College Advice Column

Building Your College List

A solid college list has between 10 and 14 schools, spread intentionally across three tiers. With fewer than 10 you do not have enough range to absorb admissions surprises, which are larger than most families expect. With more than 14, the applications themselves start to suffer. Every school on the list means another supplement, and every supplement is another chance to write something generic rather than something specific.

The goal is not to maximize the number of applications. The goal is to end up with two or three genuinely good options on April 1 of senior year: options you would be happy to attend, that your family can afford, and that match the student your child has actually become (not the one they imagined becoming in tenth grade).

The three tiers, explained

Common mistakes when building a list

The mistakes below are not theoretical. They come up on almost every list review we do.

• Prestige stacking. Eight Ivies plus Stanford, MIT, and UChicago is not a college list. It is a lottery ticket with a $600 postage cost. Admit rates at those schools are statistically indistinguishable from rejection, even for strong applicants. A list loaded up at the top is functionally a list with no match tier and no safety.
• Safety by name only. If a school’s admit rate is 18 percent, it is not a safety no matter what ranking it sits at. Look at the actual number. A common trap: treating a flagship state university as a safety when the honors college or the specific major has a 20 percent admit rate.
• Ignoring fit. Size, location, political culture, and academic culture matter more than ranking after your student enrolls. Visit every match and safety in person if at all possible. If visits are impossible, do a structured virtual tour and talk to two current students. "We can figure out fit after they get in" often means "we will try to talk them into attending the best-ranked acceptance regardless."
• Single-track majors. If your student is applying as a computer science or engineering major, check the CS/engineering admit rate specifically. At many schools it is 5 to 10 points below the overall admit rate, sometimes more. "Admitted to the university, undeclared" and "admitted to the CS school" are different things.
• Forgetting the student. Every year a parent asks us to review a list of 12 schools, and the student has never stepped foot on any of them or done more than skim their websites. At minimum, your student should be able to name two specific classes, professors, or programs at every match and reach school. If they cannot, the list is yours, not theirs.

A reasonable starting template

Most well-balanced lists look something like this:

• 1 ED or REA school (if one exists for your student): first choice, binding or restrictive
• 3 EA schools where the student likes the school and would happily attend
• 3 to 4 match schools for RD
• 2 to 3 safety schools (one of which is financially bulletproof)
• 1 or 2 reach schools your student genuinely loves and has specific reasons for

This keeps the list in the 10 to 14 range, ensures at least one application is submitted early (momentum matters), and forces the student to articulate specific reasons for each school before committing to write a supplement.

The Essay That Actually Works

Admissions officers read between 30 and 50 essays a day during peak season. After three weeks of that, the sixth essay about a tennis injury blurs into the seventh, which blurs into the twelfth about a grandparent’s cancer. What stands out is not the topic. Almost never the topic. What stands out is whether a specific person, with specific habits of mind and specific ways of noticing the world, comes through the page.

The most common mistake is to reach for a topic that sounds impressive rather than one that reveals genuine thought. Topics do not admit students. Voices admit students.

Three tests a draft needs to pass

1. The substitution test. Could another student from the same school paste their own name on this essay and have it still work? If yes, rewrite. A good Common App essay has at least three details that could only describe one specific family, one specific moment, or one specific person. Generic examples: "My parents immigrated and worked hard." Specific examples: "My dad measures out jasmine rice with a chipped plastic cup that came free with a bag of Sona Masoori in 2011. He has not used any other measuring cup since."
2. The "what did you learn" test. The essay should end with the student in a different place than they started. Even a small change counts: "I realized my dad was always going to be the way he is, and that was finally okay." No change means no story, and no story means an expository essay that could have been a LinkedIn bio.
3. The read-aloud test. Have the student read the essay out loud, to themselves, slowly. Every sentence that makes them stumble is a sentence that needs rewriting. The Common App essay should sound like the student on a good day: articulate, specific, a little funny if they are funny, a little serious if they are serious. It should not sound like an AI, a tutor, or a parent. When a reader can hear a parent’s voice in the essay, everything else in the application gets slightly less credible too.

Topics that usually do not work

None of these are off-limits, but they are hard to do well because they come up so often. If your student picks one, the essay needs to earn its place.

• The sports injury. Unless the injury genuinely reframed the student’s identity (not their athletic career), this reads as formula. "I tore my ACL and learned about resilience" is a sentence admissions officers could type from memory.
• The mission trip. It is very difficult to write this without sounding like a white-savior cliche. If the essay is really about the student volunteering to help "poor people," it will not work. If it is really about a specific conversation that shifted how the student understood their own privilege, that can work, but the bar is high.
• The generic immigrant-parents narrative. If this is authentic to your family, it can absolutely work. But it has to be told through one concrete detail that belongs only to your family: a specific meal, a specific argument, a specific phrase in a specific language. "My parents worked hard so I could succeed" is a sentence about every applicant’s parents, which means it is a sentence about nobody.
• Dead grandparent, divorce, depression, tragedy-of-the-month. These can work if the essay is truly about the student’s response to the event, not the event itself. If a reader finishes the essay knowing more about the grandparent than the student, the essay failed. Sad backstory is not a substitute for self-examination.

