Barnard announced today that 16 percent of applicants were admitted to the Class of 2020.  

Overall, 7,071 applications were received for the year. This year's admission rate marks a record low in the college's history and is down from 19.5 percent last year.

Click here for the news release.

Beginning this fall, the University of California will replace the two personal statement prompts in the UC Application with short answer questions that students can choose from.  

Freshman applicants will now choose four out of eight "personal insight" questions to answer.  Each is limited to 350 words and will have equal weighting.

The new questions will be available August 1st as part of the fall 2017 application.

Click here for FAQs or here for the personal insight questions.

Duke announced today that 2,501 applicants were admitted to the Class of 2020 under regular decision.  

Overall, over 3,300 students were admitted to Duke from a pool of over 32,000 early and regular decision applicants, resulting in an overall admission rate of 10 percent.

The target size for the Class of 2020 is 1,705. 

Click here for the news release.

Williams announced today it extended offers to 1,206 applicants for the Class of 2020.  

A total of 6,982 applications were received, resulting in an overall admission rate of 17 percent.

The target size for the Class of 2020 is 550 students.

Click here for the news release.

The University of Southern California announced today that it admitted 8,920 students to the Class of 2020.  

54,100 applications were received, up 4.5 percent from last year, resulting in an overall admission rate of 16.5 percent.

Click here for the news release.

Northwestern University admitted 2,690 regular decision applicants to the Class of 2020.  

In total, 3,761 students were admitted through early or regular decision from a pool of 35,099 applicants, resulting in an overall admission rate of 10.7 percent. 

Click here for the news release.

Middlebury College announced over the weekend that it admitted 1,042 applicants under regular decision to the Class of 2020.  

After factoring in an additional. 373 early admission admits, applicants admitted for the year totaled 1,415.  A total of 8,820 applications were received, resulting in an overall admission rate of 16 percent.

Click here for the news release.

Pomona College announced on Friday that it admitted 743 students to the Class of 2020.

In total, 8,104 applications were received, resulting in an overall admission rate of 9.1 percent.   

Click here for the news release.

Johns Hopkins admitted 2,539 applicants to the Class of 2020 under regular decision.  

In total, 3,098 students were admitted from 27,095 applicants, resulting in an overall admission rate of 11 percent.  The early decision admission rate for the year was 29 percent, compared to a regular decision admission rate of 10 percent.  

Click here for the news release.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced today that it admitted a total of 1,485 applicants to the Class of 2020.  

A total of 19,020 applications were submitted this year, resulting in an overall admission rate of 7.8 percent.  

Of the 1,485 students admitted, 656 were from early action and 829 were from regular decision.  The early action admit rate was 8.4 percent for the year, while the regular decision rate was 7.4 percent.

Click here for the news release.

So, your student has gotten those hard-earned (and highly coveted) acceptance letters. (CONGRATS!) You’ve gotten the screaming/dancing/calling everyone you know out of your system, and now it’s time to start preparing for the next step: paying for college.

Everyone knows that tuition is the primary cost of college, but there are a variety of others that can add up significantly.

It’s important that these costs are understood by the entire family —from those who are able to fully finance their student’s education to those on financial aid. Actually, it’s especially important for the latter, since you can’t get grant, scholarship, or loan money to cover many of these expenses.

An update to College Kickstart has just been posted! 

This release features the addition of several regional colleges and universities, updated admissions data and a change in terminology—"safety" schools are now "likely" schools.

Click on Continue Reading for the details. 

In search of colleges and universities with strong undergraduate business programs?

Here's a list of 100+ schools to get you started.  To make the list, we looked for public and private institutions that granted business/marketing degrees to 10% or more of its graduates last year and/or were consistently ranked highly by third party sources (US News, Bloomberg, etc.).

Apart from the brand name institutions you'd expect to be on the list, there are also several lesser known but intriguing options to consider.  If you're 100% certain about majoring in business, check out Babson College or Bentley University, where nearly everyone is a business major.  Or schools like Notre Dame, Boston College, University of Richmond or Villanova if you're looking to study business in a liberal arts setting.  And if you're an aspiring engineer looking for some business savvy, consider schools like MIT or Carnegie Mellon.

To help you categorize schools into safeties, targets and reaches, we've included admission rates, mid-50th percentile SAT and ACT scores.  And since the list is large, we've broken the schools out into very selective (<25% admission rate), selective (25-50%) and less selective (>50%) buckets. Finally, we've also provided links to each school's website to help you explore fit.

Click on Continue Reading for the details. 

With admissions decisions right around the corner, here's an article from Forbes we think you'll find useful in helping you to make a final decision on where to attend.

Clickhere for the article. 

Should my safety school be an out-of-state public university?

This article from the Washington Post provides good evidence of the trend towards admitting more out-of-state applicants at many of the nation's most prominent public universities.  While some of this shift may be attributed to "increasing campus diversity," most of it is attributable to maximizing tuition revenue as state budget support for public universities wanes.

Click here for the article.