Parent PLUS loans have quietly become one of the largest levers families pull to pay for college. As of July 1, that lever only bends so far. New federal caps limit parent borrowing to $20,000 a year and $65,000 total per student, a provision of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that took effect this week and ends more than a decade of open-ended parent borrowing.

Washington Post personal finance columnist Michelle Singletary has tracked the run-up to this moment. Parent PLUS balances grew by $43.8 billion over the past decade, even though the number of borrowers barely moved, climbing from 3.4 million to 3.6 million recipients. The amount families borrowed rose by more than 70%, while the number of families borrowing rose by only 6%. Sticker prices kept climbing too: George Washington University announced last month that 2026-27 tuition will reach $73,000, with housing and dining adding another $18,000 for incoming freshmen.

A 2026 Sallie Mae survey found that parents now cover close to half of college costs through a mix of income, savings and borrowing. Singletary and her husband made a deliberate choice about where that responsibility should sit.

“Should parents shoulder the primary cost of college? I think so.”

— Michelle Singletary, The Washington Post

For families without federal borrowing room to spare, the new cap forces a decision that Singletary’s generation could put off: whether the student, not the parent, absorbs the gap between the sticker price and what a family can pay outright.

Rapid Recap

🎓📈 All Nine UC Campuses Land 4.5 Stars or Better — Money magazine’s 2026 Best Colleges list gave every University of California undergraduate campus at least 4.5 out of 5 stars, with Berkeley, Davis, Irvine and San Diego earning the full five. The methodology weighs affordability and student outcomes above reputation, and UC notes that today’s graduates carry significantly less debt than they did a decade ago.

🏫📋 Colorado Rolls Out a New Way to Signal Which Colleges “Have Your Back” — The Colorado Department of Higher Education this month unveiled a revamped Basic Needs Campus designation, recognizing 17 schools for supporting students facing food insecurity or mental health needs, Chalkbeat reports. The label carries no additional funding, but it sets a statewide bar for services like food pantries and on-campus counseling.

✈️🎓 Virginia Colleges Are Losing Students to the Rest of the World — More than 10,300 Virginia students studied abroad in the 2023-24 school year, a 3.1% jump from the year before, Virginia Mercury reports. Some in-state schools are countering the pull by opening international outposts of their own, including George Mason University’s campus in South Korea.

🧮🤝 ETS Is Buying ACT, Merging Two of Admissions Testing’s Biggest Names — Education Week reports that ETS, the nonprofit behind the Praxis teacher-licensing exams, will acquire ACT, which serves roughly 1.38 million test-takers a year. ETS’s CEO says nothing changes for this year’s test-takers, but the deal positions the combined company to lean further into AI-driven adaptive testing and workforce-readiness assessments. Keep reading…

What This Means

The timing of this is important: ACT and SAT participation still hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels, and a large share of colleges remain test-optional. Yet ETS leadership is betting the pendulum swings back, pointing to growing concern over grade inflation as a reason admissions offices may lean on test scores again. Families weighing whether to test should watch this closely. A single company now controls two of the field’s most recognized exams, along with a growing push toward AI-scored, adaptive formats.

Florida Becomes the Fourth State to Bar Undocumented Students From Public Colleges

The Florida State Board of Education voted this week to block undocumented immigrants from enrolling in the state’s 28 public colleges, requiring proof of citizenship or lawful presence before admission. The rule extends to the state’s GED and adult education programs and follows last year’s repeal of in-state tuition for undocumented students who grew up in Florida.

Florida now joins Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina in restricting college access by immigration status, according to Higher Ed Dive. Analysts estimate the policy could cost the state college system as much as $15 million a year in lost tuition and fees, with roughly 50,000 undocumented students affected statewide as of 2023.

Florida’s separate public university system has advanced a similar policy and is expected to hold a final vote after a two-week comment period. Immigration advocates have called the rule unlawful and expect legal challenges, arguing it was created by an appointed board rather than the elected legislature. Supporters counter that it simply enforces existing state law limiting benefits to those lawfully present.

What This Means

The politics of this story will keep moving. The precedent underneath it is what families outside Florida should track: a growing number of states are treating admissions eligibility itself, not just tuition rates, as an immigration policy lever. Wherever a family sits on the underlying policy, the practical effect is the same — the list of states where immigration status determines whether a student can enroll at all is growing.

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Admissions Angle works with families as early as 8th grade to build college lists that hold up under real financial constraints, not best-case assumptions about borrowing. If the new loan caps have you rethinking your student’s list, book a free discovery call with us.

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Over the past year, several of the country’s most prominent universities quietly commissioned something unusual: studies into why the American public no longer trusts them. The results, released this spring from Yale, from Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis, and from the American Association of Colleges and Universities, range from genuinely self-critical to bureaucratically defensive. Together, they confirm what most families navigating this process already sense — that elite higher education has a credibility problem it can no longer ignore.

The AAC&U report leans toward victimhood, citing political backlash and funding pressures as the primary culprits while offering little in the way of internal accountability. The Vanderbilt-WashU report goes further, arguing that the pursuit of knowledge in certain humanities fields has been subordinated to ideology — a diagnosis that will resonate with some and infuriate others.

Yale’s report is the most candid of the three. The faculty committee identifies three areas where elite universities have lost the public: an opaque and confusing pricing structure that leads nearly half of Americans to wrongly assume everyone pays full sticker price; an admissions process that visibly privileges wealth, status and athletic ability; and a drift away from academic rigor, reflected in the fact that the median grade at Yale is now an A.

“In recent years, however, universities have been expected to be all things to all people: selective but inclusive, affordable but luxurious, meritocratic but equitable.”

— Yale University faculty committee report, April 2026

Yale President Maurie McInnis has since narrowed the university’s mission statement to focus solely on the creation, dissemination and preservation of knowledge, and created committees to implement recommendations including reducing legacy preferences and establishing a college-wide grading standard. Whether any of it actually happens is another matter.

As The Atlantic notes, all three reports share a glaring omission: the role of deliberate political pressure in eroding public confidence. Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier put it plainly — universities may not be able to control their critics, but they have been supplying the ammunition.

Rapid Recap

🏟️🎓 NCAA Approves New Age-Based Eligibility Model — The Division I Cabinet unanimously approved a sweeping overhaul this week giving athletes up to five years of eligibility, tied to age rather than seasons played. The rules take effect this fall, though legal challenges are expected. If you have a student athlete at home, our conversation with Ivy League recruiting expert Matt Hudson puts these changes in context.

🔒📋 University of Michigan Keeps Early Decision, Overriding Faculty Vote — Despite a University Senate resolution passed 1,364 to 424 urging the university to pause binding early-decision admissions, Michigan is moving forward with the practice anyway.

