What is College Fit?

“College fit” is a commonplace term in college application conversations, and especially here at ILUMIN, where we emphasize the importance of finding the college with the right culture, opportunities, and resources for each of our students. The term seems simple enough at first glance, but then students ask themselves the question, “which colleges fit me well?” and quickly realize the answer is hardly straightforward. Fit is a difficult thing to determine, after all. 

Many families misdefine “college fit” in terms of whether or not a student’s test scores and GPA are up to par with those of the college’s student body averages. But such a method of evaluation is not only limited to academics, but also boils college education down to numbers, which is a disservice to the depths of what a college education can really do for your student. 

Numbers are an important facet of every built college list, of course; comparing your student’s test scores and GPA to those of colleges do a lot for figuring out which colleges are reach schools, target schools, and safety schools. However, colleges are more than just numbers, and the same goes for college fit. College fit is different for each and every student. To truly evaluate whether or not a college is a good fit for you, we at ILUMIN look at each student’s individual needs, approaches to learning, goals, interests, personalities, academic tastes, and more. 

With this personal college fit in mind, here’s a guide to get you started thinking about building your college list! Below are resources and methods to help you understand the process of building and refining your college list, as well as to help you more fully analyze what it is that you really want in a college.

Building a College List: The Rundown

• When Should I Start Building My List?

  We typically suggest that you start thinking about specific colleges and creating your list late in the spring of 11th grade. This also happens to be the most intense time of junior year, what with finals, AP exams, and SAT or ACT preparation. Regardless, spring of junior year remains a prime time to start researching colleges you want to go to, as well as to start actively demonstrating interest in any schools that you may have been interested in for many years.

  Why is 11th grade spring in particular such a good time for this? At this time, you have a good grasp of some key information you’ll want to have when building your college list, such as what courses you’ll be taking your following senior year, as well what your final grades and GPA might be going into the admissions season. The latter is especially important to know if you’re doing any form of early applications, such as Early Action or Early Decision, which typically have October or November deadlines.

  Also, this critically prepares the summer between junior and senior year for students to work on college essays, which is the perfect time to do the bulk of the writing. In other words, students should make decisions about what schools they want to apply to in the spring in order to start working on those essays in the summer.

  However, even if junior year is a good time to start, there’s no harm done in starting in your sophomore or even freshman year. Students can keep an updated document of colleges that interest them, then update that list with more bullets or information as they slowly learn more about additional colleges or specific schools. Virtual or in-person campus tours are always a good option, too, as well as webinars or information sessions It’s never too early to just start brainstorming your college list, but understand that flexibility is important until 11th grade, and the end of 11th grade is critical for finalization.

• How Many Schools Do I Apply To?

  It depends. The short answer is that we suggest you apply to a total of twelve to fifteen schools. We don’t encourage fewer than ten, and we actively discourage more than twenty, which is in every student’s best interest. Ten or more allows you to have flexibility in your college decision-making, because you want to have options and to be able to weigh the pros and cons of each school that you get admitted to. Also, you are going to have some applications denied, and you want to be able to not feel like everything was riding on just a couple of colleges. You want a well-rounded list that goes over reach, target, and safety schools. It’s smarter to have a breadth of different colleges at every level that you’re applying to.

  The concern with choosing the number of colleges you’ll be applying to is that sometimes, high schools will limit how many letters of recommendation you’re allowed to request from your teachers and high school counselors. Sometimes, there are even individual teachers who will limit how many letters of recommendation they’ll write, whether for each individual student or across the entire student body each year. For example, a Calculus teacher might say, “I’m only writing five letters for you, so choose your five schools, and that’s all you’re getting.” It’s important to scope out what those possible limitations are, whether from your school or from your teachers, as early as possible.

  Consider the cost of college applications, and consider that cost alongside your family. The unfortunate reality is that each school you apply to is going to cost you between 50 to 90 dollars just to submit the application, with no guarantee of acceptance or even waitlisting. To add to that, you’ll also be sending transcripts and test scores to some of those colleges too, and those have a price as well. With this in mind, talk to your family and figure out a college application budget. How many colleges can you feasibly apply to? Which colleges do you want to prioritize applying to in light of your budget? There are also fee waivers available, which low-income students often qualify for, so if the budget is a big issue for you, look into those waivers with your school counselor and they can get you set up.

