Top 10 Most Applied To U.S. Colleges and Universities in 2026
Every autumn, several million high school students in the United States, Canada and abroad sit down to decide where to send an application. A small number of universities absorb a startling share of that demand. Ten American institutions each received more than 90,000 first-year applications in a single admissions cycle, and the largest of them received more than 146,000.
That concentration is the story. Applications to the most sought-after American universities have grown far faster than the seats available, which is why an admit rate that looked ordinary a decade ago now reads as selective, and why a campus that admits nearly half its applicants can still sit inside the ten most applied-to schools in the country.
Here are the ten most applied-to colleges and universities in the United States, ranked by first-year applications received for a single fall term, with the admit rate each school reported alongside it.
The ten most applied-to U.S. universities at a glance
| Rank | University | First-year applications | Admitted | Admit rate | Cycle |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | UCLA | 146,692 | 15,903 | 10.8% | Fall 2026 |
| 2 | UC San Diego | 141,767 | 38,571 | 27.2% | Fall 2026 |
| 3 | UC Berkeley | 133,154 | 13,967 | 10.5% | Fall 2026 |
| 4 | UC Irvine | 126,005 | 38,165 | 30.3% | Fall 2026 |
| 5 | New York University | more than 120,000 | not published | not published | Fall 2025 |
| 6 | University of Michigan | 108,666 | not published | not published | Fall 2026 |
| 7 | UC Santa Barbara | 108,512 | 47,716 | 44.0% | Fall 2026 |
| 8 | Northeastern University | 106,907 | not published | not published | Fall 2026 |
| 9 | UC Davis | 104,864 | 48,015 | 45.8% | Fall 2026 |
| 10 | University of Texas at Austin | 90,562 | not published | not published | Fall 2025 |
University of California figures are the campus admit data the UC system publishes for each of its nine undergraduate campuses, preliminary as of June 2026. Michigan, Northeastern, NYU and Texas report on their own schedules, and each figure below is dated to the cycle the university itself stated. Data as of September 1, 2026.
10. University of Texas at Austin — 90,562 first-year applications
Texas is the newest entry on this list and the fastest-growing. The university received 90,562 first-year applications for fall 2025, up 24.3% from the 72,885 it received a year earlier, and it was the third consecutive record. Out-of-state applications rose 48% in that single year, against 12% growth from Texas residents.
Best Known For: Engineering, computer science and business at scale, plus a research budget and an athletics programme that both operate at the top of American public higher education. Austin itself does a great deal of the recruiting.
Why It Attracts Applicants: The in-state pool is enormous by itself, and the lopsided growth is the more interesting half. Out-of-state applications rising four times faster than resident ones suggests Texas is now being weighed against private universities that cost several times as much, and winning that comparison on price.
Famous Alumni: Michael Dell, who started what became Dell in a university dormitory, and the actor Matthew McConaughey, who took a degree in radio-television-film and later returned to teach there.
9. UC Davis — 104,864 first-year applications
Davis admitted 48,015 of its 104,864 applicants for fall 2026, an admit rate of 45.8%. It is the least selective campus on this list and one of the largest by land area in the United States, which is part of the same fact: Davis has the room to say yes.
Best Known For: Agricultural and environmental sciences, veterinary medicine and viticulture. The veterinary school is among the largest anywhere, and the university’s work on food systems and drought has a reach well beyond California.
Why It Attracts Applicants: A student who wants a research university with a genuine specialism, rather than a general one, tends to find Davis on the shortlist early. The admit rate also means it functions as a realistic option inside a UC application that costs the same to send to nine campuses as to one.
Famous Alumni: Charles Rice, who took a zoology degree at Davis in 1974 and shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the hepatitis C virus, and the astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson, who earned her doctorate there.
8. Northeastern University — 106,907 applications
Northeastern reported a record 106,907 applications for the 2026-27 academic year. It is the only private university on this list besides NYU, and the only school here whose application growth is so clearly traceable to a single programme.