🏛️💸 Johns Hopkins Lays Off 110 as Federal Research Cuts Deepen — The university laid off roughly 110 employees this week — primarily in administration — after its federal research portfolio declined by more than $500 million in 2025. It follows a hiring freeze and more than 2,000 cuts last year tied to the collapse of USAID funding.

📉📚 Professors Report Freshmen Who Can’t Read Basic Sentences — A new Hill opinion piece argues that declining reading and math scores — a trend predating the pandemic — have reached a tipping point, with college freshmen now struggling to follow basic arguments from beginning to end.

What This Means

The pipeline into college admissions runs through K-12, and right now that pipeline has a serious leak. Declining literacy and math proficiency don’t just affect college readiness, they reshape the competitive landscape for every student who has done the work. As fewer students arrive at selective institutions genuinely prepared, the ones who do stand out more. For families investing in rigorous preparation early, this is the environment your student is entering. The gap between prepared and unprepared is widening, and that gap is increasingly visible to admissions offices.

The Case for a Smarter Endowment Tax

A June 25 opinion piece in The New York Times makes an argument that is equal parts policy brief and provocation: the federal endowment tax — a Republican invention designed largely to needle elite universities — may have accidentally stumbled onto something useful.

The authors, James S. Murphy and Ryan Cieslikowski of Class Action, a student-driven nonprofit, point to Princeton as the unexpected case study. The university recently waived tuition for most students from families earning up to $250,000 a year — a move that may have reduced its number of tuition-paying students below the 3,000-student threshold in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, effectively removing it from the endowment tax rolls. Princeton’s $44 million in new financial aid spending is a fraction of the more than $200 million it stood to owe annually under the tax. The math was favorable. But the outcome — more working- and middle-class students gaining access to one of the most selective universities in the country — is the point.

Murphy and Cieslikowski want a redesigned tax: one that applies to any institution with more than $500,000 in endowment per student, with rates that decrease as schools increase their share of students from the bottom 80% of household income, drop legacy preferences and grow community college transfer pipelines. Every dollar raised would go directly to community colleges and regional public universities.

What This Means

The endowment tax’s intention was to punish elite institutions for their perceived cultural politics, not expand access to college. The fact that it may have accidentally nudged Princeton toward enrolling more working- and middle-class students is a useful reminder that incentives matter more than intentions. For families watching the financial aid landscape, the practical takeaway is simple: watch what schools do with their aid budgets over the next two to three years. The policy pressure is real, and schools with the largest endowments are going to have to make choices. Some of those choices will open doors.

Admissions Angle works with families as early as 8th grade to build strategies that account for the full picture — admissions and financial planning together, not as an afterthought. If you have questions about how these changes affect your student’s college list, book a free discovery call with us.

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In May, the Department of Justice sent letters to the medical schools at Yale University and UCLA alleging illegal discrimination against white and Asian American applicants. The evidence cited? Differences in median test scores and GPAs by racial subgroup. No interviews. No review of individual files. Just numbers, stripped of every circumstance that might explain them.

That’s the approach — and a piece last week in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Eric Hoover makes clear it isn’t going away. The federal government is preparing to release data from the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement, or ACTS — a sweeping survey the Trump administration created to collect seven years of admissions and demographic information from approximately 2,000 selective four-year institutions. When that data drops, the DOJ’s Yale and UCLA letters will look like a preview.

“I don’t know of any institution that’s been consciously violating the law to preference race in admissions. But this administration has an investment in the narrative that it’s happening, independent of any facts to support it.”

— Jon Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education.

The target is holistic review: the individualized consideration of factors beyond grades and test scores that has defined selective admissions for decades. The administration’s working definition of merit, as Hoover reports, appears to encompass exactly two things — GPAs and standardized test scores — as if every applicant with a 3.7 arrived at that number the same way, from the same school, with the same opportunities.

The practical stakes for families are real. Colleges under this kind of scrutiny are being advised to document and defend their admissions processes with far more precision than before. That means the criteria they use, the factors they weigh and the reasoning behind individual decisions. Some enrollment leaders are calling for institutions to band together and release their own data proactively — to get ahead of the ACTS rollout rather than respond to it.

For students in the process right now, the landscape is unsettled in ways that matter. Holistic review isn’t going anywhere — courts haven’t struck it down, and colleges with far more qualified applicants than seats have no other workable system. But the political pressure on how institutions talk about, document and defend their processes is intensifying. Families should expect more transparency from schools they’re considering, and should know that a student’s full profile — not just their scores — still matters, and still counts.

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Rapid Recap

📝🎓 Columbia Is Now the Last Ivy to Bring Back Test Requirements — Columbia announced it will require standardized test scores for undergraduate applicants beginning August 2027, making it the final Ivy League school to reinstate requirements that most universities dropped in 2020.

🏆🌍 UC Berkeley Holds Its Title as the Top Public University in the U.S. — U.S. News & World Report ranked UC Berkeley No. 7 globally and No. 1 among U.S. public universities — a distinction it has held every year since the Best Global Universities list launched in 2014.

🎓💼 Schools Aren’t Preparing Students for Careers, Report Says — A new FutureEd report finds K-12 schools have leaned too hard on “college for all,” leaving students without a realistic sense of what comes next. With 372 students per counselor nationally, the guidance gap is structural.

💻🔓 Canvas Hackers Target Dozens More Colleges — ShinyHunters may have accessed Oracle PeopleSoft — which manages HR and financial data — at more than 100 organizations between May 27 and June 9; roughly 68% are colleges or universities.

What This Means

Campus cyberattacks are no longer an IT department problem — they’re a family problem. HR and financial data means student records, tuition payments and personal information. If your student is enrolled at a selective institution, it’s worth checking whether their school has issued any breach notifications and confirming that login credentials for student portals have been updated.

The Class of 2026 Knows Exactly What It Wants. Do Colleges?

A new survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers of more than 17,000 students across 258 institutions finds the class of 2026 isn’t just looking for a paycheck, they want professional development, job security and a clear path forward.

They’re also clear-eyed about the market. About one in five employed graduates feel overqualified for their current role, and a similar number said they deliberately applied for positions beneath their skill level just to get a foot in the door. More than half described their current job as a stepping stone.

The data points to a generation entering the workforce with high expectations and real self-awareness — but landing in a system that hasn’t caught up. “Career growth is especially important to new college graduates, which means employers need to show clear pathways for advancement, provide meaningful support, and help early talent see how they can build a future within the organization,” said NACE President and CEO Shawn VanDerziel.

For families, the takeaway is worth sitting with. Students who enter college without a framework for what comes next are more likely to graduate into exactly this scenario — capable, credentialed and underplaced. Career planning isn’t a senior-year conversation. The students who fare best start connecting their interests, skills and goals long before they’re writing cover letters.

