My eight-year-old son is now eligible to play fall baseball, so I’ve been spending a good amount of time going to his games. Because the league includes players aged 8-12, there are a good number of parents I’ve never met before, and I find myself answering a lot of questions about college admissions. To my surprise, the most frequent one I’ve gotten is this: how many colleges should someone apply to? Parents are often shocked by my answer, because so much has changed since we applied to college.
Last year, around this time, I wrote a post about reach, target, and safety schools. Everything I wrote there is still pertinent (SAT word), and I highly suggest that if you haven’t read it, you do so at the end of this post. Spoiler alert: in the post, I suggested that most students should apply to at least nine schools. I’ll give the same caveat (SAT word) I gave then: part of this number assumes that application fees are not a problem for you and your family.
However, to an increasingly middle-aged person like me, nine sounds like a lot. After all, I only applied to four schools. My wife applied to two. Most of my friends didn’t venture over five. Part of this was the fact that the Common Application was still in its infancy when we were applying, and most schools still had their own required applications, which we physically mailed in. It was a lot more paperwork, and we didn’t like doing it, so we limited ourselves in ways that students who just need to click “submit” on the computer don’t.
But, the other reason is simply that competition, especially from international students, was not nearly as intense 20 years ago. For example, the acceptance rate at Yale University in 2000, the year I graduated from high school, was 16.2%. This past year, that rate was 6.3%, the lowest ever in the history of the school. That is almost a 10% decrease in 19 years! Some schools have seen even more drastic changes: Vanderbilt went from an almost 33% rate to 8% in just 12 years. The result is that students who might have been shoe-ins even ten years ago are facing a much more difficult task now, and have to apply to more schools than ever before to make sure they get in somewhere acceptable to them.
Thus, although parents my age or older seem to be shocked by this, an increasing number of students are now applying to at least 20 colleges a year. I’m sure it would be more if the Common Application allowed for more than 20 applications. Indeed, I’ve known students who have applied to more than 40, which I still consider ridiculous. But, while I might have questioned a student applying to 20 schools in the past, I don’t even think about it today, because admissions has become so much harder to predict and so much more competitive that top students, in particular, have a good reason to fear applying to fewer.
Does this mean that I think the average student needs to apply to 20 schools in order to get in somewhere? Absolutely not! But, it does mean that if you have only four schools on your list, as I did, I’m going to counsel you to find a few more. Among the most important parts of the college process is feeling, when it is over, that you had a choice to make, not that you were forced to go somewhere out of desperation.
My son, Robert. Photo Credit: Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe.
If you were to ask my baseball-obsessed son what he wants to do in life, he would say that he’d like to play in the Majors, preferably for the Yankees, but at least for anyone but the Red Sox. However, he would also add that, in case he gets injured and has career ending surgery, or gets drafted by Boston, he needs to go to college so that he can get a “real job,” (hopefully in engineering or math, according to him). In other words, even in second grade, he knows enough to understand that dreams don’t always work out, but you can still build a good life for yourself if you have options.
It is, for this reason, that the post I mentioned above (which is also shown below) is an important read. Students and families need to make sure that they have a solid list, both of dream schools and realistic ones, knowing that while they might love the dream school, they can still be happy - and get a good education - at the less competitive one. And, if you have questions about how to do that, remember that I’m just one email away.
Mr. K
Y O U M I G H T A L S O L I K E :
Learn more about these three different categories of colleges that you should aim to apply to and why they are so important.