Blog · From the data · October 2, 2026
Fifty-one Orange County high schools publish a college list. Eight print the counts.
The angle
- Fifty-one Orange County high schools publish a college list. Eight of them print a number next to each college.
- On Santa Margarita Catholic High School's Class of 2025 list, the largest number is Saddleback College at 31, then the University of Utah at 26. Harvard, Columbia, Stanford and Cornell are also named on the page, and none of them is among its five largest counts.
- Sage Hill School's own printed counts for 2023 through 2025 add up to 567 offers and 402 seats. Those are our sums of the school's numbers, not a total the school published.
Every spring a parent sends me a picture of a high school's college list. It is always the same picture. Two columns of college names. Harvard sits near the top because H comes early in the alphabet. And under all of it is a good feeling: this school must be doing something right.
I understand the feeling. I also think that list is doing very little of the work you think it is.
A matriculation list is a list of where a school's graduates enrolled. In Orange County, 51 high schools publish a college list of some kind. Eight of them print a number next to each college name. The rest print names and nothing else.
That gap is the whole story. A name means at least one student. A number tells you how many.
Take Santa Margarita Catholic High School. It published where its Class of 2025 enrolled, across 154 colleges. Its largest number is Saddleback College at 31. Next is the University of Utah at 26. Harvard University, Columbia University, Stanford University and Cornell University are all named on the same document. None of them is among the five largest counts on it. Every name and number here is copied as the school printed it.
So the famous names are not the story. The colleges that took whole blocks of that class are close to home, or in Utah.
There is one more trap, and a school that publishes two lists lets you see it. One list counts offers. The other counts seats taken. Sage Hill School publishes both, for 2023 through 2025. Add up its own printed counts and you get 567 offers and 402 seats. Those are our sums of its numbers, not a total the school published. The gap is not a mistake. One student can hold several offers, and that student takes one seat.
Offers are a wish list. Seats are the decision.
If we were sitting across the table, here is what I would have you do. Pull up your own high school on Reach and check three things before you read a single college name: whether the list counts offers or seats, which class year it covers, and whether it prints counts at all. If it prints counts, read the largest ones first. Then ask your school for the numbers.
Several of their neighbors already print them.