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In today's issue: The new financial calculation around May 1; AI fluency vs. literacy; and why this is such a critical time for student visas.

EVENTS

🗓️ Monday, June 16 | 3 PM ET / 12 PM PT

Ask Me Anything — The College Search Starts Here

Join me for a live Q&A on navigating college admissions with expert counselors. We'll cover what can go wrong, finding clarity in the search, and discovering great colleges beyond the obvious choices.

My guests:

• Diane Campbell | Director of College Counseling, Liberty Common High School
• Shereem Herndon-Brown | Independent Counselor, and co-author of two books on admissions, including the forthcoming, Powerful College Admission Essays: A Guide to Telling Your Story

👉 Register here (to also get the recording afterward).

🗓️ Monday, July 14 | Noon ET / 9 AM PT

📚 Exclusive for Dream School Pre-Order Readers

From College to Career, the Right Way

College isn't just about getting a degree—it's about building the skills that prepare students for life after graduation. In this exclusive virtual event, I'll explore how students can intentionally develop career readiness throughout college.

We'll cover what employers actually want, a year-by-year career development roadmap, and how to spot colleges that embed career support into the student experience.

My guests:

• Lindsey Pollak | Author, Getting from College to Career: Your Essential Guide to Succeeding in the Real World
• Matt Sigelman | President, Burning Glass Institute and Senior Advisor, The Harvard Project on the Workforce
• Andy Chan | Vice President, Personal & Career Development, Wake Forest University

👉 To join this webinar (or get a recording), all you need to do is pre-order Dream School from any bookseller by July 14, then enter your proof of purchase on my website: jeffselingo.com/dreamschool 

👍 If you already pre-ordered by now, consider yourself registered for this webinar with more information to come the week before. 

1. The Great College Scramble of 2025

It's June. School's out. And by now, most high school seniors should know exactly where they're headed next fall.

But this year seems a lot more unsettled.

The traditional college admissions calendar—where May 1 marked the definitive end of another cycle—has officially died. Sure, May 1 was always somewhat artificial. Plenty of schools kept accepting students well into summer, and even selective colleges dipped into waitlists to fill gaps. But this year? The scramble has turned a lot more chaotic. 

The current madness started brewing after the 2020 pandemic year, when homebound students wanted more time to decide on where they’d go the following fall. Then test-optional policies the next year flooded schools with applications and obliterated predictable enrollment models. Last year brought the disastrous rollout of a new federal financial-aid form, pushing decisions deep into summer.

This was supposed to be the year things returned to normal.

Instead, something unprecedented happened: In the weeks after May 1, parents started forwarding me financial aid offers that looked too good to be true. Colleges were suddenly throwing $10,000, $20,000, even $30,000 at students who'd already committed elsewhere—often the first discount these colleges had offered all year.

Meanwhile, kids were getting plucked off waitlists at places like the University of Michigan, University of Chicago, the University of North Carolina—schools that typically locked their classes weeks earlier.

The anecdotes weren't isolated. Facebook groups filled with similar stories. Reddit threads multiplied. So I started reporting what became a piece for New York magazine, tracing the connections behind this admissions free-for-all.

Here's what's driving the madness: College admissions operates like a massive, interconnected web. Schools share overlapping applicant pools, which connect to other overlapping pools, creating a system that is hard to see sitting in one high school, with one list of colleges. So, when there is movement in one place, it has ripple effects in lots of places. And this spring, multiple rocks hit the pond simultaneously:

📉 Continued enrollment decline. Undergraduate numbers have been sliding for over a decade, but colleges haven't cut seats to match. Every year brings deeper discounting through merit aid, forcing schools higher up the food chain to start cutting prices too.

⚠️ Demographics created a now-or-never moment. The Class of 2025 represents the largest high school graduating class we'll see for the next decade-plus. Colleges knew this was their last shot at decent numbers before the pipeline truly dries up.

💰 Trump administration policies spooked universities. February's announcement of reduced research overhead rates blew holes in budgets, forcing schools to scramble for revenue. Solution: Pack in more students, even at a discount, because every tuition dollar (and room and board revenue) helps.

🗺️ International student deportations and visa freezes threatened a crucial revenue stream. Just when colleges needed it most, this pipeline of students—many full-payers at many institutions—dried up.

For the New York piece, I focused on Syracuse University, which became the poster child for eleventh-hour dealmaking after dominating online parent forums.

Take Zoe, a 17-year-old who'd committed to USC at the full $96,000 sticker price. In early May, Syracuse—which had offered her nothing all year—suddenly dangled an $80,000 "Personal Distinction Award" spread over four years. 

“We’re not ones to look at $80,000 and say, ‘Screw it,’” Zoe’s dad, Mark, told me. He knew schools were sometimes willing to negotiate. “I told Syracuse that they had to come back with something above and beyond for us to switch,” Mark said. “It was a nervy Hail Mary, but I felt a little burned by Syracuse.” A few hours later, Syracuse added another $10,000 a year to Zoe’s award and the next day, she decided to head to upstate New York this fall instead of Southern California. 