For the 2026-27 academic year, the sticker price at 16 colleges and universities has crossed $100,000, and the number will grow. The data comes from The Princeton Review, which provided CNBC with an exclusive look at its upcoming “The Best 392 Colleges” list.

Harvey Mudd College tops the roster at $104,512 per year in total cost of attendance — tuition, fees, room, board and expenses combined. A specialized STEM institution with a low student-to-faculty ratio and some of the highest-earning alumni in the country, Harvey Mudd offers MIT-level academics in a smaller setting.

Duke comes in second at $103,975, followed by the University of Chicago at $103,821. Also on the list: Georgetown, NYU, Brown, Northwestern and Pepperdine. All schools that cost more than $99,000 before a single dollar of aid is applied.

But the number families actually pay is a different story. Duke reports that more than half its students pay less than the full cost of attendance, and 21% of last year’s first-year class attended tuition-free. In January, Higher Ed Dive reported that the average tuition discount for first-time, full-time students at private colleges reached 57% for the 2025-26 academic year.

For every dollar those schools could have charged, they awarded roughly 57 cents in grant aid to new undergraduates. Among the 16 schools now at six figures, the average scholarship grant for first-year students with demonstrated need ranges from $42,000 to $79,000.

“The higher the sticker price, the more generous the school is likely to be with scholarship offers for students they want to enroll.”

— Robert Franek, editor-in-chief of The Princeton Review

That doesn’t make the cost any less shocking. And it doesn’t address the growing gap between families who know how to work the financial aid system and those who don’t. With Pell Grant cuts still on the table in Congress, that gap isn’t closing anytime soon.

Remember, the sticker price isn’t the price. Understanding that distinction requires knowing where to look and asking the right questions before adding a school to your child’s college list.

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Rapid Recap

📊🎓 Nation’s Report Card Shows a Split Screen — New federal test results show 9-year-olds have recovered to pre-pandemic reading levels. Thirteen-year-olds have made no progress — and their average reading scores are no higher than in 1971. “Yes, it was the pandemic,” said Harvard education professor Thomas Kane. “But it clearly wasn’t just the pandemic.”

🤖📚 AI Is Now a Major — At Dozens of Schools — Bachelor’s AI programs grew 114% nationally from 2024 to 2025, jumping from 90 to 193 programs. Northwestern launches its dedicated AI major this fall. Experts are already raising questions about faculty shortages and whether some programs are being driven more by marketing than academic substance.

🔮🏛️ The New Yorker Lays Out What Higher Ed Looks Like in 2035 — In the final installment of a six-week series, staff writer Jay Caspian Kang predicts hundreds of small colleges will close, fewer high schoolers will pursue degrees and elite prestige will hold. “The future does kind of suck,” Kang writes, “and looking over this list makes me wonder if the more appropriate framing would’ve been to ask about my future grandchildren rather than my children.”

⏳🎓 Waitlists May Be Getting Longer — New survey data from Niche suggests colleges are expanding their waitlists this cycle — and fewer waitlisted students are actually getting off them. For families still holding out hope, the math is getting harder.

What This Means

Waitlists have always been anxiety-inducing, but this year the data suggests the anxiety is warranted. Colleges are using waitlists more aggressively to manage yield, which means more students are in limbo longer, and fewer are ultimately admitted. If your student is still on a waitlist, a well-crafted letter of continued interest that’s specific, updated and genuinely enthusiastic matters. So does having a strong backup plan that you and your child feel good about. The waitlist isn’t a rejection, but you do need a strategy for it.

The A.I. Major Is Everywhere. That’s Not Necessarily Good News.

Dozens of colleges have launched A.I. degrees in recent years, and quality is a real concern.

The degrees don’t all teach the same thing. Carnegie Mellon, the first U.S. school to offer an A.I. major, focuses on how the technology is built. UC San Diego, which launched its program in fall 2025, teaches students how to apply it across industries. Bowling Green State University went further still, pairing an A.I. core with one of six application areas — from journalism to public health. The name on the degree doesn’t tell you which approach you’re getting.

Prominent computer scientists have questioned whether students are better served by a rigorous computer science foundation before specializing this narrowly, and whether programs being built quickly, at schools with no track record in the field, will hold up. There’s also no consensus on whether a standalone A.I. degree should exist at all.

Then there’s what the Ivy League is quietly saying by doing nothing. Harvard, Yale and Princeton have all declined to offer standalone undergraduate A.I. degrees, routing students through existing computer science and engineering programs instead.

At Princeton, CS declarations have dropped from 150 students in the Class of 2026 to just 74 for the Class of 2028 — a trend Szymon Rusinkiewicz, chair of Princeton’s computer science department, attributes partly to student anxiety about A.I. displacing tech jobs.

What This Means

Ivy League schools with the deepest computer science research infrastructure have looked at the A.I. major boom and decided their students are better served by fundamentals first. That’s not a knock on A.I. as a field. It’s a reminder that the credential is only as strong as the program behind it.

For families navigating this right now: a well-resourced computer science department at a school with strong industry pipelines will likely serve a student better than a brand-new A.I. major at a school that didn’t have a computer science department worth mentioning two years ago. Ask where graduates are landing. Ask how long the program has existed. Ask who’s teaching it, and whether those faculty were hired specifically for this program or have been doing this work for years.

The A.I. job market is real, and the demand for A.I. skillsets is real. However, the degree that gets a student there isn’t necessarily the one with A.I. in the name.

After a year of targeting individual campuses, the Trump administration has shifted its strategy, and the scope is sweeping. Demands previously pressed on individual schools are being written into the fine print for thousands of U.S. universities, with Education Department Undersecretary Nicholas Kent saying the new approach has the power “to affect 6,0…

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The months-long standoff between Harvard University and the Trump administration appears to be moving toward resolution, according to The New York Times. Negotiators for both sides have been making significant progress in closed-door discussions, developing a framework under which Harvard would commit $500 mil…

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Max Dawson was home from college in 2000 when Survivor: Borneo aired its finale. His mother had been watching all season. He sat down — and spotted a classmate from Brown walking across the screen.

What followed, as Inside Higher Ed reports this week, was two decades of academic obsession: a course, a scholarship and eve…

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Cecilia Lopez Alvarado earned A’s and B’s in high school math. Then she got to UC San Diego and had to start over.

A sophomore who attended a high-poverty public school in San Bernardino, Alvarado found that unlimited retakes had kept her grades up without ensuring she’d actually learned the material. Once at UCSD, she couldn’t pass a placement exam requ…

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The timing is pointed. The One Big Beautiful Bill’s new lifetime borrowing caps, revised repayment structures and the end of unlimited Parent PLUS borrowing have fundamentally changed how families can plan. The safety nets prior generations relied on like flexible repayment and forgiveness pathways are narrowing precisely as the price tag grows.

