I applied to five & was accepted to all.
Fairychatmom, it sounds like your daughter is exactly the kind of student colleges are looking for. For the past three years, I’ve served on a scholarship selection committee and interviewed scholarship applicants. One of the things we looked for was leadership ability, and it counted a lot if they managed to take the difficult classes your daughter has taken and still be involved with extracurriculars and the community. Another MAJOR factor was the essays–you would not believe how many kids turned in essays with grammar and spelling errors. If the essay was original and attention grabbing, as well as well written, I was much more likely to remember it than if it was the same mealy-mouthed cliched essays most kids write. From your brief description, though, I’d say your daughter is likely to be accepted both places.
1 in 4 applicants accepted is really not that picky. “Really picky” is 1 in 10 or less. 
Like Harvard, Williams, etc. It sounds like your daughter has a good shot, and could even potentially set her sights higher.
I think it is really important to visit and if possible stay on campus at any school you are thinking about seriously – especially if they are driving distance away.
It was during an on-campus stayover that I decided against applying to UVa, and put W&M on my list when it hadn’t made the cut initially. One just “felt right” while the other didn’t.
Good luck! Be nice to your daughter if she freaks out occasionally… College apps were the most stressful time of my entire life.
Seven, I guess:
Davidson (waitlisted)
Grinnell (accepted)
Rhodes (accepted, merit scholarship)
Goucher (accepted, merit scholarship)
Sweet Briar (accepted, merit scholarship)
Mary Washington (accepted, merit scholarship)
University of Iowa (accepted, attended)
But I was hoping to go to a small liberal arts school that would give me a merit scholarship, and those scholarships are very hard to come by, because most schools don’t even give them anymore.
Happily, I ended up at my last choice school, the U of I, which cost me $2200 a year (far less than any of the others, scholarship or no). And I was much happier at a big school than I ever would have been at a small school. Just goes to show that we don’t always know what’s best for ourselves.
I’d say 5 is a pretty normal number. One dream school, one safety, and three reasonable shots that you would like to go to.
Two sounds like a small number of schools, unless she is virtually assured of getting into her first choice and her fallback, and she is happy with both of them.
For undergrad, I applied to 7 and got into 6 of 'em; Cornell rejected me, which was fine with me as I’d only applied because my sister was there. I was kind of wishy-washy about where to attend until I’d visited and gotten some sense of the school’s atmosphere. I made a good choice, and graduated from there 4 years late.
For grad school, I applied to 5; I got into 2, was rejected by 2, and withdrew my application from the 5th after visiting. I noticed that I got into the 2 where I’d done a personal interview and was rejected by the ones where I didn’t, so I’d definitely recommend doing that. Anyhow, the school I ended up at was a mistake. Watch for schools that emphasize a little too much their post-graduation placement rates and their US News ranking - they’re probably not paying enough attention to actually educating their students.
I applied early to Smith, was accepted and graduated. My other choices - that I didn’t even have to finish the aplications for - were Wells, Mills, Hobart and William Smith and Mount Holyoke.
Yes, I knew that I wanted to attend a women’s college.
Twiddle
I applied to two- UNH and Northeastern, and was accepted by both; I never regretted not applying to more. Between the time I applied and getting the acceptance letters, I learned that my family was moving to MA to care for my great-grandmother. In a decision part panic, part defiance, part financial and part desire to go to the same school as friends- I tearfully changed my mind and chose UNH at the very last moment. I’m happy I did, since I ended up hating journalism and changing my major anyway, which was the only reason I’d been interested in Northeastern in the first place.
My high school class was so big that we were only allowed to apply to 4, and one had to be City University of NY. Rennselaer (can’t spell it, one reason I didn’t go) surprised me by sending me an acceptance a few months before the official date. I also got into MIT and Cooper Union, and went to MIT. Cooper Union was appealing - it is free, and was just down the block from my favorite used book stores. But MIT had better computers.
