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October 29, 2026

Picture two high school seniors who open their portals on the same December evening and read the same word. One applied early action to MIT and the other to...

October 23, 2026

Boston University offered 15,339 applicants a place on its waitlist for fall 2024. Of those, 8,996 accepted the offer and waited. Eighteen were admitted. Carnegie Mellon’s numbers were similar:...

October 16, 2026

Colleges report the share of their class sections with fewer than 20 students. Across 233 colleges with 2025-26 Common Data Sets, the median reported share is about half. The...

October 9, 2026

What happens to a selective college’s entering class when the children of its alumni stop getting a thumb on the scale? For most of the last century nobody could...

October 1, 2026

On August 27, the Bureau of Labor Statistics updated its Occupational Outlook Handbook entry for mechanical engineers. The new projections call for employment in the occupation to grow 11...

October 1, 2026

A College Transitions analysis of 305 four-year institutions compares each school’s academic spending per student with what schools of similar endowment wealth typically spend. The largest shortfalls belong to...

September 30, 2026

From 2015 through 2024, bachelor’s-degree alumni of the California Institute of Technology earned 171 research doctorates in physics and astronomy. Caltech enrolls 987 undergraduates. Set side by side, those...

September 29, 2026

A nearby medical school is often treated as an advantage for an undergraduate biomedical engineering program. Duke has one, Johns Hopkins has one, and so do many of the...

September 29, 2026

At the University of Chicago, economics degrees equal roughly three in every ten bachelor’s degrees the university awards. Over the 2022 through 2024 academic years, Chicago awarded 1,612 economics...

September 28, 2026

Which kind of college sends the most students on to a research doctorate in neuroscience? Count the doctorates and the answer is a big public university. Alumni of the...

September 28, 2026

Stanford places 20th in the 2026 College Transitions ranking of undergraduate electrical and computer engineering (ECE) programs. Remove the two components that measure a program’s scale and how central...

September 24, 2026

Computer science degrees more than doubled in a decade. Then recent-graduate unemployment jumped across three computing fields at once, including the largest increase of any field of study in...

September 23, 2026

Detroit’s Big 3 of GM, Ford, and Chrysler spent much of the 1970s learning an expensive lesson. While they kept turning out oversized, gas-guzzling American-style models, two oil shocks...

September 23, 2026

Walk into any Starbucks, Barnes and Noble, or public library around the holiday season and at least a few tables will be occupied by teen/middle-age dyads, with the older...

September 23, 2026

As an Asian American teenager or a parent of one, you’ve likely heard that Asian students have historically been at a disadvantage in the admissions process at elite American...

September 23, 2026

Welcome to College Transitions’ “So you want to be a…” series. Designed to help career-minded high school students think intelligently about their postsecondary journeys, these blogs look at the...

September 17, 2026

Colleges publish the GPAs of the students they enroll. Those numbers are not as comparable as they look, and the most selective schools often do not publish them at...

September 11, 2026

Students applying to college this year will inevitably confront the community essay. In fact, most students will end up responding to several community essay prompts for different schools. For...

September 11, 2026

Writing the supplemental “Why this major” essay sounds like a cakewalk for approximately 4% of high school seniors, those lucky few who’ve known their purpose since kindergarten. For most,...

September 10, 2026

Fulbright publishes the application count behind every institution’s grant total. Almost nobody looks at that column. On February 3, 2026, the Fulbright Program named 114 colleges and universities as...