Best Known For: Co-op. Northeastern students alternate terms of study with paid full-time work placements, and the university reports partnerships with 4,661 employers and experiential placements in 151 countries.
Why It Attracts Applicants: Families are pricing a degree against what it produces. Co-op turns that question into something a seventeen-year-old can picture, which is a powerful recruiting argument at a private-university price. Northeastern’s largest domestic applicant pools come from New York, Massachusetts, California, New Jersey and Texas; internationally, from China, India, South Korea, Canada and Brazil. Canada in the top five is not an accident, and it is the clearest signal on this list that Canadian students are part of this demand rather than spectators to it.
Famous Alumni: The broadcaster Wendy Williams, who graduated from the College of Arts and Sciences in 1985 after presenting on the campus radio station.
7. UC Santa Barbara — 108,512 first-year applications
Santa Barbara received 108,512 first-year applications for fall 2026 and admitted 47,716, a rate of 44.0%. It sits 154 applications behind Michigan, which is close enough that the two could swap places in either direction next cycle.
Best Known For: Physics, materials science and marine biology, and a campus that runs along a beach with a lagoon in the middle of it. Several of its faculty have won Nobel Prizes while teaching there, which is a different claim from the alumni line below and worth keeping separate.
Why It Attracts Applicants: The setting is the obvious draw and the research is the durable one. Santa Barbara is one of the few places where an undergraduate can work in a laboratory doing genuinely frontier work, which is exactly what produced its best-known graduate.
Famous Alumni: Carol Greider, who took a biology degree through the College of Creative Studies in 1983 and shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of how telomeres and telomerase protect chromosomes. She made the underlying discovery at 23, before finishing her doctorate.
6. University of Michigan — 108,666 first-year applications
Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus drew 115,125 undergraduate applications for fall 2026, a record: 108,666 from first-year applicants and 6,459 from transfers. Applications are up 29% across five years. Nearly two thirds of applicants, 71,893 of them, applied for early consideration.
The interesting detail is that first-year applications were down slightly against fall 2025 even as the overall total set a record. A list built on raw growth would have missed that; a school this large can set a record and cool at the same time.
Best Known For: Being the closest thing the United States has to a complete university. Michigan is top-tier in engineering, business, medicine, law, public policy and the arts simultaneously, and it plays football in front of more than 100,000 people while doing it.
Why It Attracts Applicants: Breadth is the answer. An applicant who does not yet know what they want can commit to Michigan without narrowing anything, and the alumni network is large enough to matter in almost any field afterwards.
Famous Alumni: Larry Page, who took a computer engineering degree in 1995 and co-founded Google, and former U.S. President Gerald Ford.
5. New York University — more than 120,000 first-year applications
NYU is the only private university in the United States drawing this kind of volume. It reported that applications for the Class of 2029 topped 120,000 for the first time, a record it believes to be the largest applicant pool of any private American university. That is the most recent figure NYU has published, so it sits here on the fall 2025 cycle while most of this list has moved on to fall 2026.
Applying to NYU also means budgeting for New York, which is a separate decision from the acceptance. If you are weighing what a city costs before you commit four years to it, our ranking of the most expensive U.S. cities to rent and live in covers the same ground from the housing side.
Best Known For: Film, drama, business and the fact that it has no real campus. NYU is dispersed through Greenwich Village, and its Tisch School of the Arts and Stern School of Business are destinations in their own right.
Why It Attracts Applicants: The city is the pitch. For students in film, theatre, finance or journalism, the internship market is a subway ride away rather than a summer relocation, and NYU has built its degree structures around that.
Famous Alumni: The directors Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee, both of Tisch.
4. UC Irvine — 126,005 first-year applications
Irvine received 126,005 first-year applications for fall 2026 and admitted 38,165, a rate of 30.3%. It is the youngest school on this list by some distance, having opened in 1965, and it now out-draws almost every university in the country.
Best Known For: Health sciences, computer science and a criminology programme that ranks at the top nationally. Irvine also has one of the strongest competitive gaming programmes of any American university, which sounds like a novelty until you notice how many applicants it reaches.
