Testing stays compressed. The Sept. 12 SAT and the Sept. 19 ACT both land this month, and registration for the October dates for both tests closes before Halloween decorations go up. There’s also an Oct. 1 cluster worth knowing about now rather than in three weeks, because the FAFSA, the CSS Profile and the QuestBridge National College Match application all open or close on it. Here’s what’s confirmed, and what each grade should be doing with it.

ACT and SAT Testing Dates for August and September 2026

ACT

• Sept. 1 — Late registration deadline for the Sept. 19 ACT; fees apply

• Sept. 11 — Regular registration deadline for the Oct. 17 ACT

• Sept. 14 — Photo upload and standby registration deadline for the Sept. 19 ACT

• Sept. 19 — ACT Test Date (initial scores expected Oct. 6)

• Sept. 29 — Late registration deadline for the Oct. 17 ACT; fees apply

REGISTER FOR THE ACT

SAT

• Sept. 1 — Late registration deadline for the Sept. 12 SAT; fees apply

• Sept. 4 — Scores released for the Aug. 22 SAT

• Sept. 12 — SAT test date (scores released Sept. 25)

• Sept. 18 — Regular registration deadline for the Oct. 3 SAT

• Sept. 22 — Late registration deadline and change deadline for the Oct. 3 SAT; fees apply

• Sept. 25 — Scores released for the Sept. 12 SAT

REGISTER FOR THE SAT

Financial Aid and Scholarship Deadlines Families Should Know

The 2027-28 FAFSA is expected to open Oct. 1, which makes September the prep month rather than the filing month. Several colleges award institutional aid on a first-come basis, so the families who file in early October are competing for a fuller pot than the ones who file in January.

Three things to do before Oct. 1:

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The new policy, signed Aug. 1 by Jenny Trinitapoli, master of the Social Sciences Collegiate Division, keeps laptops and phones out of the classroom and prohibits AI assistance on coursework. Readings move to paper, class recording is out, and so is wearable AI like Meta’s smart glasses. Faculty can’t run generative AI over student work for grading without disclosure, and exceptions need a department chair’s sign-off.

“[The guidelines] afford students the freedom to think for themselves, to listen to one another without the cacophony of other (disembodied and non-human) voices in the room.”

— Jenny Trinitapoli, master of the Social Sciences Collegiate Division, University of Chicago

This isn’t a pilot in one seminar. The social sciences core is a required three-course sequence, so the ban reaches every undergraduate in the college. The law school got there first, barring technology from first-year classrooms in July. Faculty reaction inside the division has been warm, and Aaron Jakes, an associate professor, described his as “relief and jubilation.”

What This Means

How a school teaches with AI has become a real difference between campuses, and it can differ between divisions on the same campus. A student who spent senior year writing with AI at their elbow may land in a required sequence where the tool is gone and the grade depends on what happens in a room with no screens. That belongs on the list of questions for a tour, right next to housing and advising.

Rapid Recap

🎓📬 Common App Direct Admissions Grows to 234 Colleges — Starting in September, 234 institutions across 42 states and Washington, D.C. will send admission offers to students before they apply, up from 215 last year. More than half of last cycle’s 1.5 million applicants received at least one, and a quarter of those offers came from colleges the student hadn’t considered.

⚖️💰 Five Universities Get Another Shot at the Financial Aid Case — The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Aug. 25 that Cornell, Georgetown, MIT, Notre Dame and Penn can appeal class certification in the antitrust suit over the “568 Presidents Group,” which former students say coordinated aid formulas and pushed up what families paid. Certification put at least $1.7 billion at stake across a class of 220,000.

📚✂️ Texas Universities Cut the Core — The University of Houston System board unanimously approved cutting roughly 100 courses on Aug. 21, about 40% of its core curriculum, to comply with Texas Senate Bill 37. Days earlier, a faculty task force at UT Austin recommended rebuilding general education around Western civilization and broad U.S. history, with pilot courses in fall 2027.

⚖️🤖 Cornell Turns Cheating Into a Teachable Moment — Cornell has taken its “Accepting Responsibility” program campuswide, letting students caught in minor integrity violations skip a formal hearing in exchange for a workshop and a waiver of their right to appeal. About half of the roughly 360 students in the pilot got there through AI misuse, and only four had a second violation. Keep reading…

What This Means

Half of Cornell’s cases came down to AI, which tells you where the friction sits on campuses right now. The rules aren’t settled and they aren’t consistent between courses, so a first-year student can cross a line without ever deciding to cheat. Ask on tours what happens the first time a student misuses a tool, and whether the policy lives at the university level or with individual professors. The answer varies more than most families expect.

