The 50 Largest Universities in the U.S.

What this ranking actually shows

Ranking by total enrollment puts online and multi-campus institutions at the top, because their student bodies are not limited by physical capacity. 5 of these 50 are private for-profit institutions and 39 are public. A list of the biggest physical campuses would look different, and neither list is more correct, because they answer different questions.

The concentration is the finding worth carrying away: the median US institution reporting an enrollment has 695 students, so American higher education is mostly small institutions with a very long tail, not a sector of mega-campuses.

The incident-rate column is included because campus size changes how a raw incident count should be read, not because a bigger university is more or less safe. All 50 of the 50 institutions here have a reported Clery rate. A rate reflects reporting practice as much as underlying risk, and at institutions where most students study online it is diluted by students who never set foot on a campus. See our methodology.