This Week in College Admissions: Four Shifts Every College-Bound Family Should Know

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed Congress last year, and its student-loan provisions take effect on July 1, 2026. If your family was assuming the federal-aid landscape would look the same next year as it did this year, it won’t.

Here’s what changes on day one:

Grad PLUS loans are eliminated. If your student is heading to graduate school in fall 2026 or beyond, this is the loan they cannot get anymore. Graduate students will be capped at $100,000 in lifetime federal borrowing. Professional students (medical, law, dental) get $50,000 a year and $200,000 lifetime.

Parent PLUS borrowing is capped. Starting July 1, parents can borrow no more than $20,000 per dependent per year and $65,000 over the life of the loan. New Parent PLUS loans also lose access to income-driven repayment plans. This matters because a lot of families have been quietly using Parent PLUS to close the gap between aid offers and the sticker price — especially at private four-year schools where the published cost of attendance has crossed $90,000.

SAVE, PAYE, and ICR are going away. Two new repayment plans replace them: a tiered Standard plan and a new Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP). The transition runs through July 2028.

The same July 1 date brings something less talked about but, for many South Carolina families, more important.

For the first time, the federal Pell Grant will fund short-term workforce programs: 150 to 599 clock hours, programs you can finish in 8 to 15 weeks, in healthcare, IT, the skilled trades, and other high-demand fields. Programs have to clear a 70% completion rate and a 70% job-placement rate to qualify, and they have to lead to a recognized credential.

One detail that doesn’t get enough airtime: Workforce Pell is available even to adults who already hold a bachelor’s degree. That has never been true of Pell before.

This is a real option. If your student isn’t on a four-year-college path, or is in their second semester of a four-year program and wondering whether it’s the right fit, the conversation is no longer just “college vs. nothing.” There’s a third lane now — and the federal government will help pay for it.

The March 2026 Common App report carried a number that’s easy to scroll past: 52% of applicants reported test scores. That’s the first time more than half of applicants have submitted scores since the 2019–20 cycle. Score-reporters were up 11% year over year; non-reporters dropped 5%.

What changed? Not the rule on most college websites — the majority are still officially test-optional. What changed is the pool. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown, Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, and Johns Hopkins’ Krieger and Whiting schools have all reinstated required testing. Once applicants started seeing competitive scores from peers in the admit pools at those schools, the calculation shifted everywhere else.

I’ll say what I say to every junior who sits in my office: test-optional doesn’t mean test-irrelevant. It means take the test, see your score, and then decide. Don’t decide before you have data. The students who get hurt are the ones who skip the test because they’re afraid, and then end up applying without leverage to a school that quietly expected scores.

Meanwhile, Georgetown announced it’s joining the Common App for the Fall 2027 cycle — the first major change to its application platform in decades. Expect a meaningful application surge there.

The 2026 U.S. News rankings dropped this spring with Princeton, MIT, and Harvard holding the top three spots. The bigger news, for families building college lists, is how the rankings are now calculated.

Acceptance rate, class size, alumni-giving rate, and high-school class rank are all gone from the methodology. Those numbers still appear on each school’s profile, but they don’t move the ranking up or down. The heaviest weight now sits on student outcomes — what graduates actually do, what they earn, whether they pay off their loans. Reputation, resources, selectivity (broadly), and research activity round out the model.

This matters because for two decades, schools had a powerful incentive to drive up application volume just to reject more students. That incentive is finally weakening. It doesn’t mean acceptance rates will rise overnight, but it does mean the most-rejective school isn’t automatically the best school anymore. (To which I’d say: it never was.)