16,000 Applicants Didn't Show Up

First-year international applicants on the Common App fell 10% this cycle, from roughly 165,000 to 148,000, Higher Ed Dive reports. The declines cluster where the pipeline has always been deepest. Applicants from Asia, which supplies more than two-thirds of international students in American higher education, fell 11%. India, the top source country worldwide, fell 15%. Africa dropped 17%, with Nigeria down 21%. Kenya was the only top-10 country that grew, up 30%.

The cause isn’t much of a mystery. A Department of Homeland Security rule now caps international student visas at four years, visa appointments are backed up at some embassies and more than 1,000 student visas have already been revoked. A coalition of higher education groups has sued over the rule, arguing the regulations would be “catastrophic for universities.”

“If you think, ‘OK, it might be hard for me to get a visa,’ that may make students more hesitant to apply.”

— Rodney Hughes, senior data scientist, Common App

Domestic applicants moved the opposite direction, rising 4% and carrying the platform to a 2% overall gain, according to Inside Higher Ed. Applicants using fee waivers rose 6%, and those from ZIP codes below the median income rose 8%. Black applicants rose 8%, Latinx applicants 3% and white applicants 2%. Small-town applicants climbed 9% and rural applicants 8%, adding roughly 17,000 students. Enrollment is already following the applications. More than 800 colleges surveyed last fall reported a 17% decline in newly enrolled international students.

For a U.S. family, that math cuts two ways at once. There’s slightly less competition for seats from abroad, and slightly more from a growing domestic pool at exactly the schools everyone is now looking at. Which puts the weight back on fit, and on knowing what a specific school does well before it lands on the list. We went through the new Princeton Review category rankings here.

📊🎓 Princeton Review Names Its Best Colleges for 2027 — The new rankings draw on surveys of 172,000 students across 392 schools and produce 50 separate No. 1s rather than one. Bentley takes Best Career Services, Washington and Lee tops Great Financial Aid and Vanderbilt has the happiest students.

💳📲 PayPal and Venmo Land on the Tuition Bill — Bellarmine, Butler, Kansas State, Michigan State and Texas Tech are among the first schools to let families pay tuition through PayPal or Venmo, through integrations announced Aug. 19 with Illumia, Nelnet Campus Commerce and TouchNet. Convenience fees vary by school, and a 2.5% charge on a $25,000 payment runs about $625.

🤖✍️ The Part of the Application AI Can’t Fake — Jenny Rickard, president and CEO of Common App, told U.S. News that admissions officers triangulate an application as a whole, so a voice that doesn’t match the rest of the file gets noticed. “It’s a lost opportunity if a student turns over the responsibility of sharing who they are to a bot,” she said.

🏛️⚖️ Washington Comes for Accreditation, Twice in One Week — The Education Department released a proposed rule on Aug. 19 that would make it easier to launch new accreditors and hand them oversight of campus free speech and “intellectual diversity” policies. Two days later, an 86-page report recommended revoking the American Bar Association’s recognition as the accreditor for roughly 200 law schools. A federal advisory committee takes up the report Sept. 23.

📚🤘 UT Austin Rewrites Its Core for the First Time in 20 Years — The university is narrowing general education around social sciences, STEM and the arts and humanities, cutting six credit hours in the process. Pilot courses launch in fall 2027, full rollout follows in fall 2028 and current students are exempt. Keep reading…

A core curriculum is the part of a college a student can’t opt out of, which makes it one of the more revealing things to look at when two schools seem interchangeable on paper. UT Austin is betting that fewer, more deliberate requirements produce graduates who can hold an argument together. The overhaul arrives under Texas SB 37, which gives governing boards authority to review and reject general education courses, and the Texas conference of the AAUP opposed that law, saying it “imposes political control over the core curriculum.”

For families with a rising junior or senior looking at Austin, the practical detail is the calendar. Anyone enrolling in fall 2028 or later will be under the new core, so the course catalog a student browses on a campus visit this fall isn’t the one they’ll register for.

Unemployment for college graduates ages 22 to 27 sat at 5.7% in June, well above the 4.1% rate for workers overall, and NPR reports that economists still can't agree on how much of that gap belongs to artificial intelligence. Recent grads have already made up their minds. A ZipRecruiter survey found 47% believe AI has affected hiring in their fields.

The research pulls in opposite directions. Stanford found that early-career workers ages 22 to 25 in AI-exposed roles have seen a 16% relative employment decline since late 2022. Harvard economist David Deming notes the timing doesn’t line up neatly: “If you look very carefully at the timing, it looks like the decline in junior hiring actually started a bit like six months before ChatGPT was released.” An analysis from Ramp and Revelio Labs found the reverse pattern in company spending, with firms making substantial AI investments increasing entry-level hiring by 12% in the two years after adoption.

“AI is not the whole story, but it’s part of the story and the evidence is building.”

— Erik Brynjolfsson, Stanford economist

None of that resolves anything for the person holding the diploma. “It’s hard knowing that I’m doing everything that I can to be successful and feeling like that’s not enough,” said Jacqueline Kline, a recent graduate still looking for work. That’s the sentiment behind a lot of the current family conversation about whether the degree is worth the price.

Nobody can tell a 17-year-old which majors will hold up in 2032, and the ones marketed as AI-proof this year are the same ones marketed as recession-proof a decade ago. What the data does support is that the companies spending most heavily on AI are hiring more junior people, which points toward industries where the technology works as a tool rather than a replacement.

The move families can make now is to look harder at what a school does after graduation. Career services staffing, employer relationships and internship placement rates in a student’s field are all knowable before a deposit goes down.

Admissions Angle works with families as early as eighth grade to build college lists that hold up through graduation and into a first job. If this year’s shifting applicant pool has you rethinking your student’s list, book a free discovery call with us.

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