Safety

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What's the right number of colleges to apply to?

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What's the right number of colleges to apply to?

While seniors have a few more weeks before they have to make their final decisions, it’s ok to let them go and start focusing on current juniors and sophomores who are planning for their admissions season, not ending it. One of the most basic, and common, questions about the whole experience is how many colleges to plan on applying to. Most years there’s a news story about someone who is accepted to all eight of the Ivy League schools—though so far there’s no report of that this year—and there’s also usually a story about someone accepted to a large number of universities, sometimes over 50. Are these role models for you to follow? How many colleges should you apply to?

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Survey Results

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Survey Results

I put up an online survey for students about college admissions last month, and I’d like to report on the results. There’s nothing at all scientific about this survey: I only got 126 responses, and most of those were from a high school where I made a presentation…including time to take the survey. Percentages are rounded. I didn’t do any statistical analysis.

Still, I think the answers are quite illuminating, especially since the seniors who responded were a diverse crowd of college-bound, successful high school students.

The most significant overall theme I see is that local reigns supreme. Even for these students (at a college prep magnet school for gifted students) who have access to information and representatives from all over the nation, most of their attention is in state. Almost every school named was in Texas, a well-known “elite” university, or—in the case of Rice—both. Here at the details.

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Are people afraid of the University of Chicago?

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Are people afraid of the University of Chicago?

I visited New York City over Thanksgiving with extended family. It was a fantastically fun and relaxing trip. On top of all the lights and crowds and excitement, something else really caught my attention. Standing in line one night, I overheard someone in my group say that there has been a 20% decrease in applications to the University of Chicago over the past five years. It has to do, he said, with the growing violence in Chicago. People are scared to go there. (I checked with my wife, and she heard the same thing I did.) My immediate thought was that there is no way there's been a decrease like that to such a prestigious school, no matter what the news reports say about Chicago. But I didn't have any evidence for my argument. And I'd only met this guy, who is really nice and really smart, a few hours earlier. And it's the holidays. So I let it go...

...but I couldn't let it go. This week I did a bit of investigating to learn more about applications and crime near U Chicago. And it turns out he's right. Kind of.