🎓 Thinking the Unthinkable

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In today's issue: A new fiscal year on campuses and the impact of Trump policies; the myth of the "math person"; and is the CS degree about to go bust?

⏲️ Last chance! TOMORROW, July 14 at Noon ET, I’ll be hosting a webinar about the college to career transition with three experts on the job market and how campuses could prepare students for work.

• This particular webinar is open ONLY to those who have pre-ordered my forthcoming book, Dream School. Do so by 10 a.m. ET Monday, complete the proof of purchase on my website, and you can join live and also get the recording.
• If you already pre-ordered, you should have received a link from Zoom with the subject line “From College to Career, the Right Way.” If you haven’t, hit reply.

If you’re likely to buy Dream School when it’s released on September 9 anyway, there are lots of reasons not to wait until then to pick up the book. 

Here are 3 reasons to order now:

1. You get access to Finding Your Dream School—an 18-page guide to use this summer that Dan Porterfield, the CEO of the Aspen Institute and former Franklin & Marshall president and Georgetown University vice president, recently called a “product in itself."
2. We’re going to be releasing a few bonus goodies for pre-order readers in the coming weeks, including my favorite chapter in the book as well as answers to your most frequently asked questions about admissions.
3. You’ll join the more than 6,500 people who have already pre-ordered the book; the more pre-orders we get, the easier it is for others to discover Dream School in bookstores (and on Amazon).    

⛱️ Oh, and during summer vacations we all miss emails and social media posts, so if you order now, you’ll be guaranteed to get everything we release.

EVENT

I’ve partnered up with several outside organizations to participate in free webinars (open to anyone) in the weeks leading up to the book release.

The first one up is with College Confidential on Wednesday, July 30 at 7 p.m. ET. We’ll be focused on making your college list and what a “dream school” should mean to you. 

👉 Register for free to join live and get a recording afterwards.

THE LEAD

What does this mean for [fill in the blank] College/University?

"This" is whatever the latest action is by the Trump administration related to higher ed. I’ve been asked some version of this question by parents, college leaders, and professors—usually specific to their own campuses—in recent months.

The short answer for months was that we didn’t know—yet. 

Trump was inaugurated more than half way through the fiscal year for most colleges. A college’s budget is a complex mixture of cross subsidies. Even most presidents don’t fully understand where the money comes from and where it’s going, as we explored in a recent Future U. “Higher Ed 101” episode about how college budgets work. 

The result was that the fiscal impact of Trump’s actions weren’t immediately felt on many campuses. 

But with a new fiscal year starting this month, we’re starting to really see what the flurry of actions from Trump since January—chief among them, cuts in federal research funds and delays in international student visas—will mean for higher ed. Add to those orders the “Big Beautiful Bill” signed into law a little more than a week ago, and here are among the storylines I’ll be watching in the months ahead:

1️⃣ How colleges manage admissions in 2025-26. 

Twice in the last two decades, higher ed has faced an unforeseen crisis—the Great Recession in 2008 and the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. 

Each one resulted in admissions offices upending long-held practices to protect their yield (the percentage of accepted students who enroll). As I recounted in Who Gets In and Why, selective colleges expanded Early Decision in 2008 to lock in more of their incoming class in the face of financial uncertainty. Then in 2020, many of the same colleges went test optional in an effort to maintain their application numbers (which, of course, ended up skyrocketing even more).

Now with campuses unsure how many international students will show up this fall and with research budgets getting squeezed, universities are looking everywhere for revenue. We started to see that in the last few months as some top-ranked colleges called students off their wait list well into May and June this year in order to bolster their incoming class.

If you’re a selective college, protecting your yield rate is critical to maintaining your selectivity. Otherwise, you’ll need to accept more students to maintain your enrollment. (In a sneak peek from Dream School, the graphic below shows how yield rates have fallen off a cliff for all but the most selective schools.)

One way to protect yield is leaning into Early Decision. Last week, the University of Michigan announced plans to add an Early Decision round to its 2025-26 admissions calendar. Rather than hold off until the end of the process by calling people off the wait list to fill its class, Michigan thinks it’s better to lock in as many applicants as possible early on—especially given many of them will be full-pay out-of-staters. 

I expect a few other popular schools that don’t have Early Decision to follow Michigan’s lead—if not soon, then next summer. And for those colleges that already have Early Decision, they'll continue to take more students in that round when they can.  

As schools further upstream, like a Michigan, try to protect their yield, campuses downstream in the rankings will get caught in the wake. Prime example: Syracuse throwing money at high-school seniors in May who were already committed elsewhere. 

2️⃣ What the next wave of consolidation looks like. 

Six public colleges and universities in Indiana eliminated or combined more than 400 academic programs this month before a new state law took effect requiring them to get permission to continue low-enrollment programs.

As I predicted in January, this might be the year where we see the end of the “comprehensive university”—where every college is everything to everybody. The accountability measure in the bill that Trump signed on July 4th will likely result in further consolidation: it cuts off federal student loans for programs where graduates earn less than high school graduates. So expect to see a lot fewer fine arts and studio arts programs as a result.

It’s not just consolidation of programs. More than four in ten private colleges posted a loss in 2023—twice the rate of public universities. There’s only so long colleges can run a sea of red ink before they’re forced to merge or be acquired (or simply close down). 

3️⃣ When will colleges rethink tuition pricing.

While students this fall face some of the biggest tuition increases in quite some time, we might also see tuition reductions, too, especially at the graduate level. 