  How much time do you have to write your application essays? As a rising senior, your course load and extracurriculars are likely already eating up a lot of your time. Meanwhile, every college can require you to write upwards of 3,000 words for their applications. You don’t want to overestimate how much time you have to dedicate to applications, then wind up neck-deep in deadlines and writing exhaustion only halfway through your college list. Be strategic about how many colleges you’re allocating your time to, as well as about how you plan out your writing schedule: brainstorming, writing, editing multiple times, and then finalizing.

  But what about just applying to a lot of reach schools? There’s always news stories that come out of a student that got into every school in the Ivy Leagues or you might hear about a friend that’s making a tough decision between many top 25 schools. The reality of the situation is that these are outlier situations. Getting into college is not a random selection or lottery, and admission readers do look at every application! Most students will get into zero, one, or two reach schools, regardless of how many reach schools they apply for; getting into three or more is already amazing and should be celebrated! So applying for a ton of reach schools means that 1) you’re writing a lot more essays while 2) you’re not necessarily getting into more reach schools. We generally recommend that students should apply to fewer schools that they’ve researched thoroughly and understand how that school is a good fit to them. 

  (If you’re applying to all of the campuses in the University of California system, then keep in mind that you only need to select six or more colleges to round out your college list, as well as that you have to think of the different application platforms that cover non-UC schools. The UC system uses one platform for all their campuses, but then there’s the Common App to consider with other colleges, and many more applications per college that are involved.)

• What Are Reach, Target, and Safety Schools?

  We mentioned “reach, target, and safety schools” earlier. These are common terms in the college consultant sphere when it comes to categorizing a student’s college list. Exactly what constitutes a reach school and a target school differs depending on the circumstances of each individual student. Let’s define them as we consider them here at ILUMIN.
  

  • Dream: You may not have heard this first classification used much insofar as a professional consulting setting, although you’ve probably often heard the question “what’s your dream school?” in casual conversation. We consider dream schools or colleges as ones that are hard for everyone to get into—these are the Ivy League schools and the top ten to fifteen colleges. They have less than a 15% acceptance rate at maximum, and some of them have as low as 4% acceptance rates. For individuals, a school is a dream school for you if it has this very low acceptance rate, or if your grades and scores are well below the school’s averages. For example, if you're looking at Stanford, which has a four percent acceptance rate, and your average is a 3.3 to their school-average 3.9 GPA, Stanford would be classified as a dream school for you.

  • Reach: It’s more likely for you to get into reach schools or colleges than dream ones, but reach schools should still be considered a bit of an application risk. These schools typically have 15% to 30% acceptance rates, and once again, if your grades and scores are below the school’s averages, the school would be classified as at least a reach school for you. 

  • Target: If schools have a 30% to 60% acceptance rate, and your scores are a relative match (or are higher than) the school’s average GPA and test scores, then we would consider them target schools.

  • Safety: A safety school is a college you will almost definitely get into—essentially, a safety net. Typically, we would call a college a safety school for a student only if we were absolutely certain that the student would get in. This typically entails a 60% acceptance rate or above, in combination with a student with grades and scores above or far above the school’s averages.

  The bulk of your college list should be target schools, with the rest being reaches and safeties (with a dream school perhaps in the reaches), and so your list should end up looking like a bell curve. Is this a flexible curve? Can you up your ante and apply to more Ivy League schools. Yes, but remember: balance your time and effort. It’s not feasible for students to craft brilliant applications for ten out of ten top 10 schools, and not every single top-ranking school is a good fit for a student, no matter how high-achieving they are. If you’re a very competitive applicant, you can choose to minimize safeties and increase your reaches, but if you’re feeling wary or not super confident about your chances, then pad, pad, pad, and give yourself more safeties on your college list.

