i get what you are saying, but practically and anecdotally, i have seen students get rejected from their focused/curated "best fit" schools (admittedly reaches), but randomly/unexpectedly get admitted to a reach school they weren't really focused on. they ended up going and ended up very happy. to me, it suggests that the students are adaptable and can adjust to the "unexpected" school even though they didn't necessarily think it was the BEST fit at the time of application. they ended up getting the "prestige" of the reach and the school offered their career path/major. this is what scares me to have too small of a list.

Every university with an acceptance rate of less than 15% is essentially a reach for most students applying, regardless of how good their credentials are. So devoting too much time to a few universities is a bad strategy given that you have no idea what the universities are really basing their decisions on. The universites heavily downplay the SAT importance. Everyone has perfect grades. Everyone has recommendations, which are inherently subjective and biased. Everyone is coming with a basket of AP/IB/DE. Who knows how much of any essay is a student's own words vs the words of someone else. The complete uncertainty/randomness/opacity of admissions makes the shotgun approach the most strategic. Frustrating!

Agreed. My daughter applied to just 8 universities and had success with all of them. She gets the benefit of selecting and has done so. 6-8 is just fine assuming the student is realistic in his or her selections. She had safety, possible and reaches and got into 7 and waitlisted on 1. She's headed to UCSD and we couldn't be happier for her.

For regular/typical majors you are right. Although I think 8-10 is ideal. 3 safeties, 3 targets and 3-4 reaches. One of my kids applied to 10 schools - perfect number. She got into all of them and chose based on scholarships and other things. She had no reaches because of cost, but she had a mix of safeties and targets. My other child applied to 26 schools because she applied for a musical theatre major - far more selective than even Ivy League schools. She had 5 non musical theatre schools and 20 for her major - 15 ended up turning into auditions. She ended up with 7 offers for musical theatre and acting so it worked out really well. And she had a few non theatre options too in case theatre didn’t work out. Perfect number for that situation too.

Absolutely agree with keeping the college list narrow by doing thorough research.

One former college admission officer said, the admission decision process was so random and subjective based on the officer's mood and bias, in a couple of minutes time frame. It's lousy and unfair!

I don't know how I stumbled on this video because I am WELL past the college application process and I don't have a child who will be doing so in the future. Nonetheless, this is rather fascinating to watch. For reference of how different this process seems to be today from what I experienced, I only applied to 1 university: the only one in my state that offered an accredited program in my chosen field. I didn't have a safety school and I was fortunate to be admitted after my application and interview. I was naive at the time since my parents didn't go to college and they weren't terribly helpful in the process. I can't even imagine the stress today of even getting accepted to the university where I studied.

Things are insane right now. I think colleges need to go back to requiring tests. Anecdotal evidence: 3 kids I know- 1 went 0 for 10; one went 1 for 6; one went 3 for 20. The ONLY one with options applied to 20 colleges. Makes me scared to narrow my kid’s list to less than 20. Even URI had nearly 36,000 applications - 4 times more than previous years. It’s literally a crap shoot now

21.23 I don't think it's because they don't want to. It's exhausting. My son goes to a rigorous school. As a freshman he is on 3 committees that require his time and additional research, is running for advanced positions in 2 more and another in model un, is in band, takes extra instrument lessons, and still has to find time to do his homework. The top schools require so much more than just top academics that kids now are burning themselves out just trying to do this, let alone do the research on universities

To answer your question, yes, you are wrong to recommend only 6 applications! You are crazy! I can see that you are out of touch with the college application process. How can you be a coach? College decisions are like the lottery. It's a number game. The more you apply, the more chances you have to land in a good college. I am a mother of a senior student who just went through the process. He applied to 30 colleges (all private, tier 20, and ivys) with a 5.18 GPA, 12 AP classes, member of 7 honor societies, and a violinist since 6 years old. With 1st place awards on a few international violin competitions, selected to 4 consecutive Florida All State Orchestra, fencing since he was 10, and sailing team, student ambassador, almost 300 volunteer hrs. And many more awards, Etc. He was accepted to 6 schools and was waitlisted in 5 schools. On the ones accepted, he got the merit Presidential scholarships and has two full rides. But he wouldn't have had that chance if he had only applied to 6 like you recommend. My advice for other students is not to follow your advice and apply to as many as possible.