<p>I know a girl who’s applying to 17 schools, and most people at my high school are applying to about 8-9 schools (including me).</p>
<p>I was going to apply to 11 schools, but I cut it to 9 when I realized that I don’t like Stanford or UT Austin. Half my schools are insane reaches, and thinking back on it, I really should have applied to more safeties. I would be screwed if it weren’t for Chicago. I applied to MIT, Chicago, Emory, Cornell, Duke, William and Mary, Harvard, Princeton, and CU-Boulder. That’s about ~6 reaches… which is quite disturbing looking back.</p>
<p>The people at my school are applying to more and more reach schools because our counseling office encourages it. They know that the state school is really good, so they have no problem telling people to aim high, and depend on state U if/when they don’t get in. I wish they counseled us to have a more balanced list. </p>
<p>eh, what can you do?</p>