If you have a 9th, 10th, or 11th grader at home, this is the headline of the year. On July 1, 2026, the Parent PLUS loan program changes more than it has in a generation. Annual borrowing is capped at $20,000 per student. The lifetime cap is $65,000 per student. Grad PLUS is eliminated entirely and replaced with a capped Direct Graduate loan.

And here’s the part that doesn’t get the attention it deserves: any new Parent PLUS loan disbursed on or after July 1 loses Income-Driven Repayment eligibility. New loans are locked into the standard 10-year repayment plan, period.

If you already have a Parent PLUS loan disbursed before June 30, you get a three-year grandfather window for the same student in the same program. Everyone else — do the math now. $20,000 a year times four years is $80,000 — over the lifetime cap. Most families I work with were quietly planning to use Parent PLUS to cover whatever institutional aid didn’t. That plan no longer works.

On April 27, a federal judge expanded a preliminary injunction blocking the Department of Education from forcing more than 170 additional colleges to hand over detailed applicant data — race, sex, GPA, test scores — going back seven years. Public colleges in 17 states were already protected. Now members of six higher-ed associations and six private nonprofits are too.

I’ll spare you the legal play-by-play. The practical version: in the short term, almost nothing changes about how your student’s application will be reviewed this fall. Selective colleges are not collecting expanded race-and-test-score data on individual applicants right now, and they won’t be in time for the 2026–27 cycle.

Separately, the Department of Education has opened a civil rights review of Harvard’s legacy admissions, and the Justice Department’s February lawsuit seeking Harvard’s admissions records is still active. Headlines will keep coming. The 2026–27 admissions cycle, mostly, will not change because of them.

The new FAFSA is roughly 35 questions, down from over 100. IRS income transfers automatically. FSA ID verification is real-time. By summer, most applicants will see their confirmed Student Aid Index and Pell Grant eligibility immediately on submission, not three days later.

The quieter change is the bigger one. Three categories of assets no longer count against your student’s aid eligibility: small family-owned businesses with 100 or fewer employees, family farms where the family resides, and — this is the big one — grandparent-owned and sibling-owned 529 plans.

For years, I told grandparents not to put money in a 529 they owned because it would torpedo their grandchild’s aid. That advice is now obsolete. If you have grandparents who want to help, this opens a strategy that didn’t exist last cycle.

The priority deadline at most schools was May 1. If you missed it, file anyway — most state grants and institutional aid pools fill on a rolling basis, and the gap between “priority” and “late” isn’t always what families fear.

Princeton stayed at #1, MIT at #2, Harvard at #3. The interesting movement was in the middle of the top tier. The University of Chicago jumped from #11 to #6 — reportedly tied to its new Early Decision 0 program lifting first-year retention. Northeastern leaped from #54 to #46, back into the top 50 after dropping out the year before.

Here’s the truth about big year-over-year ranking moves: they almost always reflect methodology and reporting changes, not fundamental quality changes. A school that moved 10 spots is not 10 spots better than it was last fall. The students walking those campuses today are the same students who were there a year ago.

And while we’re on rankings — more than 90 percent of ranked four-year colleges remain test-optional for fall 2026. But seven of the eight Ivies, plus MIT, Caltech, Georgetown, Penn, and now Ohio State, have reinstated SAT/ACT requirements. Treat “test-optional” at a top-25 school as “test-recommended.”