How To Build Your College List

You have worked hard during high school, challenged yourself in your coursework, prepped for your standardized tests until you achieved your target score, and built a resume that you can be proud of. Now it is essential to build a BALANCED college list to ensure you have multiple viable options to choose to attend after graduation.

A balanced college list means that you have SAFETY schools, TARGET schools, and REACH schools on your list in the appropriate proportions. 

To begin, determine if a school is a safety, target, or reach by analyzing the academic profile. You can read more about that in last month’s blog:

How to Understand Your Academic Profile

Once you understand how the school's profile compares to your profile, you can begin building your list.

Create your initial college list by ranking all of the schools you are considering simply based on which of the three categories they fall into SAFETY, TARGET, or REACH.

WORD OF CAUTION: I recommend using a fourth category that I refer to as WILD CARD schools. These are schools that historically have very low acceptance rates, typically below 15-20%, where the academic profile provides NO INSIGHT into the students being admitted. These are schools that rely HEAVILY on the holistic review, and institutional priorities guide their decisions. 

These are examples of WILD CARD schools:

• Harvard University

• Princeton University

• Cornell University

• Dartmouth University

• Columbia University

• Brown University

• Yale University

• University of Pennsylvania

• Stanford University

• MIT

• Emory University

• Vanderbilt University

• Duke University

• University of Chicago

• Rice University

• this list is just a random selection...

Once you have a complete list of all of the schools you are interested in, now you need to make sure it is BALANCED.

A balanced college list typically consists of the following:

1-2 Safety Schools

3-4 Target Schools

1-2 Reach Schools

Total of 6-8 schools is ideal

Wild Card Schools should NEVER be considered when balancing a college list. They can be added to your list, but they are additional schools and do not take the place of other schools on your list - EVEN IF YOU MATCH THE ACADEMIC PROFILE OF THE INSTITUTION.

There are many ways to build a college list. Each student is unique, so each college list is as well. Some students will choose to apply to all safety and target schools, while others will apply to one or two target schools that they are confident they would attend and then apply to reach and wild card schools for the remainder of their list. The key is to ensure that you do not apply strictly to reach and wild card schools because that could yield no acceptances and put you in a regrettable situation. 

Remember, the goal is to ensure that you have great options to choose from as you prepare to decide by May 1. 

This was originally posted on March 14, 2019.