The Merit Argument, Checked Against the Data

A working paper released this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research pushes back on a claim that’s become standard in the fight over selective admissions, which is that elite colleges are admitting large numbers of low-scoring students in the name of diversity.

Jesse Rothstein, who directs the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley, and his co-authors found a different pattern. Two-thirds of students at the top 50 private universities come from families in the top income quintile, and more than half of the students at state flagships do as well. The wealthy, high-testing applicant isn’t being crowded out of these classrooms. That applicant is the median.

“It’s high time we interrogated what we are doing with this admissions system.”

— Jesse Rothstein, director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley

The sharper finding is about money. Instructional spending per student climbs roughly 29% for every 100 points of average SAT score at an institution, and by 2019 the most selective colleges were spending about 200% more per student than the least selective, a gap that stood at 100% in 1969.

What This Means

A school’s admit rate describes who else applied. Its instructional spending per student describes what your kid gets once they’re in the building, and those two figures don’t always move together. That data is public through the federal IPEDS system, and it’s worth pulling for every school on a list, especially the ones sitting in the safety column.

Admissions Angle works with families as early as eighth grade to build college lists that hold up against how a school teaches, not only how it ranks. If this fall’s AI rules have you rethinking what to ask on a tour, book a free discovery call with us.

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The cause isn’t much of a mystery. A Department of Homeland Security rule now caps international student visas at four years, visa appointments are backed up at some embassies and more than 1,000 student visas have already been revoked. A coalition of higher education groups has sued over the rule, arguing the regulations would be “catastrophic for universities.”

“If you think, ‘OK, it might be hard for me to get a visa,’ that may make students more hesitant to apply.”

— Rodney Hughes, senior data scientist, Common App

Domestic applicants moved the opposite direction, rising 4% and carrying the platform to a 2% overall gain, according to Inside Higher Ed. Applicants using fee waivers rose 6%, and those from ZIP codes below the median income rose 8%. Black applicants rose 8%, Latinx applicants 3% and white applicants 2%. Small-town applicants climbed 9% and rural applicants 8%, adding roughly 17,000 students. Enrollment is already following the applications. More than 800 colleges surveyed last fall reported a 17% decline in newly enrolled international students.

For a U.S. family, that math cuts two ways at once. There’s slightly less competition for seats from abroad, and slightly more from a growing domestic pool at exactly the schools everyone is now looking at. Which puts the weight back on fit, and on knowing what a specific school does well before it lands on the list. We went through the new Princeton Review category rankings here.

Rapid Recap

📊🎓 Princeton Review Names Its Best Colleges for 2027 — The new rankings draw on surveys of 172,000 students across 392 schools and produce 50 separate No. 1s rather than one. Bentley takes Best Career Services, Washington and Lee tops Great Financial Aid and Vanderbilt has the happiest students.

💳📲 PayPal and Venmo Land on the Tuition Bill — Bellarmine, Butler, Kansas State, Michigan State and Texas Tech are among the first schools to let families pay tuition through PayPal or Venmo, through integrations announced Aug. 19 with Illumia, Nelnet Campus Commerce and TouchNet. Convenience fees vary by school, and a 2.5% charge on a $25,000 payment runs about $625.

🤖✍️ The Part of the Application AI Can’t Fake — Jenny Rickard, president and CEO of Common App, told U.S. News that admissions officers triangulate an application as a whole, so a voice that doesn’t match the rest of the file gets noticed. “It’s a lost opportunity if a student turns over the responsibility of sharing who they are to a bot,” she said.

🏛️⚖️ Washington Comes for Accreditation, Twice in One Week — The Education Department released a proposed rule on Aug. 19 that would make it easier to launch new accreditors and hand them oversight of campus free speech and “intellectual diversity” policies. Two days later, an 86-page report recommended revoking the American Bar Association’s recognition as the accreditor for roughly 200 law schools. A federal advisory committee takes up the report Sept. 23.

