Beginning Your College List - Veridiction Consulting

TLDR

Your college list will be a curated set (9-15) of colleges you apply to across multiple brackets with the expectation that you will have a few (3-4) viable acceptance offers, of which you will choose 1 when the time comes.
Your list will have 3 brackets: the set of colleges that seem like a balanced match for you, the colleges that should love you, and the colleges that you have a crush on.
Only include colleges where you are willing to do the work to apply, will be pleased to be accepted, and are legitimately excited about at least one of their well-funded academic programs.
Do make a point of going to visit at least some of the colleges on your list, preferably while they are in session.

Heartfelt Warm-Up

First, get a pen and a piece of paper. Now:

Let’s not talk about college for a moment.

I want you to think of a social event, a party, something big enough where you must go with friends. So visualize something you’re aiming to go to, whether it’s like Prom or Coachella, and then think of: who do you and everybody around you expect to be going with you? Boyfriend, girlfriend, bestie, ride-or-die, whatever: who is there for you and nobody is surprised by this?

➡️ Write 🥰that name🥰 down in the center of your paper. ⬅️

Now we’re going to up the stakes. We need another name, the name of somebody who could come up to you and say “Well that’s a cool idea, but I’ve got a better one and you should come with me instead” and just like that you’d totally ditch your friend and your plans and go with this other person, fully confident that your friend will totally understand and forgive you when you explain it to them later. Who is the amazing person you would like to surprise you like this?

⬅️ Write 🤩that name🤩 down on the left side of your paper.

But now it’s time for the hard question. That person whose name you just wrote down? Yeah, they did say “Well that’s a cool idea and all, but I’ve got a better one and you should come with me instead” but they said it to the friend(s) whose name you wrote in the middle of your paper so you just got ditched — and when the pain of this betrayal subsides, you realize that you’ll Get It and forgive your friend. But right now you’re alone.

So now somebody is coming up to you and saying “Hey, I know you weren’t intending to go with me but I think we can have fun if you give me a chance?” and while you haven’t paid any attention to them before, there’s something in how they’re approaching you now that makes you feel seen and valued. And because they’re approaching you and paying attention to you like this, you’re suddenly more interested in paying attention to them, too. Who can pique your curiosity like this?

Write 😎that name😎 down on the right side of your paper. ➡️

Understanding the frame

Okay, now that we’ve warmed up our emotional engine, this is how we’re tiering the spectrum of colleges you will be giving serious consideration to. On the left side are going to be the colleges that you want to love you, on the right are the colleges that want you to love them—and the balance point is in the middle. Guidelines for placing universities on your list is as follows:

⬅️ The left (“You’re Crushing On Them”) set of colleges are those with a < 20% aggregate acceptance rate, or < 30% rate if you’re below the mid-point on the academic profile. The list of colleges in this column should not be longer than any other column, and the threshold here is fixed: while we have some tricks to improve chances with a You’re Crushing On Them school (better than “slide into Yale’s DMs”), we’re not even going to count on any acceptances in this column. Each of these applications is going to take a chunk of work and leave you feeling good about choosing to apply.

The ➡️ centered (“Great Pairing”) ⬅️ set of colleges generally have a < 50% acceptance rate where you are above the mid-point in their academic profile, or < 60% if you’re a bit below the mid-point in their academic profile. This will be our longest list. Note that you can pull up They’re Crushing On You schools into this list if you feel that they are a particularly good fit for you, or there’s a lower-admission specificity (like “Honors College” or “the Business School”) that will make them a Great Pairing for you. Each of these applications is going to take a chunk of work but leave you feeling good about yourself.

➡️ The right (“They’re Crushing On You”) set of schools is all of the other colleges, especially the ones where you’re academically overqualified. This is going to be the medium-length list. These are the high-acceptance schools that you are, on-face, overqualified for and it is entirely reasonable for you to expect them to court you with:

generous financial aid offers,
ready acceptance of your AP/IB and dual-enrollment transfer credits with course waivers, and perhaps
personalized attention from the coaches and clubs that would be eager to have your participation.

This set of universities wants you to help them improve their academic reputation, but this means that you’ll have to continually be taking initiative to reach your academic potential because you’re starting academically ahead of your cohort. Still, if you can lower the total cost of your undergraduate degree (and maybe graduate early), there can be good options in this bracket. You do not have to work hard on these applications but you will have to work hard on evaluating their offers of acceptance.

