How many colleges should you apply to?

AA former Stanford admissions officer advises families to rethink both the size of a college list and the order in which it is built, two choices most families make by default. The usual list grows from the top down: a family starts with the famous names, adds a few that sound similar, and fills in the bottom at the last minute with whatever seems safe.

The result is often a list of twenty schools, most of which admit a small fraction of applicants, and a senior fall spent writing supplements for places the student has barely thought about. The officer's alternative changes the length of the list, the order of the work and, most of all, how the spring feels when decisions arrive.