When do we start looking for colleges with our kids? We have twin boys who are in their Sophomore year in high school and a lot of their friends in Junior year are starting to look for colleges. I don’t remember college visiting trips being a big deal when I was looking for college as a teen but nowadays in Seattle it feels like it’s a thing. Maybe because my husband and I both grew up in Canada and went to UBC (also my parents and aunts and uncles went there too….)we didn’t really have this kind of pressure. So when I was sent a list of the most popular colleges in the United States from Research.com it piqued my interest and I thought I’d share it with you too.
Most popular colleges in the United States in 2024/2025 according to Research.com
Research.com looked at more than 6000+ higher education institutions across America and its territories and analyzed the number of applications, admissions, and enrollment for each institution to come up with this list. Looking at the list below, I know we’ve all probably heard of some of these schools (even in Canada in the 90’s we learned a lot from American television growing up with the Gilmore Girls, 90210, the OC and Gossip Girl) but I’ve only ever visited a few intentionally and never with the kids. I think we’ll try to see how many of these places we can visit in the next couple years and try to take tours as well. (I’ll update below with college tour information if and when we do)
#1 California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, California)
#2 Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts)
#3 Stanford University (Stanford, California)
#4 Columbia University (New York, New York)
#5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts)
#6 Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut)
#7 Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island)
#8 University of Chicago (Chicago, Illinois)
#9 Princeton University (Princeton, New Jersey)
#10 Duke University (Durham, North Carolina)
If you want see maybe the top 25 most popular or even the 100 most popular colleges you can continue to scroll the list on the site and there are around 1700 schools on this list. University of Washington (one of the closest colleges to us in Seattle) Seattle Campus is #223 on the list and Whitman in Walla Walla is right behind it at #224. It is easy to see how the search for post-secondary education can be pretty overwhelming. To further pinpoint your search you can also filter for most popular degrees, colleges by state and even most affordable colleges too. For affordable colleges for Washington State students a term I’ve heard thrown around a little here is WUE and these colleges are ones that agree not to charge out of state students more than 150% of the institutions in-state rate.
For college visits, some people with kids older than mine have told me that they wish they started looking at colleges earlier. They’ve suggested that when we travel to places for work or fun that we take our teens along and explore the colleges in the area and even try to schedule tours, even if these might not be the places our kids are interested in. This kind of thing gives them experience and exposure so that if we get a chance to tour colleges that they are interested in then they also know what to ask and what to look for when they get there.
Do you have teens about the same age as my teens? Are you looking into colleges right now too?
(PS this is not the end-all be-all college ranking list, and should not be used in that way-as with anything like this it’s definitely important to use a lot of different sources, but it was fun to read through it a bit and get an idea of colleges that my kids might be hearing about and learn about them too.)
Terumi Pong is a Seattle-based family travel writer and mom of twin teenage boys. She loves coffee and pastries, shopping local and looking for greener ways to live. She is also known as Scout’s mom (Scout is a 5ish pound little black yorkie-poo)