For families building college lists right now, the financial aid package is not a formality. It’s the decision.

Rapid Recap

📰 Michigan’s flagship universities face a 62% state funding cut — Michigan’s Republican-led House passed a budget bill that would slash state operations funding for Michigan State University and the University of Michigan by roughly 62%, cutting approximately $200 million from MSU and $222 million from U-M. Lawmakers cited concerns about in-state enrollment and institutional priorities. The Senate has not matched the proposal, making this an opening bid in what promises to be a bruising negotiation.

📰 Commencement season 2026: who’s at the podium — Graduation rosters are set. Historian Michael Beschloss speaks at Penn. Hilary Duff takes the stage at Northeastern’s Fenway Park ceremony. Queen Latifah addresses North Carolina A&T. American University is bringing in Walter Isaacson, Samantha Power and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Whatever your target school’s vibe, someone worth listening to is probably speaking near you in May.

📰 The student mental health crisis is more complicated than it looks — Inside Higher Ed’s new Voices of Student Success podcast opened this week with a conversation on what’s actually driving surging demand for campus support: academic stress, social media, post-COVID social deficits, loneliness and real economic anxiety about what comes after graduation. Students are more willing to seek help than they used to be, which is progress. But counseling infrastructure at most institutions hasn’t kept pace with demand.

What This Means

The demand for campus mental health support isn’t leveling off — it’s compounding. Academic pressure, social media, post-COVID isolation and economic anxiety about life after graduation are all pulling in the same direction at once. Students are more willing to ask for help than ever before, which matters. But most institutions haven’t built the infrastructure to meet them there. If mental health support is a factor in your family’s college search — and increasingly it should be — it’s worth asking schools directly what that actually looks like on their campus.

Yale’s Report Got Some Smart Pushback This Week

Last week, Yale’s faculty report on restoring public trust in higher education made headlines. This week, Wesleyan University President Michael Roth pushed back in The New York Times. His argument: one of the report’s core recommendations, that Yale scale back the mission statement it adopted in 2016 in favor of a narrower focus on knowledge creation, fundamentally misreads the moment.

Roth’s case is pointed. Preparing graduates to lead with integrity and engage as democratic citizens isn’t a recent political embellishment — it’s a foundational purpose American universities have held since their founding. Retreating from it under political pressure isn’t a strategy. It’s capitulation.

What This Means

Families targeting elite universities should watch how schools respond to this moment. Some are articulating their values with clarity. Others are hedging. That distinction matters — especially for students drawn to schools that have historically defined themselves by civic mission and public purpose.

What’s your Angle

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The admissions chapter will resonate most with families tracking elite schools. With Yale’s acceptance rate at 4.2% for the Class of 2030, the committee questioned whether holistic review is actually delivering on its promise — citing research showing that applicants from the top 1% are substantially more likely to gain admission than equally credentialed middle-class peers, with legacy preferences and recruited athletics accounting for much of the gap. On grades, the committee was equally direct: Yale now gives out A or A- grades to 79% of students, up from 10% in 1963, and called for a 3.0 mean GPA standard to restore meaning to academic assessment.

When the president of Yale says it out loud, every family paying close attention to elite admissions should be listening.

Rapid Recap

📰 New research affirms test-optional, but the ground keeps shifting — A new qualitative study out of the University of Maryland found that students admitted through test-optional policies generally don’t feel underprepared at their institutions. But applicant score submission is up 11% year over year, more selective schools are signaling preference for scores, and outcomes vary widely by institution. The debate is nowhere near settled.

📰 An AI company’s cofounder says skip the coding major — Jack Clark, billionaire cofounder of Anthropic and a former journalist who studied English literature and creative writing, made a case this week for the liberal arts at a Semafor conference. Clark said his literary education turned out to be “extremely relevant for AI in a way that I think people wouldn’t have predicted.” He noted that Anthropic employs philosophers. His colleague Daniela Amodei has made similar arguments, citing the company’s preference for strong communicators over pure technical credentials.

📰 Students are turning to AI for college advice. So what is it telling them? — A new Chronicle of Higher Education report finds that students and parents are increasingly using AI chatbots to guide school selection and application strategy. A survey by EAB found that nearly half of high school students said they used AI in their college search. Some admissions offices are now working to optimize their AI visibility the same way they once chased search engine rankings.

📰 Hampshire College is closing — Hampshire College, the progressive liberal arts school in Amherst, Mass., announced this week it will shut down permanently after the fall 2026 semester. Years of declining enrollment, a failed land sale, an accreditor warning and a constrained endowment left the board with no realistic path forward. New data from Huron Consulting suggests nearly a quarter of private nonprofit four-year institutions could close or merge over the next decade.

What This Means

Hampshire’s closure is a preview of what’s ahead for a significant portion of American higher education. Declining birth rates, rising costs and shifting family attitudes toward ROI are squeezing small liberal arts institutions in ways that are increasingly hard to survive. For families in the planning stages: a school’s endowment size, enrollment trajectory and financial stability belong in the conversation — and they often get overlooked until it’s too late.

Nearly Half of College Students Are Reconsidering Their Major Because of AI

A new Lumina Foundation-Gallup survey of 3,801 college students found that 47% have seriously considered switching their major because of AI’s potential impact on the job market, and 16% have already made the change. The anxiety isn’t irrational: between 2022 and 2025, early-career workers in AI-exposed roles saw a 16% relative drop in employment, while more experienced workers held steady. Meanwhile, 57% of students use AI for coursework at least weekly — while 42% say their universities are actively discouraging it.

Universities are struggling to keep pace. Nearly a third of bachelor’s degree students say their institutions aren’t providing adequate guidance on AI, and institutional policies remain all over the map.

What This Means

AI anxiety about majors is worth taking seriously, but it shouldn’t drive panic-driven pivots. The data consistently points toward a pattern: broad, adaptable skill sets and communication-heavy disciplines may hold up better than narrowly technical ones as AI absorbs more entry-level task work. More important than any particular major is whether a student’s institution is actively preparing them to work alongside AI. Families making major decisions now should be asking schools directly: what does AI readiness look like in this program?

What’s your Angle

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For decades, economists have wrestled with a deceptively simple question: does an Ivy League education actually cause better outcomes, or do elite schools simply attract students who were already destined to succeed? A new wave of research, profiled in The Atlantic by staff writer Rose Horowitch, offers the most compelling answer yet — and it has less to do with instruction than with immersion.

What separates the most selective schools isn’t instruction quality alone. It’s the density of ambition in any given hallway, study room or dining hall — and according to the research, that concentration may be the whole point.

