“How Many Colleges Should I Apply To?”
Last Updated on June 20, 2023 by Jill Schwitzgebel
The question in the title is not one I can actually answer for any student – without knowing a lot more about that student’s goals. There is not a “one size fits all” answer to, “How many colleges should I apply to?” The perfect number could be as few as one and as many as ten.
The good news it that with the two largest application platforms, the Common App and the Coalition App, it can be almost as easy to apply to ten colleges as it is to apply to one.
The Basics
The average number of colleges that high school students apply to has been increasing. According to the Higher Education Research Institute’s The American Freshmen report series, 36 percent of first-time freshmen applied to seven or more colleges during the Fall 2017 admission cycle. It has gone up since then. Eighty percent of students apply to at least three. And according to the US Department of Education, the national average college acceptance rate for first-time freshmen was 66.7 percent. That number has been slowly increasing.
I recommend that teens identify colleges for their application list that fall into three categories:
- Safety colleges – This is a school where a student would be happy to attend, and exceeds the admissions standards for the school. They are unlikely to be rejected.
- Match/Target colleges – This is a school where the student meets admissions standards and has a reasonable expectation that they are competitive for admission.
- Reach colleges – Here, a student knows that their qualifications might be slightly lower than the accepted average or that the school has a very low acceptance rate, making admission less certain.
For more detail on those three categories, please see: Safeties, Matches and Reaches
So, from that list, you can see that a student could technically just apply to one college, if the student likes the school and easily exceeds the minimum admission standards. But there is more to consider.
The Details
Financial Considerations
If a student needs financial aid or is hoping for academic merit aid to make college affordable, that’s when things get more complicated. Just because a student has a so-called safety school for admission does not mean that it will necessarily be affordable. So, that might mean that a student needs two types of safety schools – a financial and an admissions safety.
And the same applies for the other categories as well. Often merit aid is predictable and/or guaranteed with a school that a student considers to be a safety. But, that usually becomes much less predictable at the match and reach colleges on the list. If a student has any Ivy league schools on their reach list, the cost might be more transparent…but then, admission is far from guaranteed.
Academic Considerations
Even a college that may appear to be a perfect match academically, will occasionally surprise an applicant with a rejection, maybe due to a high volume of applications that year or a certain student profile they are trying to achieve. Ideally, an applicant will be accepted to all of their match/target schools, but there are those occasional surprises. That’s why I recommend applying to more than one in that category.
And then there are the reach colleges, which bring all kinds of uncertainty into the process. For many teens, these are the “dream” colleges. And there is nothing wrong with applying to one of these, as long as families are realistic about the potential for rejection. It just makes an acceptance that much sweeter!
The difficult thing for very academically strong students is that some universal reach colleges (those that are among the top 20 or 30 most selective colleges in the country), actually look like target/match schools for them academically. However, the volume of applications these colleges receive means that they are not a probable school for anyone. Their acceptance rates are low, even for students who fit their academic profile. Therefore, if a student is a “match” for one of these colleges, they need to apply to several to increase their chance of being accepted to one.
But Really, How Many?
There really is no magic number – it’s not “one size fits all.” Every family has different priorities and every student has different goals.
But here are a few more factors that may affect how many applications that students send:
- If a student has a college that they love and can afford, then they might decide to apply Early Decision to that college. If they are accepted, they could be one and done!
- Applying to many colleges can be expensive, with application fees sometimes as much as $75. That may limit how many applications students send.
- How certain is the teen about their major or their area of interest? If there is still a lot of uncertainty or their interests vary widely, sending more applications rather than fewer makes sense.
- Has the student thoroughly researched colleges and had a chance to visit several of them? If not, it’s probably a good idea to err on the side of applying to more schools rather than fewer. That way, they will have choices in the spring, when they are likely to be more certain about what they want.
I recommend at least five applications- at least one to two financial and admissions safety colleges, two to three target colleges, and a reach college. When financial aid or acceptance is uncertain, I think seven makes sense. And personally, I think anything over ten is too many and students should instead consider their priorities in a college to try to better focus their list.
Ultimately, when college decision day rolls around in the spring, I just want students to have a college to attend where they feel they’ll be happy, and that their family feels is affordable. Investing the time to self-reflect and then research colleges prior to application time will ensure that happens.
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