Topics that often do work

These are not rules; they are patterns that keep showing up in essays that land.

• An ordinary thing the student notices more closely than most people would. A collection. A routine. A small weekly ritual. These essays work because they force specificity.
• An intellectual obsession that the student can explain in accessible language. A math concept, a moment in history, a bug in a piece of software. The best version of this topic sounds like a student thinking out loud, not a student performing seriousness.
• A small conflict the student worked through with themselves. Not a dramatic external crisis, but a genuine change in how they understood something. The bar for "small" is very low: changing your mind about a song can anchor a great essay if the why is specific.

ED, EA, and RD: What to Pick

The three application rounds are not just different deadlines. They imply different levels of commitment, different admit rates, and different strategic trade-offs. Picking the right round for each school can meaningfully change where your student ends up in April.

The ED boost is real, but not free

Applying ED genuinely raises admission rates at most selective private schools. At some schools the ED pool has an admit rate that is 10 to 20 points higher than the RD pool. That is a big number. Three things worth knowing before your student uses it:

• The boost is biggest at "competitive but not extreme" schools. At the very top (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT), the gap between restricted early action and regular decision is partly driven by the pool, not by preference. Strong applicants self-select into the early round, which mechanically raises the early admit rate without much structural preference.
• ED schools generally meet full demonstrated need, but that is a calculated number. If "full need" according to the school’s formula is different from what your family can actually afford, ED becomes a bet that removes leverage. Without offers from comparable schools in hand, you cannot negotiate or compare packages.
• The financial-release clause exists, but is awkward. Students admitted ED can request release if the aid package makes attendance impossible. Schools usually honor these requests, but it is not a back door for "we changed our mind," and it can complicate the student’s relationship with that school permanently.

Practical rules of thumb

1. Apply EA everywhere that offers it, unless a restrictive variant at another school forbids it. Non-binding early decisions are almost always better than their RD counterparts. Even if the admit-rate gap is small, earning a decision before winter break is a significant reduction in stress for the rest of senior year.
2. ED to at most one school, only if your student would enroll on the spot and your family is prepared to pay whatever comes back.
3. Do not ED to a school purely because the admit rate doubles. Doubling a 6 percent admit rate is still 12 percent. If your student is not particularly competitive RD, they are probably not competitive ED either, and they will have given up the leverage of comparing offers.
4. RD is fine. The best fit school might not offer an early round, or your student might genuinely need first-semester senior grades on the transcript. Being all-RD is not a strategic mistake. Being all-reach is.

Test-Optional, Really?

Most colleges went test-optional during COVID, and many of them stayed that way. "Test-optional" does not mean tests do not matter. It means if your student submits, the scores count. If they do not submit, the absence will not be held against them. The real question is whether submitting helps the application on balance or weakens it.

The general rule

The 50th percentile is a starting rule, not an absolute. Move the bar up (toward the 60th or 70th) if your student’s other credentials are strong and there is no particular reason to submit. Move the bar down (toward the 40th) if the rest of the application could use reinforcement.

Situations where submitting helps more than the rule suggests

• STEM applicants. Competitive computer science, engineering, and physics programs still read Math scores carefully. A Math SAT below 700 (or Math ACT below 32) is a real headwind for those majors, even at schools that advertise test-optional admissions. If your student is applying for those fields and their Math score is in that range, they should still submit unless their other signals are exceptional.
• Merit aid. Many schools award merit scholarships with explicit score cutoffs (for example: "1450 SAT or higher, automatic $20,000 renewable"). These cutoffs only apply if scores are submitted. Families chasing merit aid should submit any score that plausibly qualifies, even if admission itself would not require it.
• Unfamiliar high school. If your student’s high school does not have a long admissions history at the target college, the admissions reader has limited context for what a 3.8 GPA from that school means. A good test score provides calibration. Submit.
• Public flagships. Many state university systems are not test-optional and never were. The University of California system is test-blind (it will not look at scores at all), but many others still require or strongly prefer scores. Verify each school individually rather than assuming.
• International applicants. For international students from schools that are less familiar to U.S. admissions offices, test scores often carry more weight than for domestic students. Err on the side of submitting.

Situations where staying hidden is the stronger play

• The school is genuinely test-optional (not hiding a "strongly preferred") and your scores are below the 25th percentile. Submitting in that case guarantees the reader sees a weakness rather than maybe seeing one.
• Your student’s GPA, rigor, essays, and recommendations are objectively stronger than the test scores suggest. Do not volunteer weakness when the rest of the file already carries the case.
• Your student is a recruited athlete, legacy, or development case where other signals dominate the reading. (That is how the system works; whether you love it or not, the file reads differently.)

A note on superscoring

Many schools superscore the SAT or ACT, meaning they combine the best section from any attempt. For those schools, sending every attempt is the right default: the school will do the arithmetic in your student’s favor. A few schools take "highest sitting only," in which case the student should send only the best composite. Each school’s testing policy page states this explicitly.