Rapid Recap

📅 The Minimester Is Having a Moment — A growing number of colleges are experimenting with compressed eight-week terms in which students take two or three courses at a time rather than a full load across 16 weeks, with one early adopter seeing course success rates climb from 67% to 87% after making the switch.

🎓 Colleges Are Pushing Back on Workforce Pell Rules — The comment period on proposed regulations expanding the Pell Grant to short-term workforce programs closed this week, with institutions asking the Education Department to fix a provision that counts students who continue their education as unemployed in job placement metrics.

⚖️ A Father Used AI to Sue Four Universities Over His Son’s Rejections — Stanley Zhong had a 4.4 GPA and a 1590 SAT when 16 of 18 colleges turned him down; he went to Google instead. Now his father is representing the family in federal court — using AI as a substitute for legal counsel after dozens of law firms passed on the case.

What This Means

The Zhong lawsuit is easy to dismiss as a curiosity — a grievance case run on ChatGPT instead of a law firm. But it’s worth reading as a signal. The Supreme Court’s 2023 affirmative action ruling changed the rules of college admissions without settling every question about how those rules get applied. What counts as race-neutral? What does discrimination look like when no one admits to it? Those questions are now moving into courts, and families paying close attention to the admissions landscape should know: the fight over what fairness looks like at selective schools is far from over.

The New Ivies: 20 Schools Employers Are Choosing Over the Ivy League

For the third year running, Forbes has released its ranking of the schools whose graduates employers are increasingly choosing over those from the traditional Ivy League. The numbers this year are striking.

37% of C-suite and hiring executives said they are now less likely to hire an Ivy League graduate than they were five years ago. Only 6% said they are more likely. Meanwhile, 42% said they are more likely to hire from public flagship universities today — a near-complete reversal of the old prestige hierarchy.

This year’s list placed heavy emphasis on artificial intelligence. Every school that made the cut — among them Vanderbilt, Northwestern, UVA and UNC — reports AI fluency as a critical learning outcome across departments, not just inside computer science programs. The schools winning employer confidence right now are the ones treating adaptability as a core academic outcome, not an add-on.

What This Means

The diploma conversation is shifting, and the families’ Admissions Angle serves need to hear it clearly: this isn’t an argument against elite schools. The peer effects research in The Atlantic feature makes the case for selectivity as compellingly as ever. But selectivity and brand name are not the same thing, and employers are saying so out loud. A strong college list in 2026 accounts for both — schools with the academic density to shape who your student becomes, and the employer relationships to matter when they graduate.

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Being undecided used to be something to outgrow as fast as possible — but a growing number of colleges are turning it into a recruitment strategy, marketing the support programs they’ve had all along to prospective students before they ever arrive on campus.

College Board data shows “undecided” consistently ranks among the top declared majors for SAT test-takers, and EAB estimates 75%-85% of college students switch majors at least once. Most schools have had advising programs for undeclared students for years. They just never mentioned them until after enrollment. A select few are changing that — giving real names, philosophy, and academic frameworks to what used to live quietly in the registrar’s office.

If a school’s program for undecided students is hard to find on their website, that’s your answer.

Rapid Recap

🏈 Trump signs executive order limiting NCAA athletes to 5 years, 1 transfer — President Trump signed an executive order Friday capping college athletes at five seasons in a five-year window, with one transfer allowed before graduation without sitting out. Multiple lawyers told ESPN they believe the order is likely unconstitutional and unenforceable — but the uncertainty alone may already be shaping decisions as the basketball transfer portal opens next week. For families of student athletes, the rules are in flux.

💸 Will it really cost $100K to attend some DC universities next year? — American University’s estimated cost for 2026-27 approaches $105,000. George Washington’s is close to $98,000. Both numbers are almost entirely misleading. At GW, 80% of students receive a discount — actual costs range from $17,000 to about $55,000, depending on income. A Sallie Mae survey found 80% of families won’t apply to a school when they assume the price is too high, without realizing they probably wouldn’t pay it.

💳 More college students will need private loans. 40% won’t qualify. — New federal borrowing caps are pushing more students toward private loans — but a new report found roughly 40% of Americans would be denied by traditional private lenders on credit and income requirements alone. Parent PLUS loans are newly capped, and Grad PLUS is being eliminated. Nearly two-thirds of Pell Grant recipients wouldn’t qualify at most traditional lenders. The window to plan around this is closing.

What This Means

The federal loan changes taking effect this summer will directly reshape how families pay for college starting fall 2026. Parent PLUS is now capped at $20,000 per year and $65,000 total per child. Grad PLUS is gone. Families who planned to borrow up to the cost of attendance no longer can — and the private market won’t fill that gap for everyone. If your student is a junior or senior, this is the year to know your actual borrowing ceiling.

What your college’s AI policy says about its priorities

Colleges nationwide are rolling out new courses, majors, and campuswide initiatives about AI — and five institutions profiled by Inside Higher Ed this week show just how differently schools are drawing the lines.

Agnes Scott College will make AI literacy mandatory for every first-year student this fall — not as a tech skills course, but as a study in critical thinking, ethics, and accountability. The University of Richmond built an entire center connecting AI to liberal arts inquiry. At Bryn Mawr, the library is becoming the campuswide AI hub. Cornell has put roughly 7,000 students through a 75-minute critical thinking module. DeVry University is embedding AI into every single course by year’s end.

The colleges on your student’s list have already chosen where they stand. The question is whether you know what it is.

What This Means

Ask the schools on your list whether they have a stated AI policy — and what it actually says. A school that has built something intentional around AI literacy is signaling how seriously it’s taking its preparation of students for the workforce. A school still writing amendments to the honor code is signaling something different. This is now a fair question for campus visits and info sessions. Your student should know how to ask it.

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The assignment sounds almost quaint: no laptop, no AI, no notes — just a student and an instructor, talking through the material. But when Chris Schaffer introduced what he calls an “oral defense” in his biomedical engineering class at Cornell University last semester, he wasn’t reaching for nostalgia. He was responding to a crisis.

Professors at Penn, Cornell and NYU have all arrived at the same conclusion: written assignments can no longer be trusted as evidence of actual thinking. Students are using generative AI to produce polished work while their understanding of the material remains, at best, partial. The result is easy to recognize: perfect homework, blank stares.

At NYU Stern, professor Panos Ipeirotis deployed an AI-powered oral agent that interviews students about their written submissions and compares responses to identify who actually understands the content. At Penn, the shift is already systemic — the school has begun running faculty workshops on oral exam administration and describes what’s happening on campus as a “massive shift toward in-person assessments.”

The concern, as Penn’s Emily Hammer explained, isn’t catching cheaters. It’s what students are quietly surrendering.

The ability to think critically and defend your own work in a room with another person is exactly what no app can outsource for you.