Why It Attracts Applicants: Irvine offers a research university in Orange County with an admit rate that makes it a plausible target rather than a lottery ticket, which is a rare combination inside the UC system.
Famous Alumni: The Pulitzer-winning novelist Michael Chabon, who graduated from Irvine’s writing MFA in 1987, and the actor Jon Lovitz, who took a drama degree there in 1979.
3. UC Berkeley — 133,154 first-year applications
Berkeley is the most selective school on this list. It received 133,154 first-year applications for fall 2026 and admitted 13,967, an admit rate of 10.5%, marginally tighter than UCLA’s. Roughly nine applicants in ten are turned away by a public university.
Best Known For: Producing the underlying science that other places commercialise. Berkeley researchers have added elements to the periodic table, and the university’s computer science, economics and chemistry departments sit at or near the top of their fields.
Why It Attracts Applicants: Reputation compounds. Berkeley is the flagship of the best-known public university system in the world, and for an in-state student the combination of that name and public tuition is difficult to argue with.
Famous Alumni: Gordon Moore, the Intel co-founder whose observation about transistor density became Moore’s law, and Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple and later completed his Berkeley engineering degree.
2. UC San Diego — 141,767 first-year applications
San Diego received 141,767 first-year applications for fall 2026 and admitted 38,571, a rate of 27.2%. It is within 5,000 applications of UCLA, which makes the top of this ranking closer than it looks.
Best Known For: Science and engineering. San Diego is a founding node of the American biotechnology industry, its Scripps Institution of Oceanography is among the oldest and largest marine research centres in the world, and its computer science and bioengineering programmes are consistently near the top.
Why It Attracts Applicants: For a student aiming at medicine, biotech or engineering, the surrounding cluster of research institutes and companies is part of the offer rather than a bonus. The residential college system also gives a very large university a smaller feel, which matters more than prospective students expect.
Famous Alumni: Craig Venter, whose team raced to sequence the human genome, and Mike Judge, who took a physics degree in 1985 and went on to create “King of the Hill,” “Beavis and Butt-head” and “Office Space.”
1. UCLA — 146,692 first-year applications
UCLA is the most applied-to university in the United States, and has been for years. It received 146,692 first-year applications for fall 2026 and admitted 15,903, an admit rate of 10.8%. A year earlier, for fall 2025, it received 145,086. The pool is still growing from a base that was already the largest in the country.
Best Known For: Range. UCLA is a top-ten research university, a film school that has shaped Hollywood, a medical centre of national standing and the most decorated athletics programme in NCAA history, all on 419 acres in Westwood.
Why It Attracts Applicants: UCLA is what happens when a genuinely elite university sits in a city students already want to live in and charges public tuition to do it. That combination is close to unique, and the application numbers reflect it.
Famous Alumni: Jackie Robinson, who competed in four varsity sports at UCLA before breaking Major League Baseball’s colour barrier, and the director Francis Ford Coppola, who took his MFA at the UCLA film school.
Why the University of California takes six of the ten places
Six of these ten schools belong to one system, and that is partly a story about demand and partly a story about paperwork.
The UC system uses a single application. A student fills it in once, pays a fee per campus, and can send it to all nine undergraduate campuses at once. A single ambitious applicant in California can therefore appear in the application count of UCLA, San Diego, Berkeley, Irvine, Santa Barbara and Davis simultaneously. Michigan, NYU, Northeastern and Texas each require their own separate application, which means their totals are built one student at a time.
That does not make the UC numbers wrong. They are applications received, which is what the ranking measures, and every campus really does have to read them. It does mean the six UC entries are not six independent pools of six different students, and anyone comparing UCLA’s 146,692 with Northeastern’s 106,907 should hold that in mind.
The other half of the explanation is capacity. California educates an enormous number of students, and the UC system is the top public tier of a state that treats access to it as policy. Two campuses on this list, Santa Barbara and Davis, admit more than 40% of applicants. They are on this list because of scale, not scarcity.
