How Do I Create a College List?? 2/24/25
How do I make a college list?
Step 1: Write down all of the colleges you can think of. Do not limit yourself at this time. The list can and will be filtered later in the process.
Some ideas are schools:
Near your home
Hosts for tournaments, games, performances, etc you have gone to.
Attended/suggested by friends, counselors, or family
Have crazy mascots
Step 2: Find commonalities and group these by a random criteria, or things that may be important. Schools may fit into one or more categories like:
State or Private
Small or Big
Far away or Close
Best for my major
Less or most expensive
Step 3: Determine which of these groups fit into your wants/needs best.
Step 4: Find other schools that have these traits (google searches, Fiske Guide, and/or ask a friend or a school or private counselor) and add the interesting ones and the schools from Step 3 to a spreadsheet. Try to get as many as you can without going over 25.
Step 5: Take a look at their websites and visit as many as you want/can. See if you can further refine your list. Make sure you have no less than 15.
Step 6: Tour a few schools. Try to get a feeling of comfort on campus. It’s best to try several different types of schools to solidify your preferences. These can be close to home for quick checks, if possible, or longer for vacations or special schools. If neither of these is available to you, each school should have a virtual tour on their website.
How Do I Balance My List and Prepare it for Applications?
Next, you will need to organize your list by difficulty of attendance. This is where the balance comes in. If you don’t follow these steps, you run a risk of getting more denials than acceptances.
Step 6: Take a cold, hard look at your grades and test scores. Then look at the average of last year’s admitted class (not enrolled, if possible) to figure out where your academic scores fit into these colleges’ averages/ranges, which are posted as 25%-75% of the population. Then characterize them by:
Reach - your grades and scores are below the school’s ranges,
Target - your grades and scores fit into the school’s ranges, and
Likely - your grades and scores are on the high end or above the average.
Step 7: For students at the higher ends of the ranges, you can choose schools with <15% acceptance rate as your reaches. For students right in the middle, 15%-25% will be your reaches. For students at the lower end of the gpa and score ranges or below, keep the reaches between 30%-45%. If one of the schools below your reach range is really interesting, keep it and classify it as a “high reach” and remember it will be extremely difficult to get an acceptance. If your list goes below 8, or is high in one category, repeat steps 4-7 to get a better distribution.
Step 8: Complete the list. You’d like to end up with a nice bell curve of about 3 reaches, 4 targets, and 3 likelies, for 10 schools in total. Your list may have a couple more, but 15 is a maximum, due to the amount of work required to complete applications. Most lists do tend to be “top heavy” as the reach category usually has the most well-known schools. Given the past few years, most of the well-known schools have had tons of applications and their acceptance rates have dropped accordingly. So, please make sure that reach category is not going above 4 schools.
Step 9: If you haven’t already, get the school information into a spreadsheet. You can add as much data as you like and when it comes to actually applying, it will be good to add deadlines and application plans.
From start to finish this will take 3 or more months to complete, and be done by September of your senior year. It’s best to start early, no later than March of your junior year. Do not skip any steps and make sure you love every school on the list. This is very important. You want to be as happy to go to any school you are accepted to as acceptances may seem absolutely random.