Rapid Recap

📋 Admissions Data Lawsuit Pushes Deadline to April 6 — A federal judge in Massachusetts extended the restraining order blocking colleges from having to submit the Trump administration’s ACTS admissions survey until April 6, while he considers converting it into a preliminary injunction. The survey demands seven years of disaggregated admissions data broken down by race, sex, test scores, GPA and income — 88 percent of institutional research professionals called the retroactive requirement untenable, and 55 percent estimated it would require over 250 hours of staff time annually.

🗳️ Trump’s Voter Crackdown Reaches College Campuses — The administration has barred colleges from using Federal Work Study funds for voter registration work and threatened federal investigations against schools that draw on a widely used nonpartisan student voting study. Meanwhile, the SAVE America Act advancing in the Senate would require a passport or birth certificate to register to vote — expressly disqualifying student IDs.

🔧 Apprenticeships Are No Longer Just for the Trades — Nursing, AI, insurance and behavioral health are now driving significant growth in U.S. apprenticeship programs, with community colleges serving as connective tissue between employers and learners. The number of women apprentices more than tripled between 2014 and 2023. In a recent student survey, 25 percent expressed interest in apprenticeships — a participation gap researchers describe as a significant unmet need.

What This Means

The apprenticeship conversation matters even for families whose students are firmly on the four-year track — because it signals where the economy is heading. Understanding the full landscape isn’t about abandoning the traditional path. It’s about knowing what your student is navigating, and what they’re up against.

When a Field of Study Disappears

Northwestern announced a new AI major launching fall 2026, joining Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Penn, Rice and more than a dozen others that have already formalized the field. Programs typically blend machine learning and technical training with ethics and societal impact. For students eyeing this space, the question is no longer whether AI is a legitimate major — it’s which program is the right fit.

What This Means

The apprenticeship conversation matters even for families whose students are firmly on the four-year track — because it signals where the economy is heading. Understanding the full landscape isn’t about abandoning the traditional path. It’s about knowing what your student is navigating and what they’re up against.

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While most universities are still debating how to add internships, one school in Flint, Mich., has been doing the work for over a century — and it looks nothing like anything else in higher ed.

Kettering University runs on 12-week rotations. Half the student body is always off campus, placed in paid professional roles at companies like Ford, GE, NASA and Amazon. Twelve weeks later, the cohorts switch. For four and a half years, students alternate between classroom and workplace until the line between where they learn and where they perform disappears.

The rest of higher ed calls this innovation. Kettering calls it Tuesday.

Rapid Recap

🤖Northwestern Joins the Growing List of Schools Offering an AI Major — Northwestern announced a new AI major launching fall 2026, joining Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Penn, Rice and more than a dozen others that have already formalized the field. Programs typically blend machine learning and technical training with ethics and societal impact. For students eyeing this space, the question is no longer whether AI is a legitimate major — it’s which program is the right fit.

💻 UT Austin To Launch New School of Computing Come Fall — The University of Texas at Austin is consolidating computer science, data science, statistics and information disciplines into a single School of Computing, set to open fall 2026. The school plans to hire 50 new faculty and expand access to computing education across every major — not just for CS students. It’s one of the clearest signals yet that universities are reorganizing themselves around the skills employers are actually asking for.

🧠Students Are Struggling. Campus Services Aren’t Keeping Pace. — A Johns Hopkins analysis of 560,000 college students found suicidal ideation up 154% between 2007 and 2022. Nearly every four-year institution offers mental health services — and it’s still not enough. Experts say colleges are reacting to crises instead of preventing them. Campus support systems deserve a spot on your evaluation checklist.

What This Means

For families in the thick of building a college list, mental health infrastructure is still one of the most underasked questions in the process. Acceptance rates and rankings dominate the conversation — but how a school actually supports students once they’re there matters just as much. Before you finalize that list, it’s worth looking beyond the counseling center headcount and asking how proactive a campus truly is. The data suggests most schools are still playing catch-up.

Biology Is a Great Major If You Know What Comes Next

Biology is popular, demanding, and, for many students, the first step toward medical school. It’s also one of the lowest-paying majors for recent graduates in the country.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Labor Market for Recent College Graduates database, biology majors earn a median early-career wage of about $45,000 — placing them near the bottom among dozens of commonly pursued majors. Only a handful of majors, such as anthropology and fine arts, rank lower.

Mid-career, the picture improves significantly — biology majors earn a median of about $83,000 by ages 35 to 45 — but that’s cold comfort when your student is 23 and paying rent.

The degree your student ultimately chooses matters. So does understanding what it’s actually a pathway to.

What This Means

The salary gap isn’t a reason to avoid the major — it’s a reason to have a plan before declaring it. A bachelor’s degree in bio is rarely a destination; it’s a bridge. Families should be asking not just what their student wants to study, but what they intend to do with it — and whether that answer is specific enough to hold up.

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More than 600 universities have had federal funding threatened or frozen since early 2025. This week, The New Yorker takes the full measure of what that’s actually done — to research labs, faculty hiring, campus culture and the institutions themselves. Nicholas Lemann’s piece is a careful, unsettling account of what happens when universities spend a year operating in survival mode. Johns Hopkins lost $1.3 billion in federal grants. Brown paid $50 million to settle. Columbia paid $200 million. Harvard is still negotiating. The question Lemann asks is what kind of institution survives that process, and what it costs them.

If you have a high schooler with an Ivy or near-Ivy on the list, this is required reading before your first campus visit this spring. The school your student would enroll in the fall of 2027 is a different institution from the one that appears in the guidebooks. Different isn’t disqualifying. But it’s information.

Lemann doesn’t offer a remedy. Neither does anyone else.

Rapid Recap

🎓 The degree apprenticeship is having a moment — Inside Higher Ed reports roughly 350 institutions now offer nearly 600 degree apprenticeship programs combining paid work, employer-aligned training and a credential. About 80% of students say they want more work-integrated learning than their schools currently offer.

🌧️ It was raining when they visited — Amherst College researchers found students who toured on a rainy or excessively hot day were 8-10% less likely to apply than those who visited on a mild one. Amherst’s dean of admissions is now considering telling tour groups about the study in real time. Go on… [Read more →]

⚖️ The admissions data fight just escalated — Seventeen Democratic attorneys general filed suit to block a Trump administration mandate requiring colleges to hand over seven years of admissions data broken down by race, sex, GPA and test scores. The deadline is March 18. Schools that miss it face fines of more than $71,000 per violation.

What This Means

This lawsuit is a direct fight over the mechanics of how colleges make admissions decisions — and the data behind them. If the mandate survives, seven years of application records will be handed to a federal government that has already demonstrated it will use that data as leverage. For families with students in the process right now, the outcome of this case will shape what admissions offices are willing to do and say between now and when your student applies.

