“Innovative and invaluable…use this book as your college lifeline.”
— Lynn O'Shaughnessy
Nationally Recognized College Expert
July 9, 2026
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign sits in an unusual place among the nation’s large public flagships. It is a Big Ten research university with a top-ranked engineering school, a...
Notre Dame is a private Catholic research university with an admissions story that, until recently, looked steadier than most of its peers. Application volume drifted upward without spiking. The...
The University of Washington is the public flagship of the Pacific Northwest, a Tier 1 research university with roughly $1.9 billion in annual research expenditures, a medical school that...
Williams runs a peculiar economy. A college of 2,100 undergraduates in a small Berkshires town competes annually for cross-admits against Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, sits at or near the...
Dartmouth has spent the last five years doing something none of its Ivy League peers has done: reversing the test-optional policy adopted during the pandemic. The Fall 2025 entering...
Few schools have changed their position in the American admissions market as visibly as Boston University. A quarter century ago, BU admitted roughly half of its applicants and competed...
June 30, 2026
Biology has always been the gateway science. It is the major that leads to medical school, to graduate research, to careers in biotechnology and public health, and increasingly to...
Georgetown University is one of the few highly selective American universities where the headline admissions numbers have barely moved over the past five years. The admit rate has held...
June 26, 2026
Aerospace engineering is one of the most specialized and demanding undergraduate disciplines in the American university system. The field produces the engineers who design commercial aircraft, spacecraft, missiles, satellites,...
Nursing is one of the largest undergraduate majors in the United States, and the largest single field within the health professions, the category that trails only business among all...
Stanford’s Common Data Set is one of the more useful institutional disclosures available, partly because peer schools file on the same template, and partly because the format forces the...
June 18, 2026
Foreign language study is one of the most globally oriented dimensions of an undergraduate education. Whether a student is pursuing Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Russian, or the...
A new analysis of more than 300 selective colleges ranks the top undergraduate feeder institutions to elite MBA programs, by raw volume, by enrollment size, and among schools that...
Emory University ended the 2025 admissions cycle in an unusual position. Application volume grew 12 percent across the five-year window from Fall 2021 to Fall 2025, the published admit...
June 12, 2026
Among occupations with above-average AI exposure, 264 are growing while 108 are declining. The correlation between AI exposure and employment growth is near zero. For students and career changers,...
An analysis of 300-plus selective colleges identifies the top feeder institutions to elite medical programs three ways: by raw numbers, by enrollment size, and among schools that outperform their...
June 11, 2026
Michigan is the public flagship that has watched its admissions operation change under unusually heavy weather over the past five years. Application volume has climbed from under 80,000 to...
June 4, 2026
At forty schools, more than half the incoming class is filled before regular decisions go out, and the trend is accelerating. At Davidson College this year, 69 percent of...
Students from 28 states are represented at elite schools at less than half their expected share. For applicants from those states, geography may be the most underused advantage in...
June 3, 2026
A Five-Year Data Report on Admissions, Financial Aid, and What the Application Actually Requires, 2021–2026 New York University does not look like a peer of the Ivies the way...