I’m building this frame in terms of relational feelings to highlight the typical asymmetry of your desires when compared to the universities that you’ll be applying to: everybody loves Stanford but Stanford doesn’t really love anybody. The goal is to help you continually re-center your decision on how you’ll relate with the school where you’ll choose to enroll and to keep you aware of what you’re bringing to that relationship. You deserve a place where you can show up as your full and growing self and the offers of admission that colleges will be making–whether they’re crushing on you or you’re crushing on them–should be evaluated against that baseline.

Filling the frame

You can now use our “How To: College Scorecard Analysis” process document (💰) to help identify schools that may be relevant to your interests based on their locations and strengths and place them in their initial positions on your list. Start with universities that you’ve heard of to get into the process and then expand your view by searching for things like “what’s a good alternative to [This] university with a higher admittance rate” or “list universities with strong [my interest] programs” for more school names to analyze.

Notes to my clients (💰): First, I have written a tool to match your various/plural academic curiosities to universities that properly fund related departments and attract internships and recruiters (Binder, Davis, & Bloom, 2016), and we can use that to seed your college list. Secondly, we do not build out our preliminary lists in the Common App because Common App will gossip about you with colleges so we don’t want to give them information prematurely. We will work with the Common App later in our process, but not until we’re ready to get serious about the schools we’ve placed on our list.

Your college list should have between 9 and 15 schools that you’ll be applying to (default recommendation: 3-5-4; this is up from the 3-3-3 pre-Covid set), but it’s fine to rack up more colleges to consider before you go doing tours: it’s good to add or remove universities as an outcome of touring them, but don’t let your college list shrink below the minimum 9 schools you’ll apply to or grow longer than you’re willing to customize your supplemental essays for. The quantitative limit on applications is to ensure you can give an appropriate amount of your limited time to focus on the applications you care most about in clearly conveying the keenness of your interest to your admissions audience.

Or, to put it another way, we prefer to keep our college list relatively short because two half-assed applications make for an asshole application.

Do Not Enroll at Wonderland State University

A prerequisite step in my onboarding process is identifying your academic interests. Universities are, contrary to what their marketing departments will routinely tell gullible little teenagers, not uniformly strong in all of their departments. This means that there’s a big opportunity for you to pay quality-education money for a mid-to-subpar education. My job is to help you avoid that trap, and that starts by us not having this conversation from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll, 1865):

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

My job is to help you get more value out of your educational investment but if you don’t care where you academically go, then my flat advice is to go to a community college and a library until you’ve got some ideas that you care about.

If, on the other hand, you’ve got some ideas—either ranked with contingency plans, or even just vaguely—about what can keep your curiosity piqued for for four years then I can try to help you find a university that at least looks academically-relevant to several of your interests. We always aim for more than one interesting quality program so that when Future-You changes their major like over 75% of undergraduates do (Venit, 2019), the benefits of the selection work you are doing now will not be diminished.

Intended outcomes

The goal is to get acceptances from half of your Great Match tier and all of your They’re Crushing On You tier (5-8 acceptances total), with half of those acceptances appearing to be fiscally appropriate (3-4) so your final decision comes down to just a few schools, any of which are legitimately worthwhile for you such that you can make your decision about which is the best university for you based on pre-identified merits of the universities that gave viable offers of admission and move forward without second-guessing or regret.

Note: If you do an early application, you may be deferred to the regular decision pool. This is not a rejection! It just indicates that the school likes you but, as you were probably expecting, you’re crushing on that school more than they’re crushing on you. It’s fine to be deferred, you just need to continue on with your larger application strategy.

What we aren’t doing is putting much faith in the statistically unlikely possibility that the You’re Crushing On Them schools will give viable offers of admissions. It is possible–I’ve worked with several students who went to MIT, plus at least one Harvard and a Stanford–and we will put time into customizing materials for them, but we’re not going to bet on their acceptance. We’re not making that bet because the outcome has almost nothing to do with merit in any individual case: for example, even after discounting out the 20% of unqualified applications to Harvard in 2019, Harvard still had over 10 times as many qualified applicants as they had spaces in their incoming cohort and over twice as many applicants with flawless GPAs and SAT-Math scores (Selingo, 2020, p. 88). And the quantity of applications Harvard receives has doubled since then. So: yes we can try for it, no we won’t rely on it.