If U.S. Colleges Are Dying, Why Are Students Applying?

That’s the question at the center of this week’s New York Times Headway newsletter, and it’s the right one. By almost every measure, American higher education is under siege: funding frozen, faculty cautious, campuses quieter than they’ve been in a generation. And yet applications are up. Students are still competing, still anxious, still writing essays and refreshing portals.

The tension isn’t a paradox. It’s a reflection of how deeply families believe in the credential — and how few alternatives feel equally legible to employers, graduate programs and the broader culture that still, for now, reads a college degree as proof of something. The institutions may be transforming. The race to get in hasn’t slowed down.

What This Means

Practically, the process your student is navigating is more uncertain at the macro level than it’s ever been and more competitive at the individual level than it’s ever been. Both things are true at the same time. That’s not a reason to panic. It is a reason to be deliberate.

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If Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, or Brown is on your family’s list — yes, this is relevant. The Department of Defense announced it is canceling senior service college fellowships at 13 universities and nine nonprofits for 2026-27, cutting 93 fellowships in total.

Brown, Columbia, and Princeton are on the list. So are the Brookings Institution and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Harvard was cut last month. The Pentagon has named 21 replacement schools, including Liberty University and Hillsdale College.

In a video posted to social media, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said:

Hegseth said the military would no longer send senior officers into graduate programs that undermine their values. He did not elaborate on how he defines that.

Rapid Recap

🤖 AI Just Offered to Take Your Kid’s Classes for Them — A startup called Companion.AI launched a tool called Einstein that logs into Canvas and completes assignments — essays included — with no student involvement. The founder calls it inevitable. Educators are calling it something else.

🏛️ George Washington University Sells Virginia Satellite Campus — GW is selling its satellite campus in Virginia. When a university starts offloading real estate, it is usually worth asking why. For families evaluating schools outside the top tier, financial stability is a real factor.

🔬 Federal Education Research Agency Gets a Roadmap for Rebuilding — DOGE gutted the Institute of Education Sciences last year — more than $1 billion in cuts, over 100 positions eliminated. The Education Department just released a 93-page plan to rebuild it. The administration has not committed to any of it.

What This Means

IES is the agency responsible for the data families, and researchers rely on to understand what’s actually happening in American education — enrollment trends, financial aid patterns, and what interventions work in schools. When that infrastructure is weakened, the ripple effects are slow but real. For families planning years ahead, decisions about college fit, financial aid strategy, and institutional quality are increasingly made with less reliable public data behind them. Whether the administration acts on this report or files it away is worth watching.

Eight Trends Quietly Rewriting the Rules of College Admissions

The admissions process your student will face is not the one you remember. A new Forbes analysis identifies eight forces reshaping how students get into college. Several of them are moving fast enough that junior year is already too late to react.

Here’s what’s actually changing — and what it means for students who are still a few years out.

Test Scores Are Back. Sort Of.

Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and Caltech have all reinstated SAT and ACT requirements. Test score reporting on the Common App rose 11% in 2025 — the first real increase since COVID. Meanwhile, more than 1,800 schools remain test-optional. The system is now two-tiered: the rules depend entirely on the list. If MIT or Harvard is the goal, your eighth-grader should know what the SAT is.

AI Is Reading Your Kid’s Essay.

A record 3.9 million high school seniors applied this cycle. Virginia Tech now uses AI to screen hundreds of thousands of essays in under an hour. Admissions offices are also quietly rewriting prompts to ask questions that are harder to outsource to ChatGPT. What survives the filter: specific, personal, irreplaceable detail. What doesn’t: anything that reads like it could have been written by anyone, for anyone.

Legacy Admissions Are Quietly Dying.

Legacy preferences are eroding fast. After the affirmative action ruling made the practice politically indefensible, more schools are quietly dropping it. If you have been factoring a family connection into your student’s odds, start building a different plan.

What This Means

If your student is in 8th, 9th, or 10th grade, this is the moment to start building — not because the process is scary, but because the process rewards time. Scores take years to build. Essays that feel specific and real don’t get written in a weekend. The demographic shifts are creating genuine opportunities for students who know the terrain. The families getting ahead of this aren’t anxious. They’re just early.

What’s your Angle

The rules have changed. Scores are back at the schools that matter most, AI is screening essays before a human reads them, and the competitive pool looks different than it did three years ago. We want to know where your head is.

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Almost half a month ago, the largest release of information (including his frequent correspondents) on Epstein was released. With over 3 million files and an influx of new names, prominent professors have been listed amongst other names, like the former senator of Maine, as being friends and/or colleagues. Professors from MIT, Duke, Yale, and even the former president of Harvard are amongst those listed to be in contact with Epstein. With this current information, actions have been taken. Mark Tramo, physician and associate adjunct professor of neurology at UCLA, has had his profile removed from their list of experts, but the school has declined to comment on him or his connection with Epstein. A petition to fire him has already garnered over 8,000 signatures with both patients and students from UCLA speaking out.

In other universities like Duke, they have shut down three of their research centers that were run by Dan Ariely, another professor who in this case, was mentioned hundreds of times in the files. A spokesperson for the school came out to claim the closing of these research centers has nothing to do with Ariely and his ties to Epstein, to which the professor responded with an op-ed that was published in the school paper. Some professors, department chairs, and medical practitioners have expressed regret, while others aimed to justify and explain their involvement.

Rapid Recap

💸Department of Education Reveals Funding Data The department has released the information from 2025 on the international funding u.s. Universities have received, with $1.1 billion coming from Qatar. With the new portal in place, Americans can now see how money is coming in and where it is from.

🎓Virginia Tech Prohibits Identity-Based Graduations In accordance with U.S. Dept. of Education on race-based graduations being seen as segregative, VTech, along with other universities have halted these ceremonies, despite a federal judge blocking its enforcement.

🧑‍⚖️⚖️Department of Justice Sues Harvard A lawsuit was filled Friday claiming that they withheld information unlawfully pertaining its admissions processes, given its history of racial discrimination. This suit comes in after the DOJ’s primary deadline not being met. Go on…

Department of Justice Sues Harvard

Nearing a year since the request on April 25th of last year, Harvard initially sent over information on the data, but the plaintiff stated that the information provided was aggregate data of the admissions process as a whole, but not the inquired individual data on applicants. Furthermore, they stated that they are not looking for monetary payment, to remove federal funding, or even outright accusing Harvard of engaging in discriminatory actions, but merely want to conduct their investigation. The DOJ said the suit has been brought up with the sole purpose of impelling Harvard to hand over any documents that pertain to any racial considerations in admitting students. Assistant Attorney General Dhillon has come out in a press release to add “Refusal to cooperate creates concerns about university practices. If Harvard has stopped discriminating, it should happily share the data necessary to prove it.”

