Sunday night, and I was on the porch with my laptop instead of a book, which is its own small confession. Emily was inside running through her class schedule for the hundredth time — junior year starts this week, and she wanted to make sure she had it memorized before the first bell, like a kid double-checking her lines before a school play. My phone kept buzzing. News alerts. A federal judge in Massachusetts had just ruled that a lawsuit against thirty-two of the most selective colleges in the country — schools with names like Brown, Dartmouth, Duke, Cornell, Vanderbilt — could move forward. The claim: that their Early Decision agreements had quietly worked together to limit competition and keep financial aid lower than it should be.
I sat with that for a minute. Because if you have read anything I have written, you know where my mind went. Straight to the Cornucopia. Straight to kids sprinting for the same weapons, assuming that whoever grabs the shiniest one wins. Here were thirty-two schools, essentially accused of running their own version of the arena — setting the rules of the game in a way that made families believe there was one right path in, when the truth is messier and more human than that. I am not a lawyer, and this case has years left in it. But it is a reminder of something I tell parents and students constantly: the system is not always as fair or as fixed as it looks from the outside, so stop building your whole strategy around outsmarting it and start building it around who you actually are.
That is the thread running through everything in admissions news this week — for parents watching the process from the kitchen table and for students who are the ones actually walking into the arena. Let’s get into it.
At a Glance
- A federal judge cleared a major antitrust lawsuit against 32 elite Early Decision colleges to move into discovery.
- Standardized testing policy is now genuinely split — Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, and Cornell require scores again; Princeton, Columbia, and UCLA do not.
- The 2026–27 FAFSA is on track for its earliest launch ever, with new rules changing how family-owned businesses and farms are counted.
- The enrollment cliff has officially arrived, reshaping leverage and aid at hundreds of colleges even as elite schools stay crowded.
Admissions Policy Changes
The University of Michigan just added a binding Early Decision option for first-year and international applicants for Fall 2026 — due November 1, with decisions by late December. That is significant. ED has traditionally been a private-school tool, and now one of the country’s flagship publics is in the game.
At the same time, the testing landscape has fractured in a way it has not in years. Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, and Cornell have all reinstated testing requirements. Princeton and Columbia have not. UCLA remains fully test-blind, meaning it will not look at a score even if you send one. Nationally, more than 90% of ranked four-year colleges are still test-optional or test-free. There is no more universal answer here — only a school-by-school one.
And application volume keeps climbing: Common App is reporting applications up 9% year over year, with students applying to more schools on average than ever before — over seven apps per student. But here is the part that gets lost in the headlines: 41% of colleges that use Common App actually received fewer applications than last year. Record volume nationally does not mean record demand everywhere.
Financial Aid & Scholarships
Here is a genuinely good-news item: Secretary McMahon confirmed to Congress that the 2026–27 FAFSA will launch on time this fall, and the Department of Education is calling it the earliest launch in the program’s history. After a few rocky years, that alone is worth celebrating.
There is also a real formula change worth knowing. Starting this award year, the Student Aid Index calculation will exclude the net worth of small family-owned businesses (100 or fewer employees), family farms the family lives on, and commercial fishing operations. If you run a small business or a farm and assumed you would not qualify for aid, it is worth running the numbers again — the assumption you made two years ago may no longer be true.
Meanwhile, tuition keeps rising, but so does merit aid at many schools. I say this every year and I will keep saying it: the sticker price is a starting point for negotiation, not a verdict.
College Rankings & Data
The 2026 U.S. News rankings held remarkably steady — Princeton still No. 1 among National Universities, Williams still No. 1 among Liberal Arts Colleges, UC Berkeley edging past UCLA for the top public university spot. If you are chasing a school because it climbed three spots in a ranking, I would gently ask you to chase something else — fit and outcomes matter far more than a one-year shuffle.
The bigger data story is the one most families have not caught up to yet: the enrollment cliff is here. 2026 marks the start of the projected decline in U.S. high school graduates, and nine colleges are closing this year alone, with six more merging — almost all of them smaller, tuition-dependent schools without deep endowments. Meanwhile, the most selective schools remain as crowded as ever, propped up by global demand.
Legal & Legislative Developments
The story from my porch, in full: a federal judge ruled that current and former students can proceed with an antitrust case against 32 elite colleges, alleging their Early Decision agreements limited competition, raised tuition, and reduced aid for tens of thousands of students. Common App, Scoir, and a higher-ed financing consortium were all dismissed as defendants — the case is aimed squarely at the colleges themselves. This now heads to discovery, which means years, not months, before anything resolves.
Separately, seventeen states are suing the Department of Education over a mandate requiring colleges to hand over seven years of admissions data broken out by race and sex, and a related 26-state challenge to a broader federal rule is also active. And litigation continues against the University of California’s undergraduate campuses and law schools over claims of unlawful racial preference in admissions, even after claims against UC’s medical schools were dismissed.
What to Do This Week
Elizabeth will tell you I have never been great at sitting still on a Sunday night, and this week was no exception. But watching Emily rehearse her schedule while the news cycle churned through lawsuits and rankings and formulas, I kept coming back to the same thought I always land on: none of this — not the lawsuit, not the testing split, not the rankings — changes the fundamental job in front of every family reading this. Help your student find their own story. Let the arena sort itself out in the courts. Your kid’s job is just to walk in as themselves.
Need help making sense of this for your family?
Every family’s situation is different, and the headlines rarely tell you what actually applies to your student. Let’s talk it through.
Schedule a ConversationThanks for reading — I’ll be back next week with what the arena throws at us next.
Carpe diem.