The other thing we’re not going to be doing is sitting around on waitlists (which are more correctly pools, not even lists). As Maya Angelou reportedly said/wrote, “Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option.” And by framing your college list as possible relationships I want you to realize that a key part of this practice is committing to yourself for the sake of yourself and it’s really hard to do that if you’re volunteering to be a low-possibility contingency plan for some expensive university’s noticeably-mid risk management capability. Sure the validation of telling the prestigious institution “thank you for finally making this offer” is great and all, but have you ever tried the self-efficacy of “but I’ve made other plans in the meantime.”?

International intrigue

Going international for your college education is a perfectly reasonable choice and often fiscally competitive with US universities. While I still recommend visiting campuses before committing to them, if your overwhelming compulsion is to Not Be Here For This and your college list reflects that in the You’re Crushing On Them tier creeping into the Great Pairing tier, then an active pursuit of international options is viable.

The difficulty (from the listing point of view) with international schools is a lack of data on/from them. This is largely because–at least for the UK and Canada–they do things based predominantly on academic qualifications towards declared intentions and consider aggregation of that data to be a dubious practice. But for your purposes: you really need to know what you’re looking to study before you go trying to take a seat in one of those schools.

It is worth noting that if you are going for a professionally-licensed degree (like nursing or teaching) then an international education may introduce a spare hurdle between you and working in the United States: you’ll likely have to re-test for licensure before you can be employed in the United States. That said, international universities (again, at least Canada and UK) give working visas to foreigners graduating from their universities that are good for a few years (3) to encourage you to stick around and contribute to their country instead of going back from whence you came.

If you’re looking to fill your list with international options, plan to meet with their regional admissions representatives so that you can be clear about what proof of your academic qualifications you’ll need to apply with, how it’s going to be a different experience from a domestic school (ex: universities in England finish undergraduate degrees in only 3 years), and what your chances of admission (that, again, vary widely by department or “faculty”) actually are.

Some international schools are on the Common App, but the UK (also) has their UCAS that covers universities throughout the UK and will support you applying to up to 5 colleges at a go. So once you get past the initially-inefficient differences in process, many international schools will seem easier to apply to than their domestic counterparts.

Additional considerations

We expect based on your engagement here that you will only be enrolling in one (1) university as a result of this process and our goal, numbers games aside, is ensuring that it’s the best university for you even anticipating that you will change.
It is perfectly reasonable to have geographically clustered universities on your list to make visiting them in a batch easier.
When applying to universities, always prefer the universities that you have seen to the ones you haven’t. You shouldn’t be more excited about committing years of your life to a place you’ve never seen than one you have. In the long game, admissions officers also know and notice this: “prospective students who actually visited the College were more likely than their comparably qualified peers to apply in the first place, and… students who made campus visits after receiving their acceptance letters were more likely to make tuition deposits” (Stevens, 2009, p. 235).
If, after several college visits, you have clearly identified The Best University For You then you may be able to boost your chances of acceptance by giving them your polished-and-complete application for Early Decision. There are some risks involved so only consider doing this because you really want to, not just “strategically.”
🚩If you’re having difficulty finding a university that passes your vibe check when you visit, then you may need to reconsider your selection criteria or re-calibrate your expectations (if they tend to fail in the same way) or maybe question whether you’re ready for a multiyear residential college commitment at this point in your life (if they’re all unsatisfactory for different disqualifying reasons).🚩
Colleges, who are paying people to review all of the applications that come in, tend to charge applications fees (💰). Students with financial need can apply to get these fees waived and might want to send out a couple more applications to improve the likelihood of getting a suitable financial aid offer. (Getting accepted by a “need-blind” school may be easier, but getting a viable financial aid package from a “need-aware” school will be more useful to you in the end.)
Look for applications that overlap nicely: the Common App will help you with thousands of (mostly domestic) universities though customized supplemental materials are often required, the University of California system has their own application process that covers their campuses, and–as previously noted–the UK has UCAS.

References

Binder, A. J., Davis, D. B., & Bloom, N. (2016). Career Funneling: How Elite Students Learn to Define and Desire ‘“Prestigious”’ Jobs. Sociology of Education, 89(1), 20–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038040715610883

Selingo, J. J. (2020). Who gets in and why: A year inside college admissions. Scribner.

Stevens, M. L. (2009). Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites. Harvard University Press.

Venit, E. (2019, July). “How Late Is Too Late? Myths and Facts About the Consequences of Switching College Majors.” EAB Student Success Collaborative. https://attachment.eab.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/EAB_Major-Switching-Myths-and-Facts.pdf