My wife Elizabeth and I sat at the kitchen table Saturday night with two laptops, three tabs of tuition estimators, and a legal pad that was starting to look like a losing game of tic-tac-toe. The twins, Will and Emily, are juniors now, which means the abstract “someday we’ll pay for college” conversation has become a very concrete spreadsheet with very concrete numbers on it.
I remember filing the FAFSA for our oldest, Holden, years ago and feeling like I needed a law degree to understand the Expected Family Contribution formula. I told myself it would get easier. It hasn’t — it’s just gotten different. The form changed. The rules changed. And this year, with a new financial aid overhaul working its way through the system, even families who’ve been through this once before are going to feel like first-timers again.
That’s the thing about this job, and about parenting teenagers in general: just when you think you’ve got the map memorized, they redraw it. So instead of letting my own family fall behind on the news, I spent this week doing what I do every week — reading everything I could find, cross-checking it against what I’m hearing from colleges directly, and boiling it down to what actually matters for your family’s kitchen table conversation. Here’s what changed this week, and what to do about it.
At a Glance
- FAFSA opened earlier than ever — but the formula changed, and the old sibling discount is gone.
- Tuition is climbing at several major universities, while a few held the line.
- Georgetown joined the Common App for the first time in its history.
- Federal lawsuits over admissions data continue to work through the courts, with real implications for how colleges report on race and admissions.
FAFSA Opens Early — With a Rewritten Formula
The Department of Education opened the 2026-27 FAFSA earlier than it ever has — the first time in three years the form has launched before October 1. That’s good news on its face: earlier filing means earlier aid offers, and earlier aid offers mean more time to actually compare them before a deposit deadline sneaks up on you.
But the form isn’t just earlier this year — it’s different. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, family-owned farms and small businesses are now excluded from the asset calculations that feed into the Student Aid Index. That’s a win for a specific slice of families. But there’s a cost too: the sibling discount that used to divide a family’s expected contribution across multiple kids in college at the same time has been eliminated. Each student is now assessed independently against the full family income, which means families with two or three kids in school at once may see a higher expected contribution per student than they did under the old formula. Pell Grant eligibility also now requires at least half-time enrollment.
Tuition Is Climbing — With a Few Notable Holdouts
Several well-known universities confirmed tuition increases for 2026-27 this year: Rice is up 6.5% to $71,140, Duke’s annual tuition climbs to $73,740, Wesleyan is raising rates 4.8% to $75,916, and Boston College’s total cost of attendance now sits at $95,258, a 3.78% jump. Officials point to inflation, facilities costs, and compensation as the drivers — and honestly, those pressures are real. But so is the sticker shock for families trying to plan three or four years out.
Not everyone is raising the price, though. Stanford held its 2026-27 tuition flat, explicitly citing affordability concerns. That’s worth noticing, because it tells you something: these decisions are choices, not inevitabilities. Some schools are choosing to hold the line.
Georgetown Joins the Common App — And Early Decision Keeps Growing
For the first time in its history, Georgetown is accepting the Common Application alongside its own platform — a three-year pilot aimed at widening access for students who might not otherwise have applied. Admissions standards haven’t changed, and Georgetown still requires an SAT or ACT score, but if your student is already deep into Common App essays for other schools, that work now transfers over.
Meanwhile, the shift toward early admissions keeps accelerating. At several selective schools, Early Decision and Early Action now account for more than 70% of the incoming class. Vanderbilt’s Early Decision admit rate, for example, sits at just 11.9% — even with applications up more than 14% from last year. Regular Decision used to be the default path. It’s increasingly becoming the harder one.
Rankings Hold Steady, Legal Fights Over Admissions Data Continue
On the rankings front, this year’s U.S. News Best Colleges list showed unusual stability — Princeton holds the No. 1 spot for National Universities again, with almost no movement in the top 40. If your student is chasing rank instead of fit, this is a good week to remind them that a one- or two-spot shift rarely reflects anything meaningful about the actual education.
On the legal side, the Department of Justice’s lawsuit seeking years of applicant-level admissions data from Harvard remains in litigation, with Harvard calling the demand overreaching. Separately, a coalition of 17 state attorneys general sued the Department of Education over a new data-reporting rule tied to race and admissions compliance. Neither case is resolved, but both point to the same trend: how colleges collect, use, and report demographic data is under more federal scrutiny than it’s been in years.
What to Do This Week
Not sure how any of this applies to your student?
Every family’s situation is different — and this is exactly the kind of week where a second set of eyes helps.
Let’s TalkElizabeth and I closed the laptops that night without finishing the spreadsheet. Some weeks you don’t get to the bottom of it — you just get a little further than you were, and you show up again next week. That’s true for us at the kitchen table, and it’s true for your family working through this process too.
— Chris Parsons, College Planning Center
Carpe diem.