Pell Grant in Financial Trouble

With a significant increase in demand, concerns have been raised about the self-sufficiency and viability of the Pell Grant. For the first time in over a decade, there is a projection of financial shortfall in the program. Even after Congress tried to provide $10.5 billion to assist in the short-term, recent reports project that by the end of September this year, the program will still have come about $5 and a half billion dollars short, more than doubling in 2027 if it continues down this path. This greater financial need also comes with greater demand. From 2020-21, almost 6 and a half million students used Pell Grant, and this current year, over 7 and a half million students (totaling almost $35 billion) were given the grant, due to FAFSA simplification allowing for more students to be eligible.

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On Thursday, the Department of Education sent out news nationally surrounding a voting study. The message warned colleges that anyone releasing the use data of the study will be in violation of federal laws that protect students’ right to privacy and receive financial sanctions. Director Miller Jr. of ED’s Student Private Policy Office released a statement touting the wealth of ways to enforce when colleges and universities are not compliant with FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act). There are currently investigations into universities, and they are prohibited from releasing data until they are complete. ED states that they are sharing the data with 3rd-parties illegally in order to influence elections.

Not only is the use data shared, but also identifying information of the students to the NSC (National Student Clearinghouse) and political organizations. ED’s desire to determine how the data is being shared with universities and other parties and whether or not it is in compliance with FERPA’s requirements. Utah’s Senator Lee stated that the study “compels institutions to hand over students’ FERPA-protected data” and created a bill that protects students’ private information from being released without consent. Clearinghouse responded to various statements by reiterating their politically neutral stance and goal to produce civic engagement as opposed to a political agenda.

Rapid Recap

📄💻 Lawsuit Against Corporate Publishers Dismissed UCLA professor filed against 6 largest for-profit peer-review publishers. The suit argued they colluded to violate the Sherman Act, but the U.S. District Judge ruled there wasn’t enough evidence and it cannot be renewed.

🏤 Government’s Partial Shutdown Ceases House of Representatives voted to resume federal funding until September 30th, 4 days after funds ran out. This overturned cutting the Department of Education’s funding by $12 billion with a goal of meeting staffing requirements.

Department of Education Grants Vocational Funds Due to financial pressures and shortages in the workforce, an announcement was made to provide grants, almost half to 4-year universities, for programs in order to fulfill the demands of short-term workforce training. Go on…

Department of Education Grants Vocational Funds

About half of the 4-year colleges receiving funds are constituted at R-1 schools, as they boast ‘high’ research activity (classified by Carnegie). “I do think that traditional four-year public institutions are branching out in a way that they haven’t before.” Dir. Salerno of Burning Glass Institute states. He also believes financial pressures from the universities due to declines in enrollment played a factor in their desire to apply for the grants. Colleges are now utilizing external vendors, such as Coursera, in their programs, while others are building programs in-house to provide an additional edge. Interest in short-term programs and certificates have increased significantly, although there are concerns of the programs not solving long-term problems, and the relevance of the certificates years from now.

College Board Prohibits Smart Glasses During SAT

The College Board has released that smart glasses will be banned while taking the SAT. Beginning in March, students will no longer be able to bring this relatively new technology, whether they are prescription or not, as they are deemed as extensions of bluetooth earbuds and smartwatches. Armed with artificial intelligence, they have been brought into the spotlight after professors raised concerns that they would be used to cheat. In Japan, a student has been caught recording and posting the questions for a college entrance exam online to receive answers during the exam. Professors have also voiced concern about the glasses being used to secretly record professors, leaking information or lectures, and even using the film to create deepfakes. Proctors for the SAT have since been trained on how to locate smart glasses and remove them.

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After almost a year of fighting the ruling in court, the Education Secretary, Linda McMahon, and her legal team have moved to drop their appeal. The original ruling prevented the Department of Education from requiring universities to eliminate all curricula, services, and financial aid that focus on race, or to cease receiving federal funding. Last Wednesday, both sides agreed to a motion to dismiss after the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights opened the case, claiming that race-based scholarships and graduations were illegal. Furthermore, they stated that any college that didn’t act according to the claim would be investigated and lose its funding. So, the institutions closed their DEI offices and discontinued programs.

Initially, officials stated that they were solely enforcing the laws already in place regarding civil rights and abiding by the 2023 Supreme Court ruling, which prohibited affirmative action. The justification was that programs that are based on race are considered discriminatory. However, education unions confronted the claims in court 10 days later. There was no explanation as to why the Department of Education made the decision to revoke their appeal, but this ruling still sparks confusion for some universities. Some colleges have closed down establishments that cater to a specific group based on their race or ethnicity. Randi Weingarten mentioned in a press release that he is proud of the results from this case.

Rapid Recap

🗽🤝 NYU/SUNY Create Higher Education Design Lab Both schools collaborated to prepare Students for Work with AI. This large-scale operation involves first-year programming, co-curricular training, and career readiness to help foster critical thinking.

💻 Enrollment rates for Online/Hybrid Education Surge In 2019, the distance education enrollment rate was 36.9%. Now, more than half of the US’s enrollments are hybrid/online. These growth rates demonstrate the increasing demand for more accessible education

💵 U.S. Universities Aim to Manage Cutbacks Universities across the country are trying to handle the decrease in federal research funding and student enrollment rates by 20% overall. This has impacted schools, leading to layoffs and hiring freezes. Go on…

U.S. Universities Aim to Manage Cutbacks

With the significant decrease in international student enrollment, due to visa concerns, schools like Brown, University of Chicago, and University of Southern California have reported deficits. Financially, schools like Stanford have reported budget cutbacks of over $140 million. On top of that, universities are also suffering due to student loan repayments. With the new loan system, research has shown that the loan caps in place may impact over 160,000 students in not being able to find other ways to finance their education. Professor Levine of economics states that “the uncertainty caused by having to plan for potential cuts had been the most damaging aspect.” Some suggest that schools need to locate more funding from donors and students to mitigate these effects.

AI Impacting Critical Thinking and Higher Education

A few years ago, if a student had a research paper, they would type in their questions and spend time sorting through reliable sources for a paper. Today, a student can get multiple sources summarized and synthesized through AI in the blink of an eye, without having to think about anything. This is not just impacting students, but faculty. Multiple professors utilize AI to do literature reviews, decreasing the workload and time from hours and even days, to a few minutes or even seconds. For over 20 years, students have had to practice judgment in gathering and deciding if something is reliable. Now, they don’t have to question or verify anything, even when the citations or information is sometimes inaccurate. Critical thinking becomes more necessary and increasingly scarce, and research has been forever changed.

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