📚🤘 UT Austin Rewrites Its Core for the First Time in 20 Years — The university is narrowing general education around social sciences, STEM and the arts and humanities, cutting six credit hours in the process. Pilot courses launch in fall 2027, full rollout follows in fall 2028 and current students are exempt. Keep reading…

What This Means

A core curriculum is the part of a college a student can’t opt out of, which makes it one of the more revealing things to look at when two schools seem interchangeable on paper. UT Austin is betting that fewer, more deliberate requirements produce graduates who can hold an argument together. The overhaul arrives under Texas SB 37, which gives governing boards authority to review and reject general education courses, and the Texas conference of the AAUP opposed that law, saying it “imposes political control over the core curriculum.”

For families with a rising junior or senior looking at Austin, the practical detail is the calendar. Anyone enrolling in fall 2028 or later will be under the new core, so the course catalog a student browses on a campus visit this fall isn’t the one they’ll register for.

Recent Grads Think AI Took Their Jobs. The Data Is Messier.

Unemployment for college graduates ages 22 to 27 sat at 5.7% in June, well above the 4.1% rate for workers overall, and NPR reports that economists still can't agree on how much of that gap belongs to artificial intelligence. Recent grads have already made up their minds. A ZipRecruiter survey found 47% believe AI has affected hiring in their fields.

The research pulls in opposite directions. Stanford found that early-career workers ages 22 to 25 in AI-exposed roles have seen a 16% relative employment decline since late 2022. Harvard economist David Deming notes the timing doesn’t line up neatly: “If you look very carefully at the timing, it looks like the decline in junior hiring actually started a bit like six months before ChatGPT was released.” An analysis from Ramp and Revelio Labs found the reverse pattern in company spending, with firms making substantial AI investments increasing entry-level hiring by 12% in the two years after adoption.

“AI is not the whole story, but it’s part of the story and the evidence is building.”

— Erik Brynjolfsson, Stanford economist

None of that resolves anything for the person holding the diploma. “It’s hard knowing that I’m doing everything that I can to be successful and feeling like that’s not enough,” said Jacqueline Kline, a recent graduate still looking for work. That’s the sentiment behind a lot of the current family conversation about whether the degree is worth the price.

What This Means

Nobody can tell a 17-year-old which majors will hold up in 2032, and the ones marketed as AI-proof this year are the same ones marketed as recession-proof a decade ago. What the data does support is that the companies spending most heavily on AI are hiring more junior people, which points toward industries where the technology works as a tool rather than a replacement.

The move families can make now is to look harder at what a school does after graduation. Career services staffing, employer relationships and internship placement rates in a student’s field are all knowable before a deposit goes down.

Admissions Angle works with families as early as eighth grade to build college lists that hold up through graduation and into a first job. If this year’s shifting applicant pool has you rethinking your student’s list, book a free discovery call with us.

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The stakes here are not imaginary. In a new Ellucian survey of more than 2,000 current and prospective students, 89% said they would have chosen a different college for more scholarship money. Nearly 9 in 10!! That’s not a preference, friends, that’s a market.

So here’s a decoder. Four rules for reading these lists the way an admissions officer reads them, which is to say skeptically and with a calculator open. None of the lists are wrong. They’re just answering questions you didn’t think to ask.

First, what this thing is

“The Best 392 Colleges: 2027 Edition” is in its 35th year. It isn’t one ranking. It’s 50 of them, each naming 25 schools, and all of them come from the same place: about 172,000 students who filled out a 98-question survey about their own campuses. That’s about 439 students per school.

There is no specific formula for selection, no endowment math and no reputation scoring from provosts who’ve never visited the campus they’re grading. Just students, answering questions about their own lives at college.

Rob Franek, the editor-in-chief, says the same thing every August and it’s worth repeating: no school is best overall. The book refuses to name one. The question it’s built to answer is “which college is best for me,” which is a different question and a much harder one.

Rule No. 1: The rank order is not the cost order

This is the one I’d tattoo on a parent’s forearm, and the numbers make it obvious. Here’s the financial aid top 10 with what The Princeton Review says families pay.

The school ranked No. 2 has the lowest sticker price in the top 10 and the highest out-of-pocket cost. Both are true at once, and that’s the whole problem with reading these lists from the top down.

Now look at No. 2 and No. 3.

Juniata College, a private liberal arts college in Huntingdon, Pa., ranks above Princeton University. A family at Juniata pays about $59,364 out of pocket. A family at Princeton pays $10,787. Princeton’s average need-based scholarship is $80,837, the largest in the country. Juniata’s is $19,336.

