As the 2008 admissions season— which has seen the largest college applicant pool ever—comes to a close, one immutable fact was confirmed by a recent Princeton Review survey: students still want to go to Harvard. A lot.

For the first time ever, Harvard captured the top spot in The Princeton Review’s “College Hopes & Worries Survey” as the “dream college” undergraduate applicants would most like to attend if cost and acceptance were of no concern. For the past four years, that distinction had been held by New York University.

Parents ranked Harvard as the third school they would most like their children to attend, trailing Princeton and Stanford.

Robert J. Franek, the vice president at The Princeton Review in charge of the survey, argued that Harvard’s higher profile due to the elimination of early action and the new financial aid initiative led to its taking over the top position.

“We found that the number one fear among students and parents was that a student would get into a school and not be able to pay for it,” he said. “Harvard has been very aggressive with its financial aid plan, and we certainly applaud that.”

Franek added that he thought the difference between students’ and parents’ preferences might be explained by the fact that students gravitated toward more urban environments, while parents found such areas less appealing.

Top administrators declined to speculate on the results of the survey.

Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 said in an e-mail that he had “no idea” what was behind the change in the rankings, and both Dean of the Faculty Michael D. Smith and Dean of the College David R. Pilbeam responded similarly.

Fitzsimmons and Smith said that irrespective of the rankings, they hoped Harvard’s new financial aid initiative was allowing more students to consider applying.

Another issue that was addressed by the survey was the mental strain of the application process, with 61 percent of the 9,000 college applicants surveyed saying that their stress level was “high” or “very high.”

The administrators had divergent views on the issue of applicant angst: Fitzsimmons emphasized the Admissions Office’s accessibility as a bulwark against stress, while Pilbeam said that the strains of the admissions process are impossible to avoid.

“How could it be made less stressful? We’ll still have approximately the same number of new places, and...my guess is that the number of qualified applicants will stay the same, if not increase,” Pilbeam said in an e-mail. “So there’s bound to be ‘inflation,’ which will lead to greater stress.”

—Staff writer Maxwell L. Child can be reached at mchild@fas.harvard.edu.