Posts by Andrew Belasco:

Online Degrees for Caregivers: Programs That Fit Around Family Caregiving Responsibilities

Posted on: 07 May 2026

If you are caring for an aging parent, a spouse with a serious illness, a child with a disability, or another family member who depends on you, the question of whether to pursue a college degree probably feels different than it does for the typical adult learner. Your schedule is not just full. It is […]

Intermountain Health Tuition Assistance: Online Degrees for Intermountain Health Caregivers

Posted on: 07 May 2026

Intermountain Health offers one of the more flexible employer tuition benefit structures in the U.S. healthcare sector, with two distinct paths to using the same $5,250 annual education benefit. Caregivers can choose traditional tuition reimbursement at any accredited school, or they can use the PEAK program (Path to Education, Advancement, and Knowledge) for direct upfront […]

How to Complete the Common App Activities Section

Posted on: 05 May 2026

For all of the first-class treatment applicants give to their Common App essay, the Common App Activities Section is all too often relegated to steerage. If antiquated steamship analogies do little for you, a more apropos comparison might present the essay as the mean, attention-hogging prom queen in a teen movie, and the activities list […]

Can I Still Apply Test-Optional to Colleges in 2026-27?

Posted on: 05 May 2026

Prior to the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, rarely did a single month pass without another well-known college or university making headlines by announcing that it would no longer require applicants to submit standardized test scores. This movement, known as going “test-optional,” actually began almost 50 years ago at Bowdoin College and had […]

The Pell Grant Completion Gap: Does Your College Close It or Widen It?

Posted on: 01 May 2026

At 331 colleges, low-income students graduate at higher rates than their wealthier peers. The data shows where the pattern holds, where it reverses, and what families should ask before they choose a school. Higher education carries a persistent assumption that low-income students struggle more than their peers to finish college. The national averages support this […]

The Contrarian’s Edge: How Declining Humanities Enrollment Could Work in Your Favor

Posted on: 24 Apr 2026

Why the students everyone else is ignoring may hold the strongest admissions hand. If you’re a high school student who lights up over Latin verb conjugations, who reads philosophy for fun, or who chose to study Mandarin when everyone else signed up for AP Computer Science, you’ve probably heard the skeptics. Why study that? What […]

Where Do America’s PhDs Come From?

Posted on: 17 Apr 2026

Tracing the baccalaureate origins of doctoral recipients reveals a complex landscape where massive public flagships, elite private universities, and tiny liberal arts colleges each play distinctive roles. Analysis of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2015–2024 Every year, roughly 33,000 to 35,000 people in the United States earn doctoral degrees. They emerge […]

High School GPA Calculator: Calculate Your Weighted and Unweighted GPA

Posted on: 10 Apr 2026

Your GPA is one of the first numbers a college admissions officer sees on your application — and one of the most misunderstood numbers in the entire process. Students confuse weighted and unweighted. They’re not sure whether AP classes count differently. They wonder how one bad semester affects their cumulative average and whether there’s anything […]