ENugent my daughter did the Berkley high school program too - but she pretty much decided she didn’t want to go, and wound up in the University of Chicago, which she loves.
Off the top of my head? Eight: Iowa State, Knox College, Valparaiso University, DePauw University, Scripps, Eugene Lang College, Oberlin College, and Harvard. I may or may not have applied to Beloit; I don’t remember if I just considered going there or whether I actually applied. I only applied to Harvard for shits and giggles, to be perfectly honest, and Iowa State was my backup school that would pay for everything, but that I really didn’t like very much.
I got in to all of the schools; however, due to my parents’ income at the time, very few of these schools were an option. Eugene Lang and Harvard offered me pretty much no aid (I was nothing all that special to them). Scripps offered me a few thousand merit-based dollars, but not enough to mollify both tuition and the cost of plane tickets/gas to and from California. Oberlin offered 10K a year–the maximum merit scholarship–but that wasn’t enough for my parents. DePauw and Knox offered decent-but-not-stellar packages. Valparaiso offered 3/4 tuition, which was decent. Iowa State, of course, would’ve been free. I don’t remember what Beloit offered, and I think that maybe I DIDN’T apply there after all, though I might’ve. It’s all a big blur. Anyway. . .
As a result, I ended up at Valparaiso University, which was, I’m sad to say, essentially a compromise (though, if my parents had known at the time that I’d been accepted at Harvard, my dad would’ve forced me to take on massive student loans in order to go–and I wasn’t about to do that, uh-uh, no way). It didn’t meet my expectations in that it didn’t suck quite as badly as I thought it would. My first choice had been Oberlin. . .I still wish that would’ve worked out.
Last month, we went to the open house on the UCF campus - I swear, I was ready to apply myself! It’s a beautiful place and I was very impressed with all the presentations. My daughter has wanted to go there for years and she’s excited at the prospect of living in Orlando. And her dad went to UCF, so there’s a little bond there too!
JC - I have a gazillion questions, or maybe a few dozen, that I’d love to put to your brothers. An e-mail introduction would be loverly!
October - fortunately, my daughter writes very well, and I’m her proofreader. I have no problem checking her grammar or suggesting she rewrite things that are awkward. I can’t talk about her one-on-one skills - I have no idea how she does in interviews.
I wouldn’t sweat it - that’s a misleading statistic. What percentage of applicants are accepted is much different that the percentage of applicants who attend.
1.5
I applied to my state school, UW-Madison, and knew I would pretty much have a lock on getting in. However, my family lived in Madison, and I wasn’t too excited about not getting to “go away” to college. I was big into science, so I also started the application process at Caltech. It was a two part application, and I did the first part (including sending them a check) and got recommendations before wussing out and not completing the second part in time.
I got a letter from them over winter break informing me that my application was incomplete. I decided I would complete it, so I tried to be all tricky and make it seem like my original got lost in the mail, so I sent in photocopies. I didn’t get accepted to Caltech, and graduated this past May from the UW-Madison.
Five.
UPenn, U of Chicago and Columbia were my three primary choices: BU and NYU were “safeties”. Accepted at all five. Changed my mind a week before the final deadline from Chicago to Penn, mainly because of an honors program they put me in.
FWIW, I was so TOTALLY wrong about the kind of school I wanted to go to - I was sure I wanted a large, urban university setting. Gah. I never came close to finishing at Penn - got completely lost in the system there. But I’m doing fine now, thank you very much, even without a degree!
In retrospect, I always wonder if I would have been better off either at a small liberal arts school (Vassar, Grinnell, Swarthmore) or at a less competitive but still good school, say a UConn or Rutgers. Well, who knows…
This is right up my alley since I’ll be starting my freshmen year, eek, on Monday. I applied to, what seems like a lot compared to most others in the thread, 12 schools.
Many of the essays for applications can be used over and over again with minor alterations. Therefore applying to 12 really isn’t as much work as it might seem. I threw out as many applications as I could to guarantee that I would have somewhere to go. I applied to Dartmouth withoute ever seeing it.
