Creating a Custom School List
The ultimate goal of college research is to come up with a list of colleges to apply to that meet your requirements.
When you first start your college search process, you might have a list of 20 or more schools that meet one or more of your desired needs, i.e. major, location, size, cost.
But as you get closer to the summer before senior year, you should be working to narrow down that list. An ideal number of colleges to apply to is about 4 - 8 schools.
Why? Because you want to have a range of acceptance probabilities in your list.
Ultimately, you should be able to divide your list into 3 categories: Reach, Target, and Safety Schools.
SAFETY SCHOOLS
Colleges that you know for sure you are going to get into.
You meet and exceed multiple acceptance criteria, i.e. GPA, test scores, rank.
Preferably the safety schools also have your choice of major and location and are within your financial means.
TARGET SCHOOLS
Colleges where you are competitive and have a good chance of getting accepted.
Your GPA, test scores and rank fall in or above the middle 50% and your application package including essays, leadership, letters of recommendation, and extracurricular activities make you a strong candidate.
REACH SCHOOLS
Sometimes also called dream schools.
You might be a strong candidate considering your GPA, test scores, rank and application package but the acceptance rates at the school are low. You are also competing against many other candidates that match your criteria. The number of students accepted is small.
However, these schools are on your radar, have your major, meet your other college criteria, so it is worth your time and effort (and money for application fees and test scores submissions) to apply with your best essays and letters of recommendation in hopes of being offered a spot in the class.