@PengsPhils - acceptance rate is a function of how selective a school is.
If you wanted to scale popularity by schools size range perhaps the stat would be Applications Per Seat
But selectivity includes popularity in its computation - but is different
And while at it why not measure merchandising - selling shirts, bumper stickers, etc.?
No one is stopping the millions of kids in China (or any place worldwide) from applying to Harvard
Fact is more apply to BU
There’s pros and cons to apps per seat versus acceptance rate. Still, the problem is there is not a clear r definition of popular.
If by your definition, BU is more popular than Harvard, UCI is the 5th most popular college and San Diego State is the 7th most, I don’t see how it is useful.
It correlates to neither academic quality, sports quality, public opinion, or any other relevant metric. Sure, you can define it this way. But, it is pretty clearly useless to do so.
I made a glancing reference to that trend some posts upstream, suggesting a relationship between size and popularity. Do colleges grow because they are popular, or is it a matter of bigger schools becoming a bigger magnet for qualified students? I’m not sure how much BU has grown over the space of the past forty years, but, I’m betting Harvard has grown barely at all.
Prestigiosity.
'Nuff said.
The definition of “popular” is:
Around these parts, OSU is easily the most popular school.
BU might be that popular in the Boston area too, or UCLA is California. All might be more popular than Harvard, given that definition.
I don’t know about BU (a quick search yielded nothing about class size growth), but if we isolate the variable out of the equation, I would have confidence the result is the same. BU is just one case. Use one of the other at least a dozen schools with more applications than Harvard.
The answer to me seems clear just from intuition: colleges aren’t going to immediately grow because they are more popular. Harvard is your perfect case: very popular, hardly grown at all. The premise again is still flawed. Schools certainly can grow if they are becoming more popular - but many choose not to. The factor of selectivity is certainly related to the public opinion of popular.
Either way, as said before, I don’t see how this is of any use but circular debate. Have fun y’all.
And don’t count just Undergrad. Some schools might tack on 20,000 applications+ for their graduate and professional programs
Each school has a certain number of seats to sell in each class. You know how popular you are not by how many apps you get for each seat, but rather by how much you receive in return for the seat. The University of Alabama and Vanderbilt and Harvard both enroll National Merit Finalists every year. U of A practically gives away the seat to NMFs for free. There are NMFs that are going to go to U of A and never even bother applying to Vanderbilt or Harvard, because they know they are not going to pay for the seats if they are offered it. Which school is the most popular? You can’t judge by applications or even acceptances.
Why isn’t price a perfectly rational reason to choose one college over another?
For what it’s worth, here’s what College Confidential (that’s us! 
believes are the most popular colleges (other than the Ivies). http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/cc-top-universities/ (though, based on pure number of comments, I’d have to toss UA into that list as well!)
This is funny stuff, but seriously, it just depends on the exact definition of “popular,” and from whose viewpoint.
Certainly, a reasonable definition is “popular as a potential college for all high school applicants in the world.” For that, a reasonable criteria would be # of applications received. That’s an objective measurement of popularity among applicants worldwide. UCLA would be the most popular.
Popular could also mean well-known, or schools that people throughout the country take an interest in. All the big sports schools would be high on here. Duke, Alabama, etc. You see them on TV all the time.
When I think of popular, I think of it by region. I’ve spent some time in Columbus, OH. There I learned that "most popular is easy, Ohio State. Pretty much every business person I dealt with, in the hundreds, went to Ohio State for undergrad or grad, had kids there, or some other connection. It was remarkable.
In Southern California, where I’ve also spent time, “popular” for high school seniors is pretty easy. The top of the class at the public schools, UCLA and UCB are the most popular. Next tier is UCSB and UCSD. For the more middle to lower in the classes, Arizona and Oregon (their PAC12 connection and sports teams give name recognition, their 75-80% acceptance rates give them accessibility and “realistic chance” for just about everyone).
So the answer to which schools are most popular is “it depends.”
@circuitrider “Why isn’t price a perfectly rational reason to choose one college over another?”
Of course it can be. I don’t disagree. I suppose you could also fairly say that U of A is a “popular” choice for NMFs, as U of A is certainly enrolling their fair share of them. By that definition, it will be the more “popular” choice in my house in the future if we find ourselves with such a wonderful predicament.
My point though would be it would also be fair game for Harvard and Vandy to say who cares, we are so “popular” we can get all the NMFs we want without giving our seats. They are so “popular” they can even upcharge their higher income NMFs in order to give a seat or two to lower income NMFs, if that is what they want to do. In my book, this would be the way I would want to be “popular” if I had to choose, assuming I was on the other side of the fence.
The girl who wears the shortest dress to prom is usually very popular. For the evening anyway. 
Agree that popular is too squishy of a word to make the discussion very useful.
Generally speaking, give me a college that’s a little less popular. I’ll go there.
@SouthernHope Woah, what’s up with the Alabama numbers? It gets about as much activity as MIT. When did this happen?
Here is the top 10 Univ by # of applications.
Name Type Applicants-Total % Admitted-Total % Enrolled-Full-time Total
University of California-Los Angeles Public 72,676 22 35
University of California-Berkeley Public 61,717 18 37
University of California-San Diego Public 60,832 38 20
New York University Private 57,845 26 34
University of California-Irvine Public 56,515 42 21
University of California-Santa Barbara Public 55,258 44 19
California State University-Long Beach Public 55,019 31 24
St John’s University-New York Private 51,634 53 10
San Diego State University Public 51,163 31 24
University of California-Davis Public 49,820 45 23
Top 15 Univ by % of enrolled FT. Only Harvard is the most popular based on on # of applicants.
Name Type Applicants-Total % Admitted-Total % Enrolled-Full-time Total
Central Yeshiva Tomchei Tmimim Lubavitz Private 78 100 100
College of the Ozarks Private 3,006 13 91
Remington College-Dallas Campus Private 279 81 90
Everglades University Private 67 91 87
Missouri Valley College Private 2,164 22 86
Florida College Private 383 59 86
United States Naval Academy Public 19,146 7 85
United States Military Academy Public 15,408 9 85
Robert Morris University Illinois Private 4,080 21 84
University of Arkansas at Little Rock Public 1,443 53 83
Mount Carmel College of Nursing Private 190 54 83
Marshall University Public 2,866 79 82
Martin Luther College Private 209 96 82
Harvard University Private 35,023 6 81
Delta State University Public 472 89 81
University of West Alabama Public 462 100 81
Remington College-Memphis Campus Private 294 70 81
It is like asking what is the most popular car in America?
People might aspire to a Mercedes or Porsche but the car that the most people buy is the most popular.
Same holds true for colleges - with the one wrinkle the consumer can only control the application.
Thanks for the list of most applications - does this exist with grad and professional schools added in?
Hi, I registered with CC just to enter this discussion. It seems to me that the best measure of “popular” is the Parchment ranking that adds/subtracts points based on the preferences of accepted students. So a student who is accepted- this is a simplified explanation and merely for example!- at both Amherst and Williams and then chooses Williams gives Williams a point and takes one away from Amherst. Going through many thousands of these decisions annually yields a ranking where schools with the most points are preferred by accepted students (hence more popular) over those with less points. This head-to-head match up system gets rid of the significant objections with using application numbers as a proxy for popularity. Of course the warning about relying on Parchment is that the data is self-reported so subject to user error, and the users are self-selected. It seems like Naviance could take its database and run the same analysis to show preferences.