There are nearly 4000 colleges and universities in the US; the state of California alone has more than 600 while 20 other states have over 100 each. If you’re like the typical high school senior, on some days it will seem like nearly everyone of them has tried to contact you!
Most students end up applying to eight or more schools, with a mix of ‘safety’ schools, ‘match’ schools and ‘reach’ schools. But how do you go from 4000 down to 8? Many students end up primarily applying to schools they know: schools that are local, the flagship school of their state university, and famous (but extremely selective) schools like Harvard and Stanford. There’s nothing wrong with a list that centers on these schools! However, you might be leaving out schools that would be a great fit, or offer you more scholarship or financial aid money, or an opportunity to experience life in another part of the country or all kinds of other things.
Obviously, unless you are a Professional College Applicant (and as far as I know, there’s no one out there hiring kids to be Professional College Applicants – if anyone has this job, please let me know!), you don’t have time to examine 4000 college websites. One suggestion: Try to identify the most important thing you want in a school – or at least one of the most important things you want. Is it a great biology program? A city campus? A school without a football team? Google search the top ten schools with that quality. And then pick the second most important thing for you, google search that and cross-reference which schools, if any, have both. You can do this with multiple different items, helping you to identify schools that you might not have heard of that would nonetheless be a great place to get your education.
Granted, it’s not as romantic as falling in love with a beautiful campus, or applying to the school whose name you wore on your onesies as an infant, but it might be a more effective approach.
Warning: Note that many ‘Top Ten Lists’ especially if you’re looking for a good academic department, simply go down US News’ list of top universities and check whether or not they have that department, rather than whether or not the department itself is actually excellent. It may take a bit of fiddling with search terms to find lists that really examine which universities are good at a particular thing, rather than just lazily adapting US News’ ratings. But they are out there!
Strike the Write Note 