What the admit rates actually tell you
The admit rates on this list range from 10.5% at Berkeley to 45.8% at Davis, and the spread matters more than the ranking does.
Berkeley and UCLA turn away roughly nine of every ten applicants. Irvine and San Diego admit between a quarter and a third. Santa Barbara and Davis admit close to half. A student building an application list from this page should treat those as three different categories rather than one tier of famous names, because they behave differently. Applying to all six UC campuses on this list is one application and six fees, and it produces a spread of outcomes that a student targeting only the top two would never see.
It is also worth saying plainly that an admit rate is not a quality ranking. Davis admits 45.8% of applicants and produced a Nobel laureate in medicine. Selectivity measures the gap between demand and seats, and nothing else.
How this list is counted, and why other lists disagree
There are several ways to count applications, and they produce different orders. This list uses one method throughout: first-year (freshman) applications received by a single campus for a single fall term, as reported by the institution itself.
That rules out three things other rankings include:
- Transfer and graduate applications. Michigan received 115,125 undergraduate applications for fall 2026, but 6,459 of those were transfers, so the number used here is 108,666.
- Multi-campus systems counted as one school. Some universities report a single figure covering twenty or more campuses. That is a real number, and it is not comparable to a single campus’s intake.
- Applications to online and continuing-education programmes. A handful of institutions report six-figure application volumes that are dominated by programmes with no campus attached.
Where a university has published fall 2026 figures, this list uses them. NYU and Texas had not published a fall 2026 first-year total as of September 1, 2026, so their most recent published figures are used and labelled as such. The University of California figures come from the admit data UC publishes for each campus and are preliminary as of June 2026.
One consequence of counting it this way: a school can drop off the list without its applications falling, simply because everyone else grew faster. Two of the ten schools on this list in the 2024 edition were counted on a broader basis than first-year applications to one campus. On a like-for-like count, they no longer place.
What this means if you are applying from Canada
Northeastern’s five largest international applicant pools include Canada, and it is a fair guess the same is true across most of this list. If you are a Canadian family looking at these schools, three things change the arithmetic.
The first is currency. Tuition, residence and fees are billed in U.S. dollars while your savings are in Canadian ones, so the sticker price is not the price you pay. A 5% move in the exchange rate over a four-year degree is real money, and the Bank of Canada publishes the daily exchange rate you can use to check where you actually stand. Anyone budgeting for this should be looking at total cost in Canadian dollars, updated annually, rather than a U.S. figure from a brochure.
The second is where the school is. Tuition is the number every ranking quotes, and rent is the number that decides whether the budget works. New York, Boston and Los Angeles sit at one end of that range; Davis, Irvine and Austin sit somewhere else entirely. If cost of living is going to be the deciding factor, our guides to the most affordable U.S. cities to live in and the expensive end of the same market are the place to start.
The third is how the money is held before you spend it. Money you will need in eighteen months should not be sitting in the same place as money you will not touch for a decade, and the account matters as much as the investment. A TFSA is the flexible option for a family holding education savings outside a registered education plan, because withdrawals are tax-free and the room comes back the following calendar year. If you are not sure how much room you have, our TFSA contribution room calculator will work it out from your contribution history.
And once a student is actually there, the cost side is where most of the control is. Our list of ways to save money as a college or university student is written for exactly that stretch.
The short version
UCLA remains the most applied-to university in the United States, with 146,692 first-year applications for fall 2026. UC San Diego and UC Berkeley follow, and six of the ten places belong to the University of California, helped by a shared application that lets one student appear in six counts.
The list is no longer a California story alone. Michigan, NYU, Northeastern and Texas each drew more than 90,000 applications on their own separate forms, and Texas is growing faster than anything else here. What holds across all ten is the gap between demand and seats, which is why an applicant list built from this page should mix the 10% schools with the 45% ones rather than treating them as one tier.
Disclaimer: The content on bestcanadianstocks.ca is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Always consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions. Application figures are as reported by each university; University of California figures are preliminary as of June 2026. Data as of September 1, 2026.