In order of preference I applied to: Yale (early decision, deferred, rejected), Brown (accepted), Harvard (rejected), Columbia (accepted with funding for research, attending), Princeton (waitlisted), UPenn (accepted), Darmouth (accepted), Cornell (accepted), Johns Hopkins (accepted), NYU (accepted).
Looking back, maybe I did apply to too many, but I’d rather be in the position of having too many choices than having too few choices. I always heard of horror stories of the bright kid that got accepted nowhere, of course, they may only be just that, horror stories. On the other hand, I read an article saying how colleges have turned down overqualified candidates because they “thought” that the candidate would not attend, thereby bringing down their matriculation ratio which brings down their ranking. I am unable to access the article without being a member of the Wall Street Journal Online, but here is an abstract (scroll down) College Rejections
I applied to # schools. In no particular order:
Yale (accepted), MIT (accepted), Iowa State (accepted + full scholarship), Brown (accepted), Johns Hopkins (accepted), Dartmouth (waitlisted), University of Maryland College Park (accepted + full scholarship + stipend – you can guess where I ended up at), and Case Western (accepted + scholarship for all but $10,000). My first choice from the beginning was the one that offered me the most money, but I did kinda want to go to Case Western more than the others. Still hope to go there for grad school.
It wasn’t that hard to apply for so many schools; I filled out my applications at the same time. The same two essays were sent to most of the schools. I did have to write two others, but I didn’t put too much work into those. (Ironically, one of those was sent to Maryland.)
And in retrospect, why on earth did I apply to non-merit-scholarship-granting colleges if I was looking for scholarships? (Answer – it didn’t take that much more effort, so I figured what the hey.)
Eight. I applied to 8 schools. Not #.
blush
I recall reading a WSJ article that it’s becoming more common to apply to a lot of schools - meaning 8, 10, 12. Demographics are a bitch; there are a lot more college age kids now then in 1985-6, when I applied, and more of them are expecting to go to college than then.
I only applied to four - Oberlin (initial first choice, accepted), Carleton (later first choice, accepted), Swarthmore (thought it was a stretch, rejected) and Haverford (thought I might make it, rejected). My safety school was U.Texas, which both of my parents attended - but I didn’t bother applying because I knew I’d get in, at least according to the grid on the application (minimum SAT + GPA meant pretty close to automatic admission in those days).
Ended up at Carleton, even though it was the only one I didn’t visit. I really, really liked the alumni I met.
I applied early to two: MIT and Harvard, and decided that if either accepted me early, I was wasn’t going to bother applying anywhere else, as the whole process was a PITA. Harvard said yes in November, while MIT deferred me and then said yes in April.
I don’t remember ever applying to any college, despite having attended several. My primary school, which I attended full-time for 5½ years and graduated from, was The University of Texas at Austin.
There was a period in the early '70s where, IIRC, any Texas resident over age 21 with a high school diploma, could just show up and register for classes. I may not be remembering the rules exactly. But that’s pretty much what I did, in the last year one could do that (1975).
So, for a bit, a lot of people could get in. You wouldn’t graduate unless you could muster, but you could start.
I applied to five:
Swarthmore (waitlisted, eventually accepted, currently attending and loving it)
Carleton (accepted, almost attended)
Rice (accepted)
Harvey Mudd (accepted)
Pomona (accepted)
UT Austin Plan II (backup, accepted)
It seems that my fellow Swarthmore students generally applied to many more schools (~10 total) than I did if they didn’t apply early decision. I wasn’t terribly excited about any schools and couldn’t bring myself to apply to any more. I didn’t even want to go to Pomona or Carleton but I applied anyway because I thought that only applying to three was two risky.
Fretful Porpentine - I don’t believe that Swarthmore hires anyone specifically for interviews. If you interview on campus you talk with one of the deans. If off campus, alumni just volunteer to do it. Maybe I’m wrong. Anyway, the interview really doesn’t effect admission much unless you tell them you’re only applying because your parents are making you.