So how does Juniata finish ahead? Because the ranking blends how much aid a school awards with how satisfied its students are with what they got, and Juniata’s students are, by their own account, delighted. That satisfaction score is a real signal. It usually means somebody answered the phone, the award letter was legible and nothing mysterious happened sophomore year. It is a different signal from “this school will be affordable for your family.”

Both columns are useful. Read them separately!

Rule No. 2: The sticker price is not the price

Washington and Lee is the most expensive school on the list at $97,335 a year, and it’s No. 1. The average need-based scholarship there is nearly $72,000, which puts the real number closer to $25,350. The school meets full demonstrated need without loans, admits need-blind and hands full-ride Johnson Scholarships to 10% of each entering class.

Zoom out and the same pattern holds everywhere. Average published tuition and fees at private nonprofit four-year colleges reached $45,000 for 2025-26, per the College Board, while average net tuition and fees came to about $16,910. Families ultimately spent around $34,000 on the whole package last year, according to Sallie Mae. That figure includes room, board, books and the laptop.

Institutional grant aid, meanwhile, climbed 24% over the past decade to $85.1 billion. Roughly half of all grant aid now comes from the colleges themselves.

“There is money out there, great big buckets of money,” Franek said.

You will not find out how much of it has your kid’s name on it until you run each school’s net price calculator. Every college is required to post one. Almost nobody opens them. Do it in October, not in April when you’re comparing award letters and someone is crying.

Rule No. 3: The famous lists are not the useful ones

There’s a new category this year: “Great Outdoors: Students Get Outside.” The University of the South, in Sewanee, Tenn., is No. 1, with St. Lawrence University and College of the Atlantic right behind it.

I love this list, and not because I own hiking boots. I love it because it’s the rare thing a 17-year-old can have a genuine opinion about. “Do you want to be somewhere people hike on Saturday morning?” is a far more productive dinner conversation than “what’s your reach school.” The odd categories get at fit, and fit is the variable that decides whether your kid transfers.

Same goes for Happiest Students, where Vanderbilt University finished first this year, with the University of San Diego and Denison University next. One warning: if a version of that list comes across your feed with Texas Christian University on top, you’re looking at an older edition. Check the year before you forward it to anyone.

Rule No. 4: The book is not a verdict

The best use of this book is discovery. Sort by whatever your kid says matters, pull four schools you’d never heard of and put them on the list. Juniata. St. Olaf. Denison. Sewanee. These are the schools that compete for a strong applicant with money.

The worst use is treating No. 4 as meaningfully better than No. 11 when both came out of students circling numbers on a survey. The rankings aren’t precise enough for that, and they don’t claim to be.

What to do this week

Run the net price calculator for the three most expensive schools on your kid’s list. Then call one financial aid office and ask, out loud, whether they award merit money to students who don’t qualify for need-based aid. Plenty of families assume the answer is no and never ask.

“Merit aid is an underutilized resource,” Franek said. “These are grants, money that students don’t have to pay back. That is significant.”

Take a breath and close the laptop. Your kid is going to be fine in more places than either of you currently believes.

Caltech has quietly built a four-person team with a single assignment: catch applicants who lie. The group looks through admitted students’ files for fabricated credentials, according to a Wall Street Journal report recapped here. They examine the fonts and formatting on certificates, verify transcripts with the schools and programs that issued them and confirm that the people who wrote recommendation letters actually work where they say they do. Some applicants are asked to sit for a video interview and answer questions about the research they claimed to have conducted.

The effort grew out of a rise in anonymous tips accusing applicants of padding or faking their records. AI tools and the pressure to stand out have made fabrication easier to pull off and suspicion easier to come by.

“I don’t think everyone’s lying. But I can’t let a small portion of the pool of our admits ruin all the greatness in the other percentage.”

— Nic Lee, Caltech

Flagged students don’t get an automatic rejection. Caltech reaches out for an explanation before making a decision, formalizing a practice many schools have handled quietly for years. For the vast majority of applicants whose achievements are real, the takeaway is reassuring. The scrutiny is aimed at the padding, not the accomplishment.

What This Means

For the honest applicant, a fraud squad is good news. What matters for your family is documentation. Make sure everything on the application is something your student can explain in plain language and back up if asked, since “stretched” and “fabricated” can start to look alike to a reviewer who’s already on alert. If a tutor or program has ever inflated your student’s role, now is the time to walk it back to what’s true.

