College Admissions News: Week of October 5, 2026
The college admissions news that matters to families
AI goes to school
OpenAI plans to add a new tool to ChatGPT: College Planner. In addition to helping students cheat on exams, ChatGPT will soon walk them through the practical steps of applying to college.
According to OpenAI’s announcement, College Planner “brings together application requirements, deadlines, tasks, and financial-aid steps” for high schoolers. It will also help students figure out how to pay for college.
Sam Altman and Co. want you to know they care. Not just about their planned IPO, but about kids who can’t afford outside help. OpenAI says the goal is to make college guidance accessible “regardless of financial circumstances.”
How nice.
And look: we’re a college counseling company. We know some families can’t afford our services. We’re for anything that helps students get into the college of their dreams, whether it helps our bottom line or not.
What bothers us is the packaging. College Planner will live inside ChatGPT for Teens, the default version of ChatGPT for anyone under 18. OpenAI says that version is “designed to help young people learn, think critically and deepen their understanding.”
OpenAI can rebrand outsourced thinking as critical thinking all it wants. Underneath the hood, it’s still the thing doing your kid’s homework.
What families need to know
If you want to use ChatGPT to manage admissions deadlines, you’re probably fine. Just check every date against the college’s own website. AI still hallucinates, which is a polite way of saying it makes stuff up.
The bigger risk comes when students let AI write their personal essays or fill in their activities lists. The Common App treats submitting AI-generated content as your own work as fraud, and many colleges have their own policies on top of that. A seemingly harmless paragraph ChatGPT drafted for your “Why X university?” supplement could send your application to the reject pile.
What enrollment cliff?
Despite all the hand-wringing about the enrollment cliff, admissions officers expect the 2026-2027 cycle to be at least as competitive as the last.
In a new Kaplan survey, 11% predict a much more competitive cycle and 33% say somewhat more. Another 46% think it will be about the same. That’s 90% who don’t see admissions getting any easier.
At the same time, 81% are worried about the cliff’s impact on higher education. Over two-thirds fear it will force many colleges to close or merge.
What gives?
Look closer, and the contradiction vanishes. Only 56% are worried about the cliff’s impact on their school. Kaplan surveyed admissions officers at the top 212 colleges, according to U.S. News. These schools are best positioned to weather the storm. They see a crisis coming — just not their crisis.
Even we get tired of beating this drum, but the enrollment cliff won’t hit colleges equally. Ivy Plus colleges and elite publics turn away the vast majority of applicants. For them, the cliff barely dents the reject pile.
A small, tuition-dependent liberal arts college in the Rust Belt is another story. It’s likely hanging on for dear life.
What this means for families
Don’t count on the cliff to make college easier to get into, at least at the schools everyone wants. Expect the opposite. Last cycle, students submitted 10.7 million applications through the Common App, up 6% from the year before.
So build your list with the cliff in mind. Some schools have more applicants than they know what to do with. Others are fighting for every enrolled student, and strong applicants stand out.
What the heck does “holistic admissions” even mean?
How do the most selective schools pluck applicants from their overflowing piles? University of California offers a rare look inside the process.
The university now draws more than 150,000 applications per year. Yep, you read that right — 150k.
Olufemi Ogundele, Berkeley's Dean of Undergraduate Admissions, says every first-year application gets read at least twice. Readers look for what students have accomplished, but also the environment they did it in.
That’s holistic admissions in a nutshell. Your achievements get measured against your circumstances, not against every other applicant.
It also means grades alone won’t get you very far. Ogundele says the “vast majority” of Berkeley applicants have strong academics. We’ll translate: your 4.0 gets read. It doesn’t get you in.
So what does earn an acceptance letter? Ogundele prefers personal, detailed applications. He wants to know how students spend their time and what got in the way of what they cared about. And because UC Berkeley is test-blind, meaning SAT and ACT scores are not used in undergraduate admissions decisions, there’s no score to prop up an application.
What this means for families
If you’re applying to selective schools, write for the reader Ogundele describes. Someone who already assumes you’re smart, and is reading your file a second time to find out who you are, and what you’ll do when you arrive on campus.