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May 14, 2026

It’s one of the few admissions variables you can actually control. Most families don’t know which schools are watching. Consider the awkward position a Tulane admissions reader sits in...

May 14, 2026

Picture a high school senior in San Jose hitting submit on a UC application in late November. They’re one of hundreds of thousands doing the same thing that week,...

May 11, 2026

By now, whether you’ve been told about them at a young age, know someone attending one of them, or just discovered them, my guess is that you’ve heard of...

May 11, 2026

Depending on your circumstances, the five allotted entries in the Honors section of the Common Application can look like anything from a frighteningly vast and boundless ocean to a...

May 8, 2026

Why graduate programs went digital faster than undergraduate ones, and what that means for the working adults who dominate them. If undergraduate education has been wading into online learning...

May 8, 2026

Sticker prices keep climbing, institutional aid keeps growing, and the gap families face keeps widening. The average sticker price at a selective American college (tuition, fees, room, board, and...

May 5, 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...

May 5, 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...

May 1, 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...

May 1, 2026

Two Distinct Forces Are Shrinking the Labor Market, and They Require Different Responses Of 744 occupations in our dataset, 228 are projected to decline over the next decade. The...

April 30, 2026

Investment banking continues to be one of the most sought-after career paths for ambitious college graduates, offering exceptional compensation packages and accelerated professional development opportunities. Entry-level investment banking analysts...

April 24, 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...

April 24, 2026

How to use the College Scorecard’s debt and earnings data to separate colleges that pay off from those that don’t. When families evaluate the cost of college, they tend...

April 23, 2026

In the competitive world of legal education, the journey to becoming a lawyer often begins long before the first day of law school. But just how much does your...

April 17, 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...

April 17, 2026

The same forces reshaping admissions are pulling selective liberal arts colleges in two very different directions Colby College, a small liberal arts school in Waterville, Maine, received 7,593 applications...

April 15, 2026

If you’re a current high school student who has been diagnosed with ADHD, another form of neurodivergence, or any kind of learning disability (such as dyslexia, dyscalculia, etc.), you...

April 14, 2026

For many high schoolers, the approaching horizon of post-graduation has been forcibly stamped with one thing and one thing only: college. As students careen into the latter half of...

April 10, 2026

The question sounds simple enough: if I get straight A’s from here on out, what will my GPA be? But the math behind it catches a lot of students...

April 10, 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...