College List Building
Building a balanced college list is so important! The first step is to figure out what characteristics you are looking for in your university of choice. We will do activities together, but you can also use the “Sizing Yourself Up” exercise from the Fiske Guide or Dr. Steven Antonoff’s “Self-Survey for the College-Bound” exercise.
Research schools and make a list of 20 colleges you would be interested in going to. At this point, add anything that piques your interest to the list. Many websites offer insight into different colleges. Try CollegeXpress.com for different lists or rankings. College Board’s BigFuture.org and Collegedata.com are both helpful for more numbers-based searching.
Separate your schools into four categories:
- Wild card (less than 10% chance of getting in)
- Reach (low likelihood of acceptance; 10-25% chance)
- Maybe (in range for your profile; 26-74% chance)
- Likely (pretty good shot at getting in; more than 75% chance)
Figure out which schools you can afford. Remove any schools that are out of your price range.
Final cuts: your goal is to have 10-11 schools on your final list. Three in each of the Reach, Maybe, and Likely categories, and 1-2 in the Wild Card category. To whittle it down, you’ll need to spend time researching the schools and imagining yourself there. If you can’t imagine yourself at any particular school, cross it off the list.
If possible, this is a great time to physically visit a couple of the schools on your prospect list. Try going to three schools that are different from each other (big, small, public, private, etc.) and try them on. If you can’t go in person, each school should have a virtual tour on its website.
Other great ways to learn about schools are through YouTube videos and TikTok.
Having a balanced list of 10-11 schools that you would be happy at can help limit stress. The goal is to give yourself lots of options for places where you could see yourself flourishing in
college rather than a situation where you have placed all of your eggs into a wild card school basket. That’s nuts!