kids apply EA other places as well so that might not skew it that much. Mine applied to five - 4 EA and one ED (and had one more to submit RD had it been needed) and I think most others we knew were similar. So not a huge number but not one either. (Obviously she pulled the others after she got in ED and declined the one offer she got but I think they still count as apps.).
Source?
1 Like
Completely anecdotal 
. Do you have a source/data that suggests that most only apply to the one?
The Common App PDF I posted explicitly states:
“Excludes applicants applying solely via early decision plans.”
Emphasis mine. Kids applying in a manner other than “solely via ED,” which would include kids applying EA alongside ED, are included in the chart in the PDF.
I guess that suggests I should read thoroughly before answering .
Heh all good. It may very well also be the case that most ED applicants also send in some EAs.
My son took it back in February. He originally wanted to punt it to yesterday’s opportunity, but when I pointed out that he was getting his wisdom teeth out 2 days before that, he argued for a minute… and then thought better of it. He will take the SAT at school on Tuesday though. He is not happy about the move to digital, so we’ll see… hopefully it doesn’t kick his butt as well!
1 Like
Here is a graphic from the Common App, “Reports and Insights,” released in January.
It shows the growth in average number of “Applications Per Applicant” for first-year students (freshmen) applying between 2019 and 2023.
In 2019, the average applications per applicant using the Common App. was 4.77.
And as of Nov. 1, 2023 — for this cycle – the average number of applications per applicant was 5.06.
I’m not good at math … tho I went to an Ivy League school myself, I wasn’t paying enough attention, clearly … [insert “liberal arts” joke here] … so maybe there’s something else being talked about here? Like some mathematical mean of some other more arcane sort? … and I’ve missed the point?
But this is a chart straight from the horse’s mouth showing that in this most recent cycle, kids using the Common App applied to an average of five schools. Not one. No? What am I misreading?
Here’s the report as PDF from the Common App:
Yup, this is the difference between mean, median, and mode.
Mean = “average” in the common parlance. Add up all the data, and divide by the number of data points. Which is what your graph is.
Mode = “the most common data point”. So, it’s where the bulk of the data is. And, according to the source that was linked, it shows a clear graph where 183,373 kids applied to 1 school, while 10,318 kids applied to 19 schools. Only 107,461 kids applied to 5 schools.
2 Likes
Right!
So, according to the Common App – using their own parlance, and to quote – , there were " 5.06 applications per applicant’ this year. On average.
(I get it that more, as a total number, applied to just one school than the total number that applied to five schools; and, also, that there were kids who applied to more than five schools, dragging the average up… but to put it simply, “most kids” didn’t apply to just one school.
The reason the concepts exist is because they say different things about the data. You can say that on average there were 5.06 applications per applicant. But, I would point out that in actuality there were 0 applicants who sent 5.07 applications.
And more kids applied to 1 school than kids that applied to 2 schools. More kids applied to 1 school than all the kids that applied to 12-20 schools put together. More kids applied to 1 school than all the kids that applied to 9-11 schools put together.
Data is fun to play with and think about. And you can say a lot of true things about it. And they are all “right” or “correct”.
The mode of the data is still 1.
4 Likes
I get it!
And I still think. a bigger takeaway from these numbers is that many more kids applied to MORE THAN one school via Common App than applied to just one school… 
And that’s just the Common App, and doesn’t take into account state-specific application systems (like apparently some state-university systems), or the service academies (West Point, US Naval Academy, etc) that don’t take the Common App, or places like Georgetown that go their own way.
So if someone were able to come up with the average number of colleges a kid applies to via all the avenues – common app, state schools, service academies, whathaveyou – the average is probably closer to six per applicant.