College Admissions News: Week of October 19th, 2026

All the admissions news that matters to your family

Snowbirds with endowments

Carnegie Mellon is opening a new campus in Miami. It’ll have company: South Florida already hosts Northeastern’s satellite campus and will soon house Vanderbilt’s West Palm Beach graduate school.

Why are elite universities heading south? Partly demographics. Even as the nation hurdles toward an enrollment cliff, Florida’s teenage population is growing. Since 2020, the Sunshine State’s population has increased 8%, according to the U.S. Census.

Recently, South Florida has also reeled in some big companies: Amazon, Microsoft, and Blackstone now have offices there, while tech giant Palantir relocated its headquarters from Denver to Miami.

Carnegie Mellon and other elite universities are betting that Miami’s growing tech footprint and tropical weather will lure high schoolers from Florida and elsewhere. They’ll compete head-to-head with established private institutions like the University of Miami.

For UM, the competition used to come from Pittsburgh and Boston. Now, it’s right next door.

What this means for families

Branch campuses often launch with graduate or professional programs first. Undergraduate options can be thin or absent. Before adding CMU Miami to your school list, confirm the degrees it grants and whether its students learn from the same faculty as the Pittsburgh campus.

Florida families also gain a new option: a brand-name school within driving distance. That might be worth something. Check whether CMU beats in-state publics and UM on quality and price, not just name recognition.

Tenth-year seniors

Median time to degree, the amount of time it takes students to complete their studies, was under four years across the board.

Among 2.33 million students earning their first undergraduate degree in 2025, median time to degree was 3.7 years for bachelor’s degrees, 3 years for associate degrees, and 2.3 years for certificate programs.

That’s the good news. However, when a student stops their studies for whatever reason, the time to degree grows quickly. For students with one “stopout,” time to degree rose from 3.7 years to 5.1 years for a bachelor’s. Those with three or more disruptions took more than 10 years to finish a bachelor’s degree.

What this means for families

One break turns a 3.7-year bachelor’s into a 5.1-year one. Each extra year adds costs and means one less year of earnings.

Stopouts rarely feel like a big deal in the moment. A student takes a semester off to regroup, and one semester quickly becomes two. Re-enrollment gets harder the longer the gap.

If a break is unavoidable, make it formal. Many colleges offer a leave of absence that holds a student’s spot and makes returning simpler. Families should also watch the aid clock. Some forms of federal aid cap out at the equivalent of 12 full-time semesters. A long, interrupted path can use up eligibility before the diploma arrives.

Californians sharpen their No. 2s

California high schoolers are increasingly taking the SAT. As more universities return to requiring test scores for admissions, and the University of California system debates mandatory testing, students in the Golden State are booting up Bluebook.

This year, 138,763 students in California took the SAT this year, up 12.6% from the 2025 class. Though the state’s public universities don’t officially use the SAT or ACT in admissions decisions, other universities, including Stanford, Caltech, USC, and the entire Ivy League, still evaluate students’ test scores.

Test-optional isn’t test-blind, meaning students who submit scores to schools like USC likely get a leg up in admissions. The UC system also uses test scores for course placement.

Opponents of mandatory testing point to inequities in test prep and scores for disadvantaged students, although the evidence is mixed. A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) found that test-optional policies harm low-income students with high scores most.

The University of California Board of Regents will meet no later than June 2027 to vote on whether to restore testing requirements at the UCs.

What this means for families

A UC-exclusive list doesn’t need a test score currently. One application to Stanford or Caltech changes that. So does the Regents' upcoming vote, which could restore the requirement before current sophomores and juniors apply.

The safest move is to test once in the spring of junior year. A score in hand keeps options open, and students can still choose whether to send it. Decide school by school: submit where the score lands at or above the middle 50% range for admitted students, and hold it back where it falls below.

Scores matter after admission too. Students headed to a UC can use them for course placement, including meeting the system’s Entry Level Writing Requirement. A strong score there means one less hurdle in freshman fall.