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Rapid Recap

🤖🎓 AI Agents Are Now Taking Whole Online Courses — The New York Times reports on purpose-built AI systems that complete entire online college courses on a student’s behalf, doing the coursework, taking quizzes and answering discussion questions. Schools know it’s happening and have no clean way to stop it.

🛏️✨ The $20,000 Dorm Room — Mississippi designer Shelly Gates of Mary Margaret Designs got dragged online after the New York Post featured the up-to-$20,000 dorm makeovers she builds for students at Southern schools. She calls this “the year of color,” with clients trading quiet luxury for pastels and bold patterns. The backlash landed less on the decor than on the price tag.

💸🎀 The $6,500 Sorority Rush Coach — Parents are paying professional “rush coaches” to prep their daughters for recruitment, with no guarantee of a bid. Atlanta’s Trisha Addicks charges $6,500 for a one-year program and is rolling out a $12,000 two-year package. One New York coach went from five families a season to nearly 80 since 2024.

📵🏫 Students Want More Than a Phone Ban — With New York now bell-to-bell statewide and California’s ban coming next year, students are pushing for the offline support to go with the rules. A youth-led group, #OffTheGrid, has funded tech-free initiatives at 10 schools and reached 27,000 students across New York.

📝🤖 Penn Spells Out Where AI Crosses the Line — Penn Admissions released guidelines for the 2026-27 cycle that allow AI for grammar and proofreading but bar it from generating essays. The test: if a student couldn’t explain in their own words how they arrived at what they wrote, it isn’t ready to submit. Yale bars any “substantive content or output”; Brown limits it to basic proofreading. Keep reading…

What This Means

The theme here is trust. Caltech is verifying credentials, the Times is documenting AI agents that can run a whole online course, and Penn is drawing bright lines around how much help is too much. The read for students is steady: use AI like a sharp editor, for feedback and a cleaner draft, and make sure every idea is one your student could defend out loud. We tell families the same thing every cycle: the voice is the value.

Michigan Makes the First Semester Gradeless

Starting in fall 2027, the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts will grade every first-year student pass/no-credit for their first semester. Students still get letter grades and instructor feedback, but those grades won’t count toward a GPA or appear on an external transcript, which will note only that all first-semester LSA grades are automatically P/NC.

“[The goal is to] help students start strong and curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals.”

— University of Michigan College of LSA, in its announcement

University records still track the real letter grades internally, and Johns Hopkins, Goucher and Swarthmore have run versions of this. The college says it wants first-years to explore a hard subject or a brand-new field without a low grade following them for years.

What This Means

A gradeless first semester sounds like pure relief, and for a lot of students it will be. Just know what it doesn't erase. Michigan still keeps the real letter grades on file, and a competitive major or a pre-med track may still lean on early performance. If your student is choosing between schools, ask each one how a pass/no-credit first term is treated when it comes time to declare a major or apply to a professional program.

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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The 2023 tech layoffs forced a hard pivot toward “efficiency”, and generative AI accelerated another change: AI doesn’t just need people who can write software. It needs the physical infrastructure to run on, chips, data centers, sensors, robots and the engineers who understand how to build and secure them. Companies can no longer afford to hire generalists and train them for six months.

Intel has now put more than $5 billion into its Ohio semiconductor site, and after two construction delays, its two fabs are now targeted to open in 2030 and 2032, with Ohio State still central to training the workforce behind it. TSMC and Arizona State launched a free technician training program this year that guarantees graduates a TSMC interview, part of a plan to fill thousands of roles at its Phoenix fabs.

SK hynix’s $3.87 billion packaging plant at Purdue Research Park is now under construction, on track for completion in 2028. And Rockwell Automation’s Robotics Centre of Excellence, built next to the University of Waterloo rather than in California, continues to anchor the region’s robotics ecosystem. None of these are software offices with kombucha on tap. They’re all hardware bets.

To find the engineers who can build and secure that infrastructure, Big Tech and its industrial partners are anchoring themselves next to public universities with serious hardware, semiconductor and aerospace programs. Here are the schools leading that shift, and what your teen should study to get in front of it.

