How to Build a School List: The Schools Taiwanese Students Most Often Apply to Together

A Taiwanese student's school list usually has 5 schools in 1 country. The most common pair is UIUC and UCSD (83 people applied to both), followed by UCLA and UCSD, then UCSD and USC; in the UK it is UCL and KCL. Longer lists bring more admits, but the admit rate per school drops, so tiering your list matters more than piling on schools.

Key takeaways

• Among the 737 people who applied to 3 or more programs, the median applied to 5 schools (25th/75th percentile: 3 to 7) and to just 1 country.

• 58% applied only to the US and 18% only to the UK; just 7% applied to both.

• There are 704 school pairs with 5 or more shared applicants. 11 of them exceed 50 people, and nearly all of those are University of California campuses plus UIUC, USC and CMU.

• 74% of UCLA applicants also applied to UCSD; 49% of UCL applicants also applied to KCL.

• People who applied to 10 or more schools got a median of 6 admits, but their overall admit rate was only 50%; for those who applied to 4 or fewer, it was 82%.

The most common school pairs

US pairs nearly all revolve around the same group of schools: UCSD, UIUC, USC, UCLA, CMU and UCI. The table below shows the 12 pairs with the most shared applicants.

In the UK, the most common pair is UCL + KCL (44 people), followed by Manchester with UCL and Manchester with KCL (37 people each).

UCSD sits at the center of the whole network: 6 of the top 12 pairs include it. Among Taiwanese EE/CS and data science applicants it is a school that is "ranked high enough, with not too few spots," so many people use it as the middle of their list.

People who applied to X also applied to

We took the 6 schools with the most applicants and looked at which other schools appear on those applicants' lists. Each percentage is the share of X's applicants who also applied to that school.

US and UK lists barely overlap. UK applicants' lists are the three London schools plus Manchester, Edinburgh and Warwick; US applicants' lists are California schools plus strong Midwest engineering schools.

How to tier your school list

We split schools into three tiers by QS 2027 rank: top 50, 51 to 100, and 101 and below (including schools without a QS rank). Counted by application entries, the three tiers make up 28%, 31% and 41%, so a typical list is "light at the top, heavy at the bottom."

Admit rates by tier (counted by application entries) differ most at the very top:

QS rank is not the same as how hard Taiwanese applicants find a school. USC is QS #153, Georgia Tech is #142 and UCI is #252, but in US News 2027 they rank 27, 29 and 34. Only 34% of this site's Georgia Tech applicants were admitted, which makes it harder than many QS top 50 schools. When tiering US schools, it is best to look at both US News 2027 and the actual admit rates on this site.

Pair outcomes: which school did people who applied to both get into?

This only counts people with an admit or reject result from both schools. "Admitted" means admitted to at least one program at that school. Cells with fewer than 5 people say "Too few."

The table shows that few people got into UCLA without also getting into UCSD, so UCLA is clearly the harder end of that pair. UCL and KCL work the same way, with KCL often serving as the backup to UCL. CMU and UCSD each win some: the two schools don't screen for exactly the same things, so applying to both spreads the risk.

How many schools is enough?

The more schools you apply to, the more admits you get, but the hit rate per application falls, because the extra schools are usually harder ones.

"At least 1 admit" is close to 100% mainly because of reporting bias: people who got in are more willing to share on the site. It does not mean that applying to 3 schools guarantees you a place somewhere.

How to use this data

1. Pick the country first, then rank schools. 80% of people apply to only one country, and US and UK lists barely overlap. Applying across countries means preparing two sets of documents and timelines, so know your limits.

2. Aim for 5 to 8 schools, covering all three tiers. The median is 5. Among people whose lists covered all three tiers, 71% got at least one QS top 50 admit.

3. Keep the top tier to a third or less. The admit rate at QS top 20 schools is only 44%; too many of them turns your list into a string of rejection letters.

4. Judge safety schools by actual admit rates, not just rankings. For example, over 70% of this site's applicants to USC and to UCI were admitted, which is safer than their QS ranks suggest; Georgia Tech is the opposite.

5. Use popular pairs as a reference, not a template. Other people's lists reflect their own backgrounds. Take your GPA and language scores to admission results search, compare results from people with similar backgrounds, and then decide which schools go in each tier.

FAQ

Q: How many schools do people usually apply to for a master's abroad?Among the 737 people on this site who applied to 3 or more programs, the median was 5 schools and 5 programs, and the middle half applied to between 3 and 7 schools.

Q: Which other schools do UCLA applicants usually apply to?74% also applied to UCSD, followed by UIUC (54%), USC (45%), CMU (41%) and UC Berkeley (40%).

Q: For a UK master's, which schools should I pair with UCL?49% of UCL applicants also applied to KCL, 41% to Manchester and 36% to Imperial. Of the 40 people with results from both UCL and KCL, 26 were admitted to both.

Q: Does applying to more schools raise my chances?You will get more admits (people with 10 or more schools had a median of 6), but the admit rate falls from 82% to 50%. Applying to more schools helps only so much; tiering matters more than numbers.

About the data

• "Taiwanese students" means OfferLand users: the site's users are mostly Taiwanese students, the data is self-reported, there is no nationality field, and it is not official school data.

• Sample: 737 applicants who shared results for 3 or more different programs on OfferLand, 4,613 result entries in total, dated December 2015 to July 2026, 98% of them from 2020 onward. Mostly master's (679 people's lists were mainly master's programs, 47 mainly PhD), with a few applying across degree levels.

• "Schools" are counted by university: several programs at the same school count once. Pairs are listed only when 5 or more people applied to both.

• Admit rate = (admitted + enrolled) ÷ (admitted + enrolled + rejected), counted by application entries; 36 waitlisted or pending entries are excluded. In the pair outcomes section, "admitted" means admitted to at least one program at that school.

• School rankings are QS 2027 and US News 2027.

• 273 of the 737 people (37%) reported no rejections at all. Reports lean toward admits, so actual admit rates may be lower.

• Statistics from OfferLand's own sample, self-reported by users; not official school data.

Further reading

• Taiwanese Students' Study Abroad Application Report 2026

• US study abroad application data

• UK study abroad application data