  Also, numbers are far from the only factors when it comes to sorting colleges under these categories. In fact, if a student’s average test and GPA just meets the minimum for eligibility at a school, or even if that student’s scores are comfortably within the school’s average, it is wise to err on the side of caution and bump a safety to a target school, or a target to a reach. This is not only because it’s better to play the application game a little safer, but also because if all a student has is good numbers, their chances of acceptance are not going to be very high at all. College applications are holistic, after all—there are also extracurriculars, essays, other students, and declared majors to consider, among many other aspects. 

  For example, taking declared majors into account—if you’re going into a school with a competitive major, then your chances of acceptance dip quite a bit, easily making it a reach school. Certain schools have acceptance statistics by major, which illustrates this well: Carnegie Mellon University has a 7% admit rate for computer science students, as compared to 23% for business. Keep in mind that categorization of schools into this “reach, target, and safety” spectrum really does change by institute, by department, and by major.

  Another factor to consider: where are you ranked, and what are you achieving, within the context of your own high school? Context is important. When you apply to college, you’re primarily evaluated in the context of your high school, and colleges will use your standing in your graduating class as a metric. You can find good information on this by looking up common datasets along with the name of a school into Google. If you’re looking at a top 50 college, you’re in good shape if you’re in the top 10% or 25% of your graduating class. For example, 94% of students admitted to Yale were in the top 10% of their class, as were 88% of students admitted to Carnegie Mellon, and 92% of admitted students to Boston University were in the top 25% of their graduating class. Most competitive schools only take students from the top 50% of their class. Even if you don’t know your rank, think about the rigor of your schedule and your academic achievements compared to those of your classmates when you consider where on the dream-to-safety spectrum each school is for you.

  As you build your college list, keep in mind that every school you get into should be a school that you’re excited to go to. You shouldn’t to statistically pick some schools that are safe for you and apply to those for the sake of applying to them; you should pick safety schools for which the case is that, if that’s the only school you get into, you will still be happy to go there at the end of the day, because it’s a school that’s a good fit for you.

How to Search for Colleges

Now, to start building your preliminary college list. This is the time to scour through schools, find ones of interest, and jot them down to evaluate and compare later. 

• Searching by College Rankings

  This is a method most competitive students are used to. It makes sense to look at rankings lists, of course—they’re a solid, ballpark way to know how good or prestigious a college is—and they’re great for identifying colleges for further research. 

  However, take great caution against building your college list based only on how highly-ranked a college is. Whenever you consult a college rankings list, review the criteria that the list is using, because sometimes they weigh on interesting things, and these criteria may be factors that are completely irrelevant to your personal needs. Also, college rankings change every year, so instead of putting too much weight on the most recent rankings, see if a college is consistently around a certain range instead across time—as well as across lists. A school may be number 24 on one list and 76 on another—figure out why that’s the case, and determine if that reason is important to you.

  Some common college ranking sites are U.S. News, Niche, Princeton Review, Times Higher Education, and Forbes. They’re all flawed in their own way, and they’re all helpful in their own way. Use this resource wisely.

• Searching by Statistics

  It’s understandable to want to know your odds for getting into certain colleges, or the numbers that admitted students have that are getting them their acceptance letters. Searching by statistics is certainly helpful for identifying colleges, as well as filtering out schools that are very much out of your reach (to the point that you will not succeed there) or are too low of a bar (a place that won’t challenge you at all). There are many online resources that allow you to enter your GPA and test scores into search engines, such as Naviance. That will give you schools that are numerically good matches for a student of your caliber.

  However, remember that admissions is holistic. Even if you’re above the 75th percentile for GPA or test scores, you are not guaranteed a spot in a college, and if you’re not above that percentile, your chances are not completely dashed, either.

• Searching by Major

  Another way to search is by major. Many students are undeclared, and that’s totally okay; undeclared students can choose a college that they love and apply to a major that’s interesting there, and shouldn’t force themselves to apply as a major that they have no desire to pursue just for the sake of the application. However, if you already know what you want to study in college, searching by major is a good way to sort through your college options. QS World University Rankings ranks colleges by major globally, for example. Look up which colleges have an abundance of great resources for the major that you’ve got your heart set on.

