Nine U.S. universities now receive more than 100,000 first-year applications a year -- a number that would have sounded absurd a decade ago. It's tempting to read that purely as "these are the schools everyone wants," and that's part of it. But looking at the actual list, the sharper pattern isn't which schools are most desired -- it's which schools made it structurally easiest to end up on the list in the first place.

The 100,000 club

For recent admissions cycles: UCLA led the country with roughly 146,672 first-year applications, followed by UC San Diego (141,752), UC Berkeley (133,128), and UC Irvine (125,987). NYU topped 120,000 for its Class of 2029, believed to be the most of any private university in the country. The University of Michigan received 108,666 first-year applications for fall 2026, up 29% over five years. UC Santa Barbara (108,503), Northeastern (106,907), and UC Davis (~104,850) round out the group. Six of those nine spots belong to a single system -- the University of California -- which received a systemwide record of over 251,000 applications (first-year plus transfer) for fall 2026.

The real common thread: applying to one more school costs almost nothing

This is the part that gets skipped in most coverage of these numbers, and it's the most useful thing to actually understand. NYU and Northeastern are both Common App members, meaning a student who has already written one central essay and entered their activities list for a different school can add NYU or Northeastern with a few extra clicks and whatever supplemental questions each asks. The six UC campuses work the same way through a different mechanism: the UC system uses its own single application, not the Common App, but that application lets you write your activities list and four personal-insight responses once and then simply check a box for each of the nine UC undergraduate campuses you want them sent to. A student applying to Berkeley is, structurally, one checkbox away from also applying to UCLA, San Diego, Irvine, Santa Barbara, and Davis -- which is a large part of why all six cleared 100,000 in the same cycle. This is the same mechanism our piece on colleges dropping supplemental essays documented directly: UVA's applications jumped 52% in Regular Decision the same year it cut its essay requirement, because removing friction is one of the most reliable ways to raise a school's raw application count, independent of how much more desirable the school actually became.

Test-optional and test-blind policies remove a second gate

Every school on this list has also removed the barrier of needing a "good enough" test score before applying at all. The UC system has been fully test-blind since 2020 -- it won't look at a score even if you send one -- while NYU, Michigan, and Northeastern are all test-optional. See our full breakdown of what test-optional and test-blind actually mean for how that landscape has been shifting elsewhere; the specific relevance here is that a student who might have self-selected out of applying over a mediocre score has one less reason to hold back at any of these nine schools.

What isn't just mechanical: these schools are also pitching something specific

Lower friction explains volume; it doesn't fully explain demand. Each of these schools is also making a deliberate, explicit pitch, and it's less about prestige for its own sake than about career outcomes and scale. NYU's own admissions leadership has framed its growth around students wanting "a rigorous liberal arts education that builds on the vibrancy and diversity" of an urban setting with direct access to internships and global learning. Northeastern's chief enrollment officer, Satyajit Dattagupta, put it even more directly: "the value derived from our focus on a personalized experiential education through global experiences, coupled with outstanding academics and research, is unparalleled in higher education." Northeastern backs that up with real numbers it markets hard -- co-op placements with more than 4,600 employers across 151 countries, a network of 14 global campuses, and 96% of graduates employed or in graduate school within nine months. These are schools selling a specific, legible outcome, not just a name.

Being genuinely large is part of the story too

Every school on this list is also just big. UCLA, Michigan, and the rest of the UC system admit thousands of students per campus per year -- these aren't small, scarcity-driven institutions rejecting nearly everyone because they only have 1,500 seats to offer. A large research university with dozens of majors and a big enough operation to process six-figure applicant pools gives a much wider range of students a plausible reason to apply than a small college ever could -- more majors, more scholarship tiers, more geographic pull, more name recognition among relatives and counselors nationally and internationally. Scale attracts more applicants partly just by existing at scale.

The catch: a huge applicant number and a huge admit class can coexist with a brutal acceptance rate

The consequence of all this is a specific, almost paradoxical profile: schools that are simultaneously enormous and extremely hard to get into in percentage terms. NYU's acceptance rate for the Class of 2029 fell to 7.7%, the lowest in the university's history, out of that 120,000+ applicant pool. Northeastern's acceptance rate has been reported around 5.6% for a recent cycle. That's a genuinely different shape of selectivity than a small elite college with a tiny applicant pool and a tiny class -- these schools admit thousands of students every year, and are still historically hard to get into, precisely because the applicant pool is inflated by exactly the low-friction mechanics above.

What this means for you

  • Don't read "100,000+ applications" as a pure popularity signal. A meaningful share of that number, especially across the UC system, is the same students getting added to multiple campuses' totals through one checkbox-driven application -- not six separate, independent decisions to apply.
  • A school being huge doesn't make it an easy target, even though it admits a large class. NYU and Northeastern's acceptance rates are now competitive with, or below, plenty of schools most families assume are "harder" to get into -- run your own numbers rather than assuming a big school is automatically a safer bet.
  • If a school specifically markets career outcomes or experiential learning (co-op, global campuses, internship access), verify the actual placement numbers it's citing rather than taking the pitch at face value -- Northeastern's and NYU's numbers above came from the universities' own admissions and communications offices.
  • Check whether a school you're considering has dropped a supplemental essay or gone test-optional recently -- both changes reliably drive application volume up on their own, separate from any real shift in how selective or good the school actually is. See our piece on how many colleges you should actually apply to for how this rising volume should factor into your own list-building.

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