University of Waterloo

Location: Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Anchor: Google, Meta, Microsoft, Rockwell Automation

Waterloo captures the shift toward hardware and physical automation better than any school on this list. Silicon Valley has recruited Waterloo software grads for years, but the AI infrastructure era has pushed that recruiting toward hardware and robotics. Clearpath Robotics, founded by Waterloo engineering alumni, was acquired by Rockwell Automation, which then built its global Robotics Centre of Excellence in Waterloo specifically to stay close to campus labs like RoboHub. Big Tech and industrial giants aren't just scouting app developers here anymore. They're anchoring next to the labs producing engineers who can bridge digital AI and physical systems.

What to study: Mechatronics Engineering, which blends mechanical, electrical and software systems; Systems Design Engineering, built around holistic, prototype-driven problem solving; or Management Engineering, a small, co-op-only program that feeds technical program manager roles at companies like Nvidia.

Watch Ryan Gariepy walk through Clearpath's story:

Ohio State University

Location: Columbus, Ohio
Anchor: Intel, Amazon Web Services

Ohio State is the clearest example of what the AI infrastructure era is asking for, and also a clear example of how long hardware bets take to pay off. Intel’s Ohio site was announced in 2022 as a $20 billion investment, and by early 2026 the company had put more than $5 billion into the project, with its two fabs now targeted to open in 2030 and 2032 after two construction delays. Intel has still pledged $100 million toward Ohio education partnerships, and Ohio State channeled part of that funding into a dedicated Semiconductor and Microelectronics Education initiative alongside its Center for Advanced Semiconductor Fabrication Research.

What to study: Electrical and Computer Engineering, with a concentration in Solid State Electronics and Photonics, or Computer Science and Engineering.

Arizona State University

Location: Tempe, Arizona
Anchor: Intel, TSMC, aerospace contractors

ASU still carries an outdated “party school” reputation that has nothing to do with its Fulton Schools of Engineering, one of the largest and best-funded engineering programs in the country. Arizona has become the epicenter of U.S. microchip manufacturing, and TSMC’s Phoenix factories led the company to a 2023 partnership with ASU covering student recruitment, lab funding and joint research. That partnership is now producing results: in 2026, ASU and TSMC launched a free technician training program that guarantees a TSMC interview to anyone who completes it, part of a push to fill thousands of equipment, facilities and manufacturing roles at TSMC’s Phoenix fabs.

What to study: Materials Science and Engineering for chip development, Electrical Engineering or Supply Chain Management through W. P. Carey, ranked among the top three programs in the country by U.S. News & World Report and a direct feeder for companies working to fix ongoing electronics shortages.

Take a look inside the fabs this partnership feeds into…

Read more

There’s a reason some families spend as much energy on the alumni interview as they do on the essay. A parent’s diploma on the wall has quietly done real work in admissions for decades, and that’s exactly what a new bill wants to take away.

The Merit-Based Educational Reforms and Institutional Transparency Act would strip a college’s accreditation if it keeps giving alumni or donor kids a boost in the admissions process, and because accreditation is what lets a college’s students receive federal financial aid, this one reaches even the private schools that state laws can’t touch. Sen. Todd Young of Indiana has pushed this idea since 2023. It stalled then. He’s trying again.”

“America is a land of opportunity, not a land of aristocracy.”

— Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind.

Legacy preferences have already been fading without any new law. About a quarter of four-year colleges still factor in legacy status today, down from roughly half a decade ago. But the schools most likely to still be doing it are exactly the ones our families tend to apply to: wealthy, selective and quietly protective of the practice. Stanford, for one, walked away from California’s state financial aid money rather than give up its legacy admissions policy when the state threatened to publicly call it out.

What This Means

If your family has a legacy connection, don’t assume it still carries the weight it used to, and don’t assume it’s gone either. The honest move is to ask the admissions office directly how much it actually matters at that specific school, because the answer is changing school by school, not all at once, and it’s not the kind of thing you want to guess on.

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Rapid Recap

🎓⌨️ Turnitin’s New Tool Watches Students Type — Turnitin’s newest software, Clarity, tracks students’ keystrokes, revisions and copy-and-paste activity as they write, then lets professors replay the whole drafting process to check for AI use. Yale, Vanderbilt and Johns Hopkins have already turned off Turnitin’s AI-detection feature over false-positive concerns.

