Finalizing Your College List

Rising seniors, by around this time, you should have a fairly decent sense of your college list (especially if you are targeting those October/November early deadlines.) If you have the workings of a list in front of you and you’re unsure of whether it is “final”, here are a few questions to run through to “sanity-check” your list! 

Is your list well-balanced?

“Balance” can be a tricky thing to divine, especially if you don’t have a good sense of a school’s admissions trends and priorities. But take a look at your profile (i.e. GPA, test scores, academic rigor, extracurricular involvement, etc) and compare it as best you can to a “typical” admit. Do your stats look pretty in line with what the school is expecting? You can probably call that a target. Are you falling even a little short? Probably a reach. Do your stats exceed those of a typical admit? Well, while nothing is “likely” in this business, you probably have a decent shot at these schools. Now, look at your list overall. Do you have mostly target and/or likely schools with maybe a few reaches mixed in? Fantastic, that’s a well-balanced list! Is it maybe a little too top-heavy? You might consider whittling down those reaches and adding more targets and likelies. Pro tip: at schools where your stats exceed the typical admit, they are going to be more likely to offer you scholarship money to incentivize you to attend!

Would you be excited about attending all of the schools on your list?

This might sound obvious, but I see a lot of students want to have more likely options on their list “just in case” even if those options are schools they’d never attend. That makes zero sense! Why put yourself through the work (and application fees) of applying if you’d never actually go there? If you absolutely would never attend a single school on your list, drop it! If you’re worried you don’t then have enough likely options, then maybe you need to go back to the drawing board and research some more schools. The truth is, most schools in this country admit most students who apply, so you might need to think outside the box a little bit!

Are you applying to a realistic number of schools? 

With a few exceptions, for most students there is very little reason to apply to more than 12 or 13 schools (I advise students to aim for 8-12), if you have a well-researched and well-balanced list. Applying to more schools (especially if they are highly rejective!) does not actually increase your chances of getting into one of them. Think of it this way: applying to 10 highly rejective schools wouldn’t be like buying 10 tickets to win the same lottery prize, it is actually more like buying tickets to 10 different lotteries! And also consider that most schools charge an application fee (anywhere from $50-$90 or so) making applying to more schools financially burdensome. It’s always going to be a better bet to apply to fewer schools where you are a good fit.    

Do you have a sense of how much work is required to complete all of the applications?

Most schools have rolled out their applications/essays for the 2025-26 application season (and others are slowly rolling out in the next few weeks.) Do you have a sense of what is going to be required of you to complete all of the applications for the schools on your list (especially if your list is on the longer, more competitive side)? I’ve seen reality set in for students when they realize that, with balancing everything else including a rigorous senior year courseload, maybe completing  30-40 essays in the next couple months is not a reasonable goal. Honestly, I’ve had students drop schools off their lists for worse reasons than it was too much work to apply!

Do you know what these schools are looking for/require in the admissions process?

Now that you’ve looked into what essays are required for each school, do you feel like you have a good enough sense of each school’s mission that your answers would align well with the sort of student they are looking to attract? When they ask you why you want to go there, can you answer in a way that goes beyond the skin-deep (school size, location, sports, etc)? Also, look into what other materials need to be sent in addition to your application. Find out how many recommendations they require/allow, if you need to send official score reports of your SAT/ACT (or if you can apply test optional, if desired), etc.  

Hopefully after running through all of these “checks”, you feel confident about your list! If so, time to start cracking on the Common App and all of those supplemental essays. If not, it’s not too late to assess (or re-assess) your priorities, keep researching schools, and try to get on some campus tours!