Why? The domestic policy bill the president signed this month includes a new annual cap for master’s degrees of $20,500 on federal loans and a $100,000 overall cap (professional degrees have higher limits). It also eliminated federal PLUS loans for graduate degrees, which students would stack on top of their federal loans all the way up to the full cost of attendance. 

As Ryan Craig pointed out last week, “the net price paid by master’s students more than doubled in 20 years. Before Grad PLUS, the average master’s student who tapped federal loans took on debt of $33K. Now it’s over $70K.”

While graduate schools only enroll 15% of student loan borrowers, 40% of outstanding student loan debt comes from graduate school. With the spigot of easy money tightening, we’ve probably seen the end of the $150,000 MFA from the University of Southern California, the $125,000 master’s in journalism from Columbia, or the $100,000 master’s of arts in humanities at the University of Chicago. Either those programs get a massive tuition cut, offer heavy discounts off the sticker price, or some will likely close down altogether.  

Bottom line: What was unthinkable a year ago as a strategy on many campuses is now on the table as colleges face a near-term future with a lot less money directed to them and students. Earlier this year in my look ahead, I predicted colleges had time for a reset. They don’t. Universities are confronting a financial landscape as challenging as the 2008 recession or the Covid-19 pandemic, but this time there's no federal safety net to soften the blow. Indeed, this Administration and Congress have ripped open lots of holes in that net.  

The Myth of the 'Math Person'

Last year, during a dinner with parents before an appearance at a school in Maryland, a mom told me she was grappling with guilt and frustration because the math pathway she’d chosen for her son in middle school had “shut him out” of top-tier engineering programs that wanted him to have “more calculus.”

Recently, I hosted a Next Office Hour on math and the role it plays in college admissions.

Afterwards, I caught up with one of the panelists, Shalinee Sharma, author of Math Mind: The Simple Path to Loving Math, and cofounder of Zearn, to talk more about her book. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. One of my favorite stories in your book was the A&W “1/3 pounder burger,” which A&W promoted as bigger than the McDonald's quarter pounder, yet it didn't sell because people didn't know a third was bigger than a quarter. It reminds me of when I'm in a store and a clerk has to make change and can't. What has happened to our math skills?

A. This story of Americans failing at fractions isn’t about intelligence—it’s about lost intuition. We’ve lost the everyday number sense that helps us make sense of the world around us — including how much meat we’re getting for our money.

Our lost intuition is rooted in the way many American students experience math. Unlike higher performing nations, U.S. students experience math as a series of procedures without gaining a deep understanding of the concepts behind them.

Learning with pictures and objects helps students grasp the “why” behind math, making abstract concepts tangible, especially when students get stuck. Ultimately, the acid test of whether you understand a math concept—whether you’re a kindergartener or a mathematician building AI algorithms—is if you can draw a picture.

The 2008 National Mathematics Advisory Panel report emphasized the need for a balance of fluency and understanding. If we think about it like reading, fluency is the ability to decode words quickly, while conceptual understanding is being able to comprehend what you’re reading. One doesn’t work without the other.

Q. How did math become so anxiety-ridden?

A. As I share in Math Mind, the way we talk to our kids about math matters.

The idea that certain people are born with math ability and the rest of us aren’t the biggest myth in math learning. Science has shown babies as young as 2 days old have an inherent number sense. There is no such thing as a “math person.” We are all math people.

When a kid falls behind in reading, we don't say, well, you're just not one of the reading kids. We'd be shocked to hear a parent say their child just isn't cut out for reading books. Yet we do this with math from the start.

Just as troubling, however, are the everyday myths in the math classroom that keep us from learning and loving math. Speed is often over-emphasized in math. To be clear, developing fluency is vital in math, but as students’ progress to more advanced math, they need to know when to move speedily and when to move slowly and methodically, both of which are critical in problem solving.

In overemphasizing speed, kids assume they don’t belong in math—reinforcing the myth of the math kid—and don’t advance their problem-solving abilities. Speed counts for something—just not for everything.

Q. If you were math czar for a day, what's the one thing you'd do?

A. There is no silver bullet when it comes to supporting math learning, so I’d invest in three key areas.

First, offering a balance of fluency and conceptual understanding in math to ensure that students have both the automaticity and the conceptual grasp to tackle increasingly complex math.

Second, teaching math using visuals and objects to help math make sense and support students in building strong mathematical intuition.

Third, creating systems to help all students catch up when they fall behind. Every student will need support at some point, and catching up shouldn’t be about luck.

SUPPLEMENTS

✏️ The End of the English Paper? “Being a student is about testing boundaries and staying one step ahead of the rules. While administrators and educators have been debating new definitions for cheating and discussing the mechanics of surveillance, students have been embracing the possibilities of A.I. A few months after the release of ChatGPT, a Harvard undergraduate got approval to conduct an experiment in which it wrote papers that had been assigned in seven courses. The A.I. skated by with a 3.57 G.P.A., a little below the school’s average.” (The New Yorker; subscription required). 

🎓 A New Southern Accreditor. “Public universities in six southern states have come together to create a new higher education accreditor that will offer an alternative to existing nationally recognized accrediting agencies overseeing the nation’s colleges and universities.” (Forbes)

💻 Has the Computer-Science Bubble Burst? Enrollment in computer-science programs is stalling nationwide. Blame AI: Generative tech is proving so good at writing code that it’s displacing the very coders who built it. “We might have passed peak computer science,” writes Rose Horowitch. (The Atlantic; subscription required)

Until next time, Cheers — Jeff