🎓🎓 Brown’s Longest-Serving President Announces Her Exit — Christina Paxson will step down as Brown University’s president at the end of the 2026-27 academic year, a year earlier than the extension she signed in 2025. She’s led Brown since 2012, longer than any other current Ivy League president, and the school will begin a national search for her replacement this fall.

🎓💰 Rice Raises Its Free-Tuition Cutoff to $200,000 — Rice University is expanding its Rice Investment financial aid program starting fall 2027, offering free tuition to families earning up to $200,000 a year, up from the previous $140,000 cutoff. Families earning less than $100,000 will have tuition, fees, and room and board fully covered.

🎓🏈 94% of Division I Athletic Programs Lost Money Last Year — A new federal report found that 330 of 352 Division I athletic programs spent more than they brought in during the 2023-24 academic year, a gap covered largely by student tuition and fees. Every Division II program reviewed lost money too.

What This Means

That gap doesn’t stay contained to the football program. Colleges cover athletics shortfalls with tuition and fee revenue, the same pool of money that funds financial aid and the same pool your family is already negotiating over in an admissions offer. It’s also why a growing number of schools have quietly cut Olympic sports like swimming, tennis and track over the past two years while football and basketball budgets keep climbing. If your student is being recruited for a non-revenue sport, ask the athletic department directly whether that program’s funding is considered stable. Don’t assume it.

A Different Way to Rank a College

Princeton kept the No. 1 spot on LinkedIn’s Top Colleges list for a second year, but the list itself is the real story. Instead of ranking schools by how hard they are to get into, LinkedIn ranks them by what happens to graduates once they leave: who gets hired, who gets promoted, who builds a strong network. It’s pulled from LinkedIn’s own data on millions of alumni.

“What makes LinkedIn Top Colleges different is that it’s built on real career outcomes.”

— Laura Lorenzetti, VP and executive editor, LinkedIn

The order looks different because of it. Babson beats Georgetown. Bentley, a school many families have never toured, lands ahead of Michigan and USC. Seven schools joined the list for the first time this year, including Washington University in St. Louis and Davidson.

What This Means

This isn’t a replacement for the rankings your family already knows. Think of it as a second opinion. A school that ranks lower on prestige can still rank high on what happens after graduation, and that’s worth a real conversation with your student, not just a glance at the number.

Admissions Angle works with students as early as 8th grade to build strategies that account for the full picture. If you have questions about what’s changing and what it means for your student, book a free discovery call with us.

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For years, we’ve done this work one family at a time. We sit across from a student, go through their list, read a personal statement through six or seven drafts, and watch someone turn into a stronger applicant than they thought they could be walking in. That part of the job hasn’t changed since we started Admissions Angle in 2019. What’s changed is how…

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The College Application Lab is our self-paced, eight-module video course covering the college admissions process: building your list, writing your essays, tracking deadlines and submitting a strong application.

Go through each module of videos at your own pace, using the designated manual to take notes.

At the end of the module, use the designated workbook for exercises and assignments to work on your essays, applications and overall strategy.

New to the course? Start with Module 1.

Module 6.0: Submitting Your Application

Learn how to strategically select and rank your extracurricular activities for the Common Application.

Read more

The College Application Lab is our self-paced, eight-module video course covering the college admissions process: building your list, writing your essays, tracking deadlines and submitting a strong application.

Go through each module of videos at your own pace, using the designated manual to take notes.

At the end of the module, use the designated workbook for exercises and assignments to work on your essays, applications and overall strategy.

New to the course? Start with Module 1.

Module 8.0: Following Up

What supplemental essays are for, and how they fit alongside your personal statement.

Read more

The College Application Lab is our self-paced, eight-module video course covering the college admissions process: building your list, writing your essays, tracking deadlines and submitting a strong application.

Go through each module of videos at your own pace, using the designated manual to take notes.

At the end of the module, use the designated workbook for exercises and assignments to work on your essays, applications and overall strategy.

New to the course? Start with Module 1.

Module 7.0: Scholarships and Financial aid

What supplemental essays are for, and how they fit alongside your personal statement.

Read more

The College Application Lab is our self-paced, eight-module video course covering the college admissions process: building your list, writing your essays, tracking deadlines and submitting a strong application.

Go through each module of videos at your own pace, using the designated manual to take notes.

At the end of the module, use the designated workbook for exercises and assignments to work on your essays, applications and overall strategy.

New to the course? Start with Module 1.

