How many schools should you apply to?

The honest answer is four.

Four schools is enough to give your student real options without drowning your family in work, and that second part matters more than people realize. Every school you add is another set of visits, another essay or three, another interview, another round of your student figuring out how they feel. Schools vary a lot in how much they ask: some take a common application and a shared essay, some tack on short extra questions, and some run their own bespoke process that wants a real chunk of your fall. You don't find out how heavy a school is until you're inside it.

So we worry less about applying to too few than too many. Once you're at five or six private schools, the work compounds and families burn out, right when your student needs to be at their best. If a school asks almost nothing, fine, it's close to free to add. But most ask plenty.

Your four can include public schools, not only private ones. The public lottery is a single online form, about as easy as it gets, so listing public schools costs you almost nothing in effort. Lowell and Ruth Asawa SOTA are their own animals: SOTA's audition is real work, and Lowell has its own grade-and-test requirements, so count each of those as a fuller commitment, not a freebie.

Three is fine, too, if three is your honest list. Going below that gets a little nerve-wracking, but if there aren't three schools that fit your student, that's worth facing honestly rather than padding the list with places you don't mean.

And one thing underneath all of this: you don't fully control where your student lands. Admissions will narrow your list for you. That's exactly why the schools you choose to apply to matter so much. Spend your energy putting the right schools on the list, the ones that fit this student, not the ones your friends' kids are chasing.