  Also, if the major you’re interested in is a relatively obscure one, like sports medicine or food science, you can go on websites like Big Future, a Collegeboard website, to search for colleges that offer those particular majors.

  When you’re looking by major, be careful that you’re not mixing up undergraduate and graduate programs! Many top colleges are institutions with world-renown graduate programs, and students often confuse a school’s graduate program prestige with what it offers to undergraduate students. Don’t make the mistake of wanting to go to Stanford to study business, which does not exist at the undergraduate level at Stanford—only for MBA programs. Make sure you’re searching within undergraduate circles.

Researching Colleges and Refining Your College List

Once you have a lengthy list of colleges, it’s time to do more in-depth research and see which colleges actually meet your criteria and make the cut to your final college list. Again, there are many factors you should consider, beyond numbers like test scores and GPA, when fine-tuning your list. Here are a handful of criteria, as well as the directions in which you could take your research:

• Academics

  When it comes to higher education, academics is of course a huge part of any student’s evaluation of college fit. Maybe your student already has a certain major or field of study in mind for when they start their college career. Prospective computer science majors, for example, could look more favorably towards colleges that are well-known for their computer science programs. However, a college’s major ranking isn’t the only thing that speaks to a major-related college fit. What kind of professors are in the department faculty, and would you be interacting with them directly if you were to go to that college? What facilities and other resources are available at that school for that major? If you want to do research in that major—say you’re a prospective history major with a penchant for the U.S. Civil War, or you’re interested in chemistry and want to work in a lab during your time in college—check what kind of research opportunities and even faculty with related research topics there are at your colleges of interest. 

  What kind of courses does each college offer? Major-related courses are of interest, of course, but electives are also worth surveying, in case you want to broaden your academic horizons beyond the scope of your major—and even more so if you’re not sure what you want to major in just yet. Does the college require students to fulfill certain general education requirements, and is that something you’d be interested in? Do the classes pique your interest? Are there eclectic courses that might challenge your perspective, or are you a student more interested in straightforwardly higher-level coursework, and would prefer colleges that offer a specific level of theoretical mathematics? 

  It’s also important to think about what kind of student you are. Is your approach to learning more theoretical, practical, research-based, discussion-based? Would you thrive better in a lecture-hall environment or a small discussion group one? Check out teacher-to-student ratios and typical class sizes, and gauge whether a school’s learning environment is the one for you.

• Location

  With higher education’s return to in-person learning, physical location contributes to campus culture and student life as well. Some colleges claim the whole city as their “campus” of sorts, such as NYU and the University of Michigan, and students are accustomed to treating the urban environment and all its resources (social and otherwise) as their second home. Other colleges are relatively secluded and have a flourishing on-campus student lifestyle, such as Amherst. Do you want quick access to the city, or would you prefer a nature-surrounded bubble? Perhaps you’d prefer a hybrid of the two? In what larger environment do you do your best work? Are the study spaces on campus appealing to you? Are you the kind of person who needs to get off-campus to clear their head once in a while, and are those options available to you at this school?

• Size

  Does the school have a small, mid-size, or notably large student body? Again, what are class sizes and faculty-to-student ratios like, and how might this synergize with (or conflict with) your personal approach to learning? If the school is a university with graduate programs and schools, what is the proportion of undergraduates to that of graduate students? Does this indicate a greater institutional focus on undergraduate or graduate education, and do you mind the answer? These are all school-size related questions that can really impact your potential time as a student on each campus you research.

• Campus Culture, Extracurriculars, and Student Life

  Academics may be important, but so is the campus community you’ll be immersing yourself in for the next few years. Campus culture goes a long way to creating your college experience, and understanding different campus cultures is key to figuring out your personal college fit. There’s a lot that goes into defining a specific college’s campus culture: student body priorities, for example, as well as administrative policies and responses, student diversity, college and student philosophies, daily student life, libraries and resources on campus, students’ hangout location preferences, college traditions, and much more. To understand a school’s campus culture, a good place to start is the hearsay. What do students say specific colleges are known for—even through jokes? Is it the massive number of business or English majors? Is it sports, or the relative lack of them? Is it the quirky engineering pranks of CalTech and MIT, the Primal Scream of Columbia? Figure out what all of this says about the campus culture at each college, and decide if this is a culture that you can find yourself thriving in.

