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Most families enter the college admissions process with a goal already in mind — and most of the time, it’s the wrong kind of goal.
“I want to get into a top-10 school.” “I want to go somewhere with a less than 20% acceptance rate.” These are the goals that dominate dinner table conversations and dominate TikTok comment sections. They are also, according to experienced admissions counselors, a recipe for stress, disappointment, and decisions that don’t serve students well.
Setting the right admissions goals isn’t about aiming lower. It’s about aiming smarter — and at the right things. Here’s how to think about it.
Step 1: Recognize That Outcome Goals Based on Rankings Are Deeply Flawed
The first step is one of the hardest: letting go of rankings and acceptance rates as the primary measure of success.
Sarah Farbman, senior admissions consultant at Great College Advice, is direct on this point. She distinguishes between what she calls admissions outcome goals — targeting schools by selectivity or prestige — and goals that are actually built around a student’s needs.
“Admissions rate is just a number,” Farbman explains. “It’s the number of students who got in divided by the number of students who applied. That’s it. It does not tell you anything about the quality of the education you’ll receive, or whether that college is suitable for you, your goals, your learning style, your needs.”
The same applies to rankings. The methodology used to generate college rankings does not measure educational quality, career outcomes, or student happiness. And yet these numbers carry enormous weight in how families approach the process.
The goal isn’t to dismiss ambition — it’s to make sure ambition is pointed in a direction that will actually produce a good outcome for the student in front of you.
Step 2: Build Goals Around Self-Knowledge
Once a family sets aside rankings as the organizing principle, the natural question is: what should goals be based on instead?
The answer is self-knowledge. Farbman encourages students and families to work through a set of foundational questions before building a college list:
What kind of academic environment has worked well for this student in the past?
Why is this student going to college — what do they hope to get out of the experience?
What career directions, even tentative ones, are they drawn to?
Is community size important? Location? Campus culture? Access to specific programs?
Is proximity to home a priority, or is distance desirable?
These aren’t abstract questions. The answers become the criteria that drive a college list — and a good college list, built on genuine criteria, will produce far better outcomes than one built on prestige metrics.
Veteran college admissions expert Jamie Berger describes this process at Great College Advice as working through a detailed spreadsheet with students — nearly 100 categories covering everything from academic programs to campus environment to geography. “Top 20 is not what we focus on,” he says. “Fit is what we focus on.”
Step 3: Redefine What “Success” Looks Like
One of the most useful reframes that Farbman offers is a new definition of a successful admissions outcome.
“Success, in my mind, is when a student has choices,” she says. “They don’t just have to go to the one school they got into. They have choices — and they can make choices in which the school is closely aligned with their own needs.”
This is what a balanced college list is designed to produce. At Great College Advice, every list includes reach schools, target schools, and likely schools — the categories that reflect honest, realistic probabilities given a student’s academic profile. The goal is not to avoid ambitious schools, but to make sure the list is structured so that a student will have genuinely good options regardless of how the most selective decisions fall.
Sarah Myers, Senior Admissions Consultant at the firm, emphasizes why this matters emotionally as well as practically. If a student has a well-built list, the rejection from a reach school stings — but it doesn’t devastate. “Students who have a good list probably will get some rejections, because that is a balanced list,” she notes. “But having schools on there that are going to be places they feel comfortable, no matter what happens, is the best way to buffer the disappointment of a rejection.”
Step 4: Don’t Overlook Financial Goals
Financial criteria belong at the very beginning of the goal-setting conversation — not as an afterthought once a list is already formed.
The Great College Advice Family Handbook is explicit about this: financial factors should be the starting point for every family, regardless of income level. Even families who could theoretically attend any school should think carefully about the role merit aid and cost play in the decision. Farbman notes that some of the most generously rewarding schools for merit-based aid are also excellent academic institutions that students may not have initially considered — and putting them on a list can make a dramatic financial difference.
If cost is a central concern, that shapes the list from the very start. Waiting until after admissions decisions arrive to think about affordability puts families in a much weaker position.
Step 5: Set Process Goals, Not Just Outcome Goals
This is the dimension of goal-setting that almost no one discusses — and it may be the most important.
Farbman calls these process goals: intentions about how a student and family will go through the admissions experience, not just where they hope to land at the end of it.
“The admissions process is just that — a process. It’s super long. It lasts for most of high school. And the way you go about it matters,” she says. “I want students to go through the admissions process in a way that makes them feel good, that’s given them the opportunity to have a reflective experience where they’ve learned something about themselves — and where they feel like the adults in their life are listening to them and guiding them, rather than bossing them around.”
She offers a vivid analogy: imagine two students who start at the same high school and end up at the same college. The difference in how they experienced the journey — one having worked toward and chosen that school, one feeling like they settled — will shape not just their college experience, but how they see themselves.
Setting a process goal might look like: “We will make decisions together as a family, with the student’s voice leading.” Or: “We will not measure this process by a single outcome, but by whether the student genuinely understands their options and feels ownership over the choice.”
A Note on “Dream Schools”
It’s worth acknowledging that dismantling the “dream school” framing is genuinely hard. Students live in a world where school prestige is discussed constantly and publicly. Farbman acknowledges the difficulty: “I really have compassion for students who are trying to find their way, especially in a world where everyone is talking about rankings online and on TikTok. It’s really hard to avoid.”
But the students and families who can resist that framing — or at least hold it loosely — tend to end up happier with both the process and the outcome.
Where Great College Advice Can Help
Setting admissions goals that are realistic, personalized, and actually aligned with a student’s needs is one of the most valuable things an experienced counselor can do for a family — and one of the hardest things to do without expert support.
At Great College Advice, every engagement begins with a deep self-assessment process: understanding the student’s academic profile, values, goals, and preferences before a single school name is discussed. The result is a college list built on criteria that belong to the student — not a ranking someone else designed.
Book a free consultation with us and let’s talk about your admissions goals.
