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A book I am studying has 日本の大学を受けたいです。translated as "I want to apply to a
Japanese university."

Finding it a little confusing to nail down what sense of 受ける is being used
here.
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nuances
Usage of 受ける in 日本の大学を受けたいです。
I'm guessing the difficulty lies in (not) understanding how to get into
Japanese universities in general.

Unlike (at least most, I believe) US universities, if you want to attend a
Japanese University X, you need to do the following.

  1. Apply to University X. This usually means sending the application form + high school records. There is no 'statement of purpose' kind of thing (I don't know how exactly US college admission works, so ignore this comment if it is not common either.) Recommendation is usually a formality.
  2. Take the 大学入学共通テスト (formerly センター試験) if X is a public university (as opposed to private uni). This is something like SAT/ ~~GCSE~~ A-levels in US/UK. This is usually for screening, you have only to reach a minimum score (set by the university X).
  3. Take the second test which is prepared by the university X. You need to score top r% to pass it, where r depends on the capacity of the university X.

There are _many_ variations, but the normal procedure is as above.

What is (probably) particular to Japanese (or many Asian) university admission
is step 3: Each university prepares its own paper test, which is more or less
proportionally difficult along with the prestige of the university. And this
step 3 is by far the most important (high school GPA does not matter really,
again I don't know how things are in other countries). Thus _being admitted to
a university X_ is largely synonymous to _passing the test prepared by the uni
X_. Hence 大学を受ける means (その)大学の試験を受ける= _take the test prepared by the
university_ or _apply to the university_ , 大学に受かる means _admitted to the
university_.
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This 受ける basically means "to take (an exam, a job interview, an audition,
etc.)". We say 試験を受ける, テストを受ける, 面接を受ける, オーディションを受ける and so on.

Since applying to a university/company/job almost always involves some kind of
test/interview, we can just say 京都大学を受ける, トヨタを受ける, シンデレラ(役)を受ける, and so on,
too. Always saying ～の入学試験を, ～の入社試験を or ～役のオーディションを is bothersome, so 受ける in
such cases automatically means taking the corresponding test without
explicitly saying it. "To apply to ～" is usually a natural translation, but
you cannot use 受ける if there is no exam. For example, you cannot say
ボランティアを受ける. The more direct translation of "to apply to " is ～に出願する, but this
is a rather stiff kango verb that is not very common in informal speech.

This is a fairly common derivative usage of 受ける, although it was not listed in
monolingual dictionaries I checked.

(By the way, does "to take Kyoto University" make sense in English, too? At
least DeepL recognizes this usage...)
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