If you're in the hunt for merit scholarships, be sure to stay on top of explicit deadlines a school on your list might have.

In some cases, like Boston University and the University of Richmond, it's a hard deadline that you have to meet in order for you to be considered at all.  In others, like Indiana University and many other public institutions, it's a "priority" deadline that maximizes your chances of merit aid before the money runs out.  Either way, merit aid continues to be an excellent way for good students to defray the cost of an education.  

We've compiled a list of schools in our coverage universe with explicit deadlines, along with some stats to help you gauge the size and breadth of the institution's merit offerings.  We've also included links to each school's scholarship page for easy access to the details.

Most of these schools automatically consider you for merit scholarships without the need for an additional application.  

Click on Continue Reading below for the list.

Still looking for ideas on how to write a compelling admissions essay? Then check out our latest set of essays that worked, courtesy of Tufts admissions.

This blog post includes five essays, as well as video commentary on why each one proved compelling to the admissions team.

Click here for the essays.

Still struggling with your college essays?  Here's an excellent post from Johns Hopkins University on essays that worked.  It provides eight actual essays submitted by applicants and commentary from the admissions committee on why they worked.

When does it make sense to take advantage of early admission?

Here's an article from the Boston Globe, complete with perspectives from admission directors from Boston College, Babson College, Wheaton College and UMass Lowell. 

Click here for more.

New SAT, current SAT or ACT—which one is for me?

Here's a 30 question diagnostic developed by Dr. Gary Gruber that can help you determine which may be best for you.   

Click here for the article.

For those of you wondering about the new SAT, here's an excellent article from Jed Applerouth that details the differences between the current and new formats, as well as the ACT.  

Read the article here.

Last week the Department of Education introduced a new College Scorecard designed to provide better insight on how well colleges are serving their students when it comes to access, affordability and outcomes post graduation.  

With nearly 2,000 data points for 7,000+ schools in the underlying database, there's a lot of information covered—some useful, some a bit outdated.  We've taken a closer look and summarized our findings for you. Long story short, for those receiving financial aid, we think it's a great way to assess the financial return on investment in a college education.  We also think it's going to be useful for identifying schools that are particularly strong in providing access to students from lower income families.

Click on Continue Reading for our summary.

A group of 80 higher education institutions called the Coalition for Access, Affordability and Success will be introducing a new alternative to the Common Application in 2016.  Designed to level the playing field for college admissions, the Coalition will deliver free tools to increase transparency around admissions and financial aid and promote awareness and engagement prior to senior year.

Details to come later this year, with more insight expected at this week's NACAC Conference in San Diego.

Click here for the press release or here for the related article from the Washington Post.

Here's a recent blog post from the President of Hampshire College in the Huffington Post.  It's entitled Results of Removing Standardized Test Scores from College Admissions, and while it's meant to tout the impact of adopting a test blind admissions policy (SAT/ACT scores are not accepted/considered), in reality it's a fascinating perspective on college rankings and how the quest for top rankings can often pressure schools to commit "unnatural" acts.

Click here for the article.

Here's an interesting article/podcast from National Public Radio about the College Scorecard just released by the Obama Administration.  The data, which includes some very useful information about the cost and return of a college education at over 7,000 schools, stops short of rankings but makes it possible to create your own rankings.

NPR provides three screens you might find interesting:

• Schools that make you money
• Schools that make financial sense
• Schools that emphasize upward mobility

Click here for details.

The Common App for 2015-16 was posted earlier today, and we've just wrapped up our analysis on the real number of short answer/essay prompts required for each school.  If you've been through this process before, you know that just because a school lacks a writing supplement doesn't mean there are no additional essays to complete.  Many schools in fact simply embed these prompts in the main application itself.

This post summarizes the prompts required for 200+ Common Application schools in our coverage universe.  Our definition of a prompt is a question that requires more than a one word or one sentence answer.  It's not perfect, but it should help you gauge the amount of writing you'll need to get through over the next few months.  It'll also help you identify schools that you can apply to without the need for extra essays!

Click on Continue Reading for the list.

Here's an updated list of reported early admission rates for the Class of 2019.

This list includes several popular private and public schools, including Amherst, Bates, Boston College, Boston University, Bowdoin, Brown, Colby, Colgate, Cornell, Dartmouth, Davidson, Duke, Emory, Emory (Oxford), George Washington, Georgetown, Georgia Tech, Hamilton, Harvard, Harvey Mudd, Johns Hopkins, Kenyon, Middlebury, MIT, Northwestern, Notre Dame, NYU, Pitzer, Pomona, Princeton, Rice, Stanford, Trinity College, Tufts, University of Chicago, UNC Chapel Hill, University of Pennsylvania, University of Virginia, Vanderbilt, Wake Forest, Williams and Yale.

Click Continue Reading for the list.

Here's an updated list of reported admission rates for the Class of 2019. This update adds several popular private and public schools to the list, including Clark University, DePauw, Oberlin, Smith, University of Richmond and Washington & Lee University.  

Click Continue Reading for the list.

An update to College Kickstart 2015 has just been posted! 

In addition to Class of 2019 admission rate updates to our database, this release features an enhanced Plan Highlights page to help Plus Edition subscribers get organized and track admission requirements for the schools on their list.  If you're a Plus Edition subscriber, you'll now be able to see application requirements at a glance for all of the schools on your list, including testing, recommendations, interviews and most importantly, essay counts! 

Click on Continue Reading for the details. 

Here's an article from Kevin Carey of the New York Times about the latest college "return on investment" figures released by the U.S. Department of Education.

The new data tracks the cost of an education and average reported earnings ten years out.  What's important about the data is that it is not "self-reported" based on surveys, as is the approach used by PayScale.  Instead, the government was able to match data from the student financial aid system to federal tax returns, so an accurate picture of earnings across a far larger sample is in place.

What's interesting about the data isn't that elite institutions report higher earnings. What's interesting is that there are a significant number of institutions that the payoff is far less evident, including some well-known universities and liberal arts colleges.  

Click here for the article.