  Student life, specifically, is also a large part of campus culture. Are you a student who is interested in the party scene, or would you rather a school without much Greek Life, or perhaps even a school that only has business or networking sororities and fraternities? What kind of extracurriculars do colleges offer, and are you interested in spending your free time exploring interests outside of your major or pursuing your major further in hands-on club environments? Do students seem like they have many options for academic and social life balance, and is that important to you? Are there religious or cultural values that you would want to keep participating in during your time on campus, and are there opportunities at colleges available for you to do so?

• Financial Needs

  We can’t talk about college fit without considering affordability. When looking at different colleges’ tuition, check in-state and out-of-state tuition differences, room-and-board costs, financial aid options, college-specific scholarships, and more. Colleges will often list the different additional financial aid packages available for prospective students, depending on different student circumstances, qualifications, and even merit—some colleges even meet 100% of students’ demonstrated need. FAFSA can also help with affordability. 

  Also, use the Gonzanga University Net Price Calculator, in which you enter some basic information about your family and income, and it will tell you what your likely sticker price is going to be for that school without you ever filling out the FAFSA or any other documents, just so you can get an idea of your personal financial situation in relation to college applications. If you don’t want to enter information, use College Scorecard, a government website, in which you can look up each individual college and see the net price by income level written for you.

  There are two kinds of aid that students should look at: need-based aid, and merit-based aid. Also consider in-state and out-of-state tuition, and the differences between the two. Ultimately, if a college’s cost of attendance is far beyond a student’s expected financial possibilities, then it’s smart to consider colleges that are a better financial fit.

• Housing and Dining

  Every student needs a place to stay and food to eat, yet housing and dining are often overlooked when it comes to college considerations. What is the dorm situation like on campus, from actual buildings to policies to space for upperclassmen? Is dorm life a key aspect of student life, or do most students move out of campus housing the first chance they get? How is the off-campus living, and is it affordable, safe, and convenient? How are the dining halls and meal plans? Are there many cafes or alternative dining options on campus, and how do you like the spread of nearby restaurants? Accommodations are important too—if you have certain dietary needs or restrictions, are there dining options available for you, or are you very limited (or perhaps not accommodated at all)? It’s important to consider these questions, as they will be crucial for your daily college experience—not to mention survivability! 

• Career and Post-Undergraduate Opportunities 

  If the pre-professional experience is particularly valuable to you in a college career, then gauge career opportunities on campus when you’re considering college fit. Many colleges provide students with career advisors or resume and cover letter proofreading services, and even offer or direct students to a myriad of internship opportunities, whether during the academic year or over breaks. If you’re into the research side of STEM, look into on-campus research opportunities and laboratories that hire students as research assistants or lab managers to help you make the first step into academic work. Look into pre-professional programs as well, which often put students on the right track to recruitment later on, even before they graduate. There may also be pre-professional student-run organizations on campus, from student consulting groups to literary journals to healthcare clubs—check what options there are, and consider whether that is a valuable option for you to have in your campus experience.

  If you’re looking to keep pursuing higher education after your undergraduate career (e.g. graduate school, medical school, or law school), there are many requirements you’ll need to collect over your undergraduate years to meet the qualification level for these programs. For example, for medical school, you’ll need certain courses, good GPA and test scores, and strong letters of recommendation. Are these things you can feasibly obtain at the college you’re considering? Are the courses you want easy to get spots in, or are classes notoriously difficult to enroll in? Are faculty there known to give strong letters of recommendation to graduate school-hopefuls? How is the typical relationship between faculty and students, and are the professors well-known in their fields? For any high school student who already has their heart set on education beyond their undergraduate years, these are important questions to consider.

Conclusion

This guide is meant to provide a look at how we at ILUMIN help students build their own personal college lists and figure out what college fit means to them. If you would like to see how we can customize college fit advice for your student’s specific interests and needs, please feel free to request a free consultation!