I was standing on the sideline at a summer soccer clinic last week, watching a nine-year-old argue with his coach about the new small-sided rules — four v four now instead of seven v seven, no more offsides, a smaller goal. He wasn’t wrong that the game had changed since his older brother played it. He was wrong that it mattered. The kid who wins is still the kid who controls the ball, moves without it, and doesn’t panic when things get chaotic. The rules around the game shift constantly. The fundamentals never do.
I thought about that kid all week, because the rules around college admissions just shifted again — in a big way, on four different fronts. If you’re a parent reading the headlines and feeling your stomach drop, or a student wondering whether the goalposts moved on you personally, take a breath. None of this changes what actually gets a kid into college: a body of work that’s honestly theirs. But you do need to know what changed, so let’s walk through it together.
At a Glance
- Testing is officially back at the top. Columbia just confirmed it will require SAT/ACT scores starting fall 2027 — making it the last Ivy to reinstate testing, so all eight Ivy League schools now require scores.
- UC quietly shelved its own plan to even study reinstating the SAT/ACT, just days before its Board of Regents met.
- Supplemental essays are disappearing at Tulane, UGA, UVA, UNC Chapel Hill, and elsewhere for 2026–27.
- Federal financial aid rules changed on July 1 — new caps on Parent PLUS loans, the end of the SAVE repayment plan, and no more Grad PLUS loans for new borrowers.
Testing Is Back at the Top — Even If UC Just Got Cold Feet
Columbia University confirmed this week that it will require SAT or ACT scores from applicants starting with the fall 2027 entering class. Columbia was the last Ivy League holdout still test-optional — with this move, every single Ivy now requires a score. That lands on top of ETS’s acquisition of ACT, announced two weeks ago, which put the two biggest names in testing under one roof.
And then, right on cue, the University of California did the opposite. Just days before its Board of Regents met this week, the UC faculty body that had proposed formally studying whether to reinstate the SAT/ACT abruptly withdrew that plan. The pages describing it disappeared from UC’s website, and testing wasn’t even on the Regents’ agenda. UC says a review is still coming eventually — but the timeline, for now, is nobody’s guess but theirs.
The Supplemental Essay Is Going Extinct at Several Big Names
Tulane, the University of Georgia, the University of Virginia, the University of Washington, and UNC Chapel Hill have all dropped their supplemental essay requirements for the 2026–27 cycle. Cornell trimmed its universitywide essay but kept a school-specific one. The stated reasons vary — admissions offices say the extra essay carried relatively little weight in decisions, and more than one dean admitted, in so many words, that they’re tired of reading AI-generated filler.
Here’s the part that should catch your attention: fewer required essays does not mean an easier path in. It means a bigger applicant pool, because the extra essay used to be the thing that filtered out students who weren’t serious. Remove that filter and you get more applications chasing the same number of seats — which mathematically means lower acceptance rates.
“Removing a checkpoint doesn’t make admission easier. It makes the applicant pool larger.”
Financial Aid Rules Changed on July 1 — For Real This Time
A cluster of federal financial aid changes took effect July 1. The SAVE repayment plan — which let many lower-income borrowers make $0 monthly payments — has been eliminated. Parent PLUS loans, which used to have no cap at all, are now capped at $20,000 a year and $65,000 total per child. Grad PLUS loans are gone entirely for new borrowers starting graduate or professional school this fall. And there’s now a lifetime federal borrowing limit of $257,500 across all loan types (Parent PLUS excluded).
On the brighter side, FAFSA completion hit a record high this spring — 59.1% of graduating seniors had it done by late June, the best rate in nearly a decade. If you’ve been avoiding the form because of how rocky it was two cycles ago, it’s worth knowing that most families now report a smoother process.
Washington Is Reaching Deeper Into Admissions and Research
Seventeen states are suing the U.S. Department of Education over a mandate requiring colleges to hand over seven years of detailed applicant data — race, sex, test scores, GPA — tied to compliance monitoring after the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision. Separately, the White House Office of Management and Budget has proposed a rule requiring political appointees — not career staff — to personally review and approve every discretionary federal grant, including research funding to universities, before it can be issued. The public comment period just closed, with implementation targeted for October.
Neither story changes how your student applies this fall. But together they point to a federal government reaching further into how colleges report on their students and fund their research than it has in years.
“The rules around the game shift constantly. The fundamentals never do.”
What to Do This Week
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to with that nine-year-old on the smaller field: the families who get rattled by every rule change are the ones who spend all their energy reacting instead of building. The families who do well are the ones who keep doing the fundamental work — self-awareness, honest writing, a realistic financial plan — regardless of what the goalposts look like this year. Students, that means you too. Don’t let a headline about essays or testing talk you into believing the process is rigged against you. It isn’t. It’s just different than it was for your older sibling. Play your game, not theirs.
Want Help Making Sense of This for Your Student?
Every family’s situation is different, and the news above affects every kid differently depending on where they are in the process. Let’s talk through what it means for yours.
Schedule a Conversation— Chris Parsons, College Planning Center
Carpe diem.
