“Innovative and invaluable…use this book as your college lifeline.”
— Lynn O'Shaughnessy
Nationally Recognized College Expert
July 10, 2026
Civil engineering is the oldest of the engineering disciplines, and in many respects the one most deeply embedded in the physical fabric of society. It is the field responsible...
Computer science is the defining discipline of the 21st-century economy. The systematic study of computation, meaning algorithms, data structures, operating systems, programming languages, artificial intelligence, machine learning, networks, and...
July 9, 2026
Johns Hopkins runs one of the most active and self-conscious admissions offices in American higher education. Over the past five years it has reinstated standardized testing for its Homewood...
The University of Georgia is one of the more legible institutional case studies in American public higher education. It is the flagship of a state-mandated, scholarship-financed system; it holds...
Georgia Tech entered the 2020s as the rare highly selective university whose national reputation was climbing about as fast as its application volume. Over the five cycles from Fall...
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...
The 2025-26 admissions cycle saw the nine undergraduate University of California campuses collectively attract 250,000+ applications. This is a double-digit increase from four years prior. Logic would suggest that...
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 29, 2026
Want to spend a couple of unproductive hours on the internet? Start by Googling “What should I major in?”. You’ll find countless articles with strong points of view. Some...
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 24, 2026
If you’ve ever wondered what other people write about in their college application essays, you’re not alone. Just as reading a range of novels can expose you to unique...
June 19, 2026
Examples are integral to the learning process in just about every subject. In writing, they’re particularly important, especially when working with abstract concepts or attempting to master a new...