Financial Aid, Demystified

Financial aid feels like a black box, but it is not. Every school’s aid office runs the student’s family through a formula and produces a number. The number varies by school, but the inputs are all drawn from two documents: the FAFSA and, for about 250 private colleges, the CSS Profile. Once you understand what those documents ask and how the formulas use the answers, the black box opens up.

The two forms

• FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid). Every family fills it out, regardless of whether they expect need-based aid. Opens October 1 for the following academic year. The FAFSA produces a federal Student Aid Index (SAI, formerly EFC), which is the number the government and most public universities use to calculate aid. The form itself is free.
• CSS Profile. An additional form required by a specific list of roughly 250 private colleges and a handful of universities. It asks for significantly more detail, including home equity, non-custodial parent income (if applicable), and assets in unusual account types. It costs $25 for the first school and $16 for each additional school, with fee waivers available for eligible families.

The two flavors of aid

Things worth knowing before the first form is filed

• The FAFSA uses tax data from two years back. The 2026-27 FAFSA pulls 2024 tax data. A family cannot retroactively shift 2024 income, but they can plan around this timing for younger children.
• Assets in a student’s name are weighted about four times more heavily than the same assets in a parent’s name. If the goal is to minimize FAFSA SAI, funds sitting in a UTMA or UGMA account are expensive. Know this before setting those up.
• Retirement accounts are not counted as assets. 401(k), 403(b), and IRA balances do not appear on the FAFSA. Home equity is counted on the CSS Profile but not on the FAFSA.
• Divorced parents. The FAFSA uses whichever parent provided more financial support in the 12 months before filing. The CSS Profile typically wants information from both biological parents regardless of custody. These two rules can produce very different aid calculations at schools that use both forms.
• Appeals are real and common. Once your student has a financial aid offer, you can appeal with documentation of circumstances that have changed since the forms were filed: job loss, medical expenses, another sibling entering college, death of a parent. Most aid offices have a formal appeals process and do not penalize families who use it.

A reasonable aid timeline

1. Spring of junior year. Run the Net Price Calculator on every school your student is seriously considering. Get a rough map of what each would cost.
2. Summer before senior year. Gather the documents you will need: prior-year tax returns, W-2s, investment statements, records of any non-retirement assets.
3. October 1, senior year. FAFSA opens. File as soon as you can. Some state and school aid is first-come, first-served within the applicant pool.
4. October through November. File CSS Profile for any schools that require it. Coordinate with the non-custodial parent if applicable.
5. March and April. Aid offers arrive alongside admission decisions. Compare net prices carefully. Appeal anything that does not reflect your current circumstances.
6. May 1. Commit. Celebrate. Cry a little. Move on.

Interviews: Prepared, Not Rehearsed

Most college interviews are evaluative but not determinative. A strong interview rarely flips a reject to an admit, but a bad one can tip a borderline case. Most are conducted by alumni volunteers, held over Zoom or in a coffee shop, and last 30 to 60 minutes. They are a chance for the school to get a sense of the student beyond paper, and for the student to get a real person’s read on the school.

The worst interview outcomes happen to two kinds of students: the ones who overprepare and sound like a recorded answer, and the ones who underprepare and cannot name a single specific reason they applied. Neither is hard to avoid. Both require a little preparation, done correctly.

What to prepare, before showing up

1. A 90-second "who I am" story. Not a resume recital. One or two things the student genuinely cares about, told as short specific stories. The goal is that the interviewer, two days later, can still describe the student in one sentence that is not generic.
2. A specific reason for applying to this school. "Strong CS program" is not specific. "Professor X’s work on Y, and the Z seminar series that lets sophomores participate" is specific. Two or three specific reasons is better than one, but one concrete specific reason is infinitely better than three vague ones.
3. Two or three questions for the interviewer. Good questions are ones only a person who was a student there can answer. Bad questions are ones the student could Google in 30 seconds. Good examples: "What surprised you about the culture of the school once you were enrolled?" "Were there any opportunities you did not expect to find?" Bad examples: "How big is the school?" "What is the student-faculty ratio?"

Questions the student will probably get

These come up over and over. None of them should be a surprise on interview day.

• Why this school? (See above: be specific.)
• Tell me about yourself.
• What do you do outside of school?
• What class has challenged you most, and how did you handle it?
• What is a book you have read recently that was not assigned? (This one regularly trips up strong students. Have a real answer with a specific reason they liked or disliked the book.)
• What do you want to study, and why?
• What do you do for fun?

Mechanics that quietly matter

• Be on time. For Zoom, log in three minutes early, with the camera working, a reasonable background, and a quiet room.
• Dress one step up from what your student would wear to meet a friend’s parent. A collared shirt or a simple top is plenty. Nothing flashy.
• Send a short thank-you email within 24 hours. Two or three sentences is the right length. Reference one specific thing the interviewer said: this makes the message feel genuine rather than templated.
• Do not bring a parent. If a parent wants to tag along for the drive or the coffee shop, they should wait outside during the actual interview. Interviewers always notice, and always read the presence of a parent as the student lacking independence.
• Phones off, or at least silenced and out of sight. A buzz in the middle of a question is a small thing that lands poorly.