So I often advise families to try to create a balanced list of schools when applying to college, what does that mean? It means that the first category is 3 different ones. You take 6-12 colleges, and you want to find reaches, likelies and safeties; and these are based on the statistics of what a typical college accepts each year. You look at your child's GPA and test scores and you look at the college's statistics and you say, "Okay, on the reach schools, they typically take a little bit higher GPA and test scores, that's a reach. But I'm right in the normally accepted category, those are likelies; the trick to a list though is to find safety schools. Schools where you know your son or daughter will get in, but will actually be interested in going. Now, once you've done that, you also want to balance it with different types of schools. So I'll give you my own example; when I applied to colleges, I applied to UCLA, a big public school and Stanford, a mid-sized private school. I did that because I didn't really know what I wanted at that time and so I wanted to give myself some options. But on top of that, I was also balancing it financially. So a lot of people think that UCLA is a less expensive school, so you want to keep that on the list; and Stanford's a more expensive school, we might not be able to pay for that. But Stanford had a lot of scholarships, so it ended up costing my family only $12k more over 4 years than it would have gone to UCLA. So what i would suggest is do your research as a parent. Call up these schools, find out what their financial aid profile is and balance the schools so that your student or your child has many choices as possible.