Module 5.0: Supplemental Essays

What supplemental essays are for, and how they fit alongside your personal statement.

Read more

The College Application Lab is our self-paced, eight-module video course covering the college admissions process: building your list, writing your essays, tracking deadlines and submitting a strong application.

Go through each module of videos at your own pace, using the designated manual to take notes.

At the end of the module, use the designated workbook for exercises and assignments to work on your essays, applications and overall strategy.

New to the course? Start with Module 1.

Module 4.0: The Personal Statement

What the Common App personal statement is for, and how this module will help you write yours.

Read more

The College Application Lab is our self-paced, eight-module video course covering the college admissions process: building your list, writing your essays, tracking deadlines and submitting a strong application.

Go through each module of videos at your own pace, using the designated manual to take notes.

At the end of the module, use the designated workbook for exercises and assignments to work on your essays, applications and overall strategy.

New to the course? Start with Module 1.

Module 3.0: Your College List

How to start building a college list that reflects your goals and profile.

Read more

The College Application Lab is our self-paced, eight-module video course covering the college admissions process: building your list, writing your essays, tracking deadlines and submitting a strong application.

Go through each module of videos at your own pace, using the designated manual to take notes.

At the end of the module, use the designated workbook for exercises and assignments to work on your essays, applications and overall strategy.

Getting started with The College Application Lab

What to expect from the course and how to use the manual and workbook together.

Read more

The College Application Lab is our self-paced, eight-module video course covering the college admissions process: building your list, writing your essays, tracking deadlines and submitting a strong application.

Go through each module of videos at your own pace, using the designated manual to take notes.

At the end of the module, use the designated workbook for exercises and assignments to work on your essays, applications and overall strategy.

New to the course? Start with Module 1.

Module 2.0: Crafting an Admissions Angle

An introduction to what an admissions angle is and how it shapes the rest of your application strategy.

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Why now: both changes are meant to reach stu…

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Testing deadlines are compressed this month too, with the SAT's next two registration windows both landing before Labor Day. None of this is optional reading. Here's what's confirmed so far, and what each grade should be doing with it.

ACT and SAT Testing Dates for August and September 2026

ACT

• Aug. 14 — Regular registration deadline for the Sept. 19 ACT

• Sept. 1 — Late registration deadline for the Sept. 19 ACT

REGISTER FOR THE ACT

SAT

• Aug. 7 — Regular registration deadline for the Aug. 22 SAT

• Aug. 11 — Late registration deadline for the Aug. 22 SAT; fees apply

• Aug. 22 — SAT test date (scores expected to be released Sept. 4)

• Aug. 28 — Regular registration deadline for the Sept. 12 SAT

• Sept. 1 — Late registration deadline for the Sept. 12 SAT; fees apply

REGISTER FOR THE SAT

What Every Grade Needs to Do in August

If you’re a parent of a freshman, your job is to...

Ease the transition, not manage it. Freshman year grades count toward the GPA a college eventually sees, so this isn’t a practice year to shrug off, but it also isn’t the moment to hover over every assignment. Talk with your student now, before schedules lock in, about what a manageable course load looks like, and plan to treat the first two weeks back as an information-gathering window rather than a performance review. Specifically:

• Have the goals conversation now. Not a lecture — a real conversation. What does your student want sophomore year to look like? Grades, friendships, activities? Getting clarity now makes fall feel less reactive.

• Help them find something to do with purpose. Even a few hours a week of volunteering or a structured program builds the habit of showing up. If your student’s school or program has community service requirements, summer is the time to start chipping away.

• Keep tabs on required reading. It’s easy for this to fall off the radar. A gentle check-in mid-July goes a long way.

• Discuss the transition to high school: Have open conversations about the transition to high school and address any concerns or questions your child may have. Let the reflection be guided by takeaways from the past school year and inspire positive changes for the coming school year.

If your child is a freshman, their job is to...

• Go in with a plan to pay attention from day one, not just show up. Habits set at the start of high school carry through four years.

• Set up a planner or folder system before the first day. It’s a lot easier to build that habit now than to fix a mess in week three.

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Last year, a kid added the wrong Cornell to their college list.

The Common App portal, opening this weekend, has two main dashboards: one for the application itself, and another called My Colleges, where you build the list of schools you’re applying to. Add a school there, and you get everything you need to start that application: requirements, social …

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