"Don't judge me too harshly," her dad told me. "I work in sales. I know these are businesses. But this is silly season."

👉 Read the complete story in New York (subscription required) or on Apple News.

2. So Is This the New Normal?

Zoe wasn't alone. Syracuse kept throwing money at students through last week, and dozens of other schools followed similar playbooks.

The result? Parents with rising seniors are now strategizing about which colleges might get desperate next spring, gaming out how long their kids should wait before committing.

But here's the thing about institutional desperation: It's fickle. This year's “buyers” could flip overnight depending on that magic number—yield rate—that determines how many accepted students actually show up.

My forthcoming book Dream School dives deep into how "yield management" has reached absurd new heights. As students spray applications everywhere and traditional metrics lose meaning (thanks to money playing a bigger role in final decisions by families), colleges are pulling increasingly desperate tricks to figure out who's actually coming. That's yield management.

🚨 Another sneak peek from Dream School: Below is a one of the graphics from the book, showing yield rates by selectivity. Yield rates have cratered everywhere except the super-selective tier. Twenty years ago, Syracuse's yield looked more like Duke's today.

So has college admissions become a year-round game of musical chairs, where commitments mean nothing until someone waves cash or a waitlist spot opens at a "better" school?

Absolutely.

The old investment disclaimer now applies to college admissions: Past performance doesn't indicate future results. Those scattergrams from your high school's college counseling office? The "chance me" posts cluttering Reddit and College Confidential? Increasingly worthless.

Between Trump policies, demographic shifts, and brutal industry economics, enrollment day keeps moving.

What emerged in 2025 was last-minute dealmaking as a permanent feature of the admissions landscape—not a bug, but the new reality of a system under siege.

3. Degrees vs. the Machines

🧐 Of course, the other lurking threat for higher ed is the value of the degree in an AI world.

Why it matters: As AI reshapes the job market—especially at the entry level—colleges face growing pressure to equip students with the skills to leapfrog those roles. Just being AI-literate won’t cut it anymore.

The big picture: Students need AI fluency—a deeper, more human-centered ability to co-create knowledge, navigate ethical decisions, and solve problems in context.

• “Degrees risk becoming worthless if colleges don’t respond to AI’s impact on learning and cheating,” warned José Antonio Bowen, co-author of Teaching With AI, during last month’s "Next Office Hour" webinar. He called for assessments that reward human thinking over machine output.
• Angela Gunder, CEO of Opened Culture, was blunt: “The quest for one AI framework to rule them all is a dead end.” She argued AI literacies must be plural, contextual, and ever-evolving.

What’s happening: Matt Kinservik, professor of English and former vice provost for faculty affairs at the University of Delaware. shared the details of the university's three-course AI Certificate for undergrads—covering AI fundamentals, ethical implications, and practical applications across disciplines. It’s designed as a flexible, stackable path to fluency.

• Jennifer Sparrow, the associate vice president for research and instructional technologies at New York University, who joined me for a separate interview during the webcast distinguished between literacy (knowing how to use AI) and fluency (understanding when and why).
• “Fluency is about ethical use, understanding sources, and co-creating knowledge within a discipline," Sparrow said.
• Across the board, panelists emphasized durable skills—critical thinking, creativity, communication, and curiosity—what Bowen called “survival skills.”
• At Delaware, Kinservik’s team skipped rigid policies and instead issued practical one-pagers to help faculty adapt. Their strategy: “Top-down, bottom-up, and middle-out.”
• Bowen urged colleges to stop blocking AI tools and start building trust: “People are using it anyway—in secret.”

Bottom line: Expect the conversation to shift—from “How do we stop AI?” to “What can students do now that they couldn’t before?”

• Gunder called for a “values-aligned culture,” where ethics and equity are baked into AI education—not bolted on.
• Kinservik put it plainly: “We need to teach students how to manage the tools—not just absorb the content.”

🖥️ Watch an on-demand recording of the "Next Office Hour" here (With support from Adobe).

SUPPLEMENTS

🌎 Timing Is Everything for Student Visas. “A big part of the heartburn is the timing of the freeze,” notes Karin Fischer. “In recent years seven in 10 student visas have been issued during four critical months  of May through August, notes Karin Fischer. (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

✂️ Budget Cuts at NSF. “If this new budget recommendation becomes reality, it means that NSF by its own estimate will be supporting just 30% of the graduate students it does now, and just 18% of the postdocs. NSF is now helping more than 37,000 undergraduates every year get their first real research experience; under the recommended budget that number will drop to only 8,000 nationwide,” notes Tim VanReken (LinkedIn; nsf.gov)

✈️ Michigan, Florida, Now What? Florida officials have “rejected the candidacy of Santa Ono to lead the University of Florida, after he had been accused of leniency toward pro-Palestinian protesters while serving as president of the University of Michigan.” Since he’s already quit he’s job at Michigan, Ono is left without one. (New York Times)