This Week in College Admissions — June 15, 2026 Edition

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4, 2025, begins its major implementation phase on July 1, 2026. That’s not a future problem. That’s right now.

Here’s what changes for any student borrowing federal aid starting this fall:

Parent PLUS loans are capped at $20,000 per year per student. Previously, parents could borrow up to the full Cost of Attendance. For families at expensive private schools where tuition, room, and board run $70,000 or more per year, that gap is enormous and has to come from somewhere else.

The Graduate PLUS loan program is eliminated for new borrowers. Graduate students who planned to borrow up to their full cost of attendance can no longer do that. The new lifetime borrowing limit — across undergraduate, graduate, and professional study combined — is $257,500.

Income-driven repayment is narrowed dramatically. Popular plans like IBR and ICR are no longer available for new borrowers. Going forward, borrowers choose between a revised standard plan or the newly created Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP). If your student or your family had a long-term repayment strategy built around income-driven plans, it needs to be rebuilt.

On the Pell Grant side, Congress allocated $10 billion to stabilize the program for two years. The catch: students whose scholarships and institutional waivers already cover their full Cost of Attendance will no longer be eligible for Pell funds.

This one has been building for a while, but the data this cycle made it official: for the first time since the pandemic, more Common App applicants submitted standardized test scores than chose not to. Fifty-two percent included SAT or ACT results — an 11% jump year over year. Meanwhile, the percentage of applicants not submitting scores dropped by 5%.

Harvard and MIT reinstated test requirements before this cycle. Princeton continued its return to testing. Georgetown announced it’s joining the Common App starting this August for students applying for fall 2027 entry — but it’s keeping its testing requirement and its supplemental essays. The holistic process at Georgetown isn’t getting simpler. It’s getting wider.

Over 90% of ranked four-year colleges are still technically test-optional. But “test-optional” has never meant what families assumed it did. Schools that don’t require scores still look at them when submitted and still compare applicants accordingly. The data this year makes that clearer than ever.

For students: if you have strong scores — at or above the school’s mid-50% range — submitting them is almost always the right call. If your scores are below the range, you have a real decision to make. Not a default.

Every Ivy League institution posted an acceptance rate below 9% for the Class of 2030. Harvard and Princeton admitted roughly 3 to 4% of applicants. Total Common App applications climbed 5% this cycle to 9.42 million. More students, applying to more schools, for fewer spots at the most selective institutions.

I’ve said this before and I’ll keep saying it: those numbers are not an indictment of your student. They are a context problem. The students I worry about are the ones who built their entire list around the schools you recognize from sweatshirts — and then didn’t get in anywhere they were excited about.

The US News 2026 Rankings have Princeton at #1 in National Universities, followed by MIT and Harvard. The rankings are what they are: a useful starting point, a terrible finish line. I’ve watched students turn down schools that fit them beautifully because they weren’t ranked high enough. I’ve watched other students chase a rank and spend four miserable years there.

The students who win this process — and I mean that in the way that actually matters, not just the acceptance letter — are the ones who build lists around fit, program strength, financial reality, and genuine interest. Not prestige. Not peer pressure. Themselves.

Students for Fair Admissions — the organization behind the 2023 Supreme Court ruling ending race-conscious admissions — has filed new lawsuits against Duke, Princeton, and Yale, arguing those schools are still considering race in admissions despite the ruling. The suits point to declining Asian-American enrollment figures as evidence. These cases will take time to resolve, but they signal that the post-2023 legal environment is not settled.

On legacy admissions: Virginia’s ban on legacy preferences at public universities went into effect July 1, 2024, making it the second state after Colorado to eliminate the practice at public institutions. Early reports from Virginia schools like UVA, William & Mary, and VMI show minimal enrollment disruption. The broader lesson: at public universities, family connections are increasingly irrelevant. At private universities, the pressure is growing even where it’s not yet law.

What does this mean practically? The admissions process is becoming more about the student and less about the family history or demographic category. That’s not a bad thing. But it means the student who can articulate who they are and why they belong at a particular school has never had a bigger advantage.