How Many Colleges to Apply to

In recent years students have been applying to more colleges and universities than they have historically. This is often thought of as a sound strategy given how competitive admissions has become at certain colleges. However, this practice is compounding the competitiveness in college admissions.

If you apply to seven different schools, each of these schools will treat your application as a serious one. They have to spend time and effort reading and evaluating the application. We all know, however, that not all applications are serious applications. In other words, students apply to some schools as "safety" schools which, barring an unforeseen disaster, they have no intention of enrolling. The number of safety schools students are applying to has also been increasing. Many of these applications are in fact vacuous. They have no real intention behind them.

Practically, for schools you have no intention of enrolling at, your application is in fact contributing to the increased competitiveness. For every application that is genuine, there maybe as many as one application that is not genuine. But to admissions offices, it doesn't matter. Colleges only have so many offers of admission they can award based on the size of their freshman class. Thus, if you have two applications, and the admissions rate for a particular college is 50%, one of those two people won't be admitted. What happens if the person who is admitted is the person who has no intention of enrolling while the person who wanted to attend that college got a denial? The college just lost a potential member of their freshman class and someone's heart got broken.

When you play this scenario out on a large scale, you can begin to see how the rise in the number of applications submitted by single students is increasing competition. Imagine at the hypothetical college I mentioned above that instead of just two applications there were ten, and that only five of them were genuine. If the 50% acceptance rate holds, then five will be admitted and five denied. However, when more applications start pouring in, colleges have to adjust their acceptance rates to accommodate the increase. Instead of accepting 50%, the college could now accept 40%. In that case, four students will be admitted and six denied. This might be a great situation for the college's rankings in US News and World Report, but it is not a good one for serious applicants.

More to come...