The College Investor Audio Show

The University of Missouri System Board of Curators voted unanimously Thursday to raise undergraduate tuition 4% across all four campuses for the 2026-27 academic year. Graduate tuition will rise 3%. The increase hits resident undergraduates at Mizzou (Columbia), UMSL, UMKC, and Missouri S&T at a moment when families are already absorbing FAFSA changes, new federal borrowing caps on Grad Loans...

California State University, the largest public college system in the U.S., just voted to allow (PDF File) the creation of bachelor's degrees that can be completed in as little as three years. This is a massive shift that could reshape how working adults and community college transfers earn a credential. The first shortened degrees could launch as early as fall 2027, though 2028 is more likely.

The U.S. Department of Education has started emailing borrowers enrolled in the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) Plan a second round of reminders (which we're dubbing as "courtesy" notices) ahead of the formal transition emails set to start July 1, 2026. Why it matters: Around 7 million borrowers are still sitting in SAVE forbearance after a federal court order killed the plan . Once a borrow...

Families comparing colleges usually start with the published tuition number . That number is rarely what they will actually owe. While most families don't pay sticker price , another line item is becoming a shocking addition: fees. Buried in the fine print, the mandatory student fee can add $1,000, $4,000, or even $8,000 to the annual bill before housing and food. At Southern Methodist University...

The U.S. Department of Education, with the Department of Treasury, plans to resume administrative wage garnishment on defaulted federal student loans this fall, restarting involuntary collections after a months-long pause announced earlier in 2026 . The timing will likely reflect the end of the period of time for borrowers to select a new repayment plan . While specific details have not been annou...

Student Defense co-founder Dan Zibel joins The College Investor at the ASU+GSV Summit to talk about how colleges are using AI in admissions, grading, and student lending — and why students deserve transparency about it. Recorded live at the ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, Robert Farrington sits down with Dan Zibel, co-founder of Student Defense, to talk about how artificial intelligence is reshaping...

UC Irvine's Paul Merage School of Business is cutting tuition on its Flex MBA program by $30,000 and its Executive MBA by $48,000 starting this fall — a reduction of up to 38%. The school is openly framing the move as a response to new federal graduate borrowing limits that take effect July 1, 2026. However, this move raises more questions than answers. Why it matters: At the new $99,000 price tag...

Key federal databases that tracked American schools since 1962 is now running on outdated numbers. After Education Department gutted their research arm last year, large portions of the Digest of Education Statistics (covering per-student spending, teacher pay, enrollment, and student safety) have not been refreshed in more than a year. The Department says new contracts are coming, but the public (...

Federal student loan interest rates are heading higher for the 2026-27 academic year, following Monday's May 10-year Treasury Note auction (PDF File). Undergraduate Stafford Loans will carry a 6.52% fixed rate, up from 6.392% a year earlier, with graduate and PLUS borrowers seeing similar increases of roughly 13 basis points. The new rates apply to federal student loans disbursed on or after July...

The payment pause protecting borrowers in the SAVE plan is winding down , with loan servicers set to begin notifying borrowers starting July 1 to move into a new repayment plan. Once a borrower receives that notice, the clock starts: forbearance ends 90 days after the official notice is sent, which means most affected borrowers will be back in active repayment by the end of September 2026. This me...

Financial planner and former college admissions consultant Tyler West joins The College Investor Audio Show at MilMoneyCon to talk about how families should actually approach paying for college — from 529 plans to commuter schools to the conversations parents aren't having with their kids. Recorded live at MilMoneyCon, Robert Farrington sits down with Tyler West, an associate financial planner at...

Anna Maria College's closure announcement last week brought the 2026 U.S. nonprofit college shutdown count to eight. The 80-year-old institution in Paxton, Massachusetts said its Board of Trustees could no longer project the financial resources to sustain academic operations past the spring 2026 semester. This decision came less than two weeks after the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education...

The U.S. Department of Education published its final rule implementing the student loan provisions of the Working Families Tax Cuts Act , ending Grad PLUS for new borrowers , capping Parent PLUS for the first time, narrowing the definition of "professional student" , and consolidating the federal repayment system into two plans for new borrowers. Most provisions take effect July 1, 2026, with reha...

Higher education economist Preston Cooper joins The College Investor at the ASU+GSV Summit to talk about when a bachelor’s degree pays off, where grad school goes wrong, and how families should think about ROI in a labor market that is changing fast. Recorded live at the ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, Robert Farrington sits down with Preston Cooper, the researcher behind some of the most widely cite...

The number of federal student loan repayment plans is shrinking. Starting July 1, 2026, new Direct Loan borrowers will only have access to two plans: the Tiered Standard Plan and the Repayment Assistance Plan , known as RAP. The Department of Education recently refreshed StudentAid for RAP, showing the repayment math, and how the plan's interest subsidy and matching principal benefit actually work...

A new Trellis Strategies survey (PDF File) of 3,182 former students who left college without a credential finds that financial pressure and life circumstances (not academic struggles) are the top reasons they walked away. This matters because students who leave college without a credential are usually the ones that face the most financial difficulty after leaving school. When you drop out of colle...

Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent told an American Enterprise Institute audience on Thursday that federal student loan forgiveness “is not happening,” highlighting the administration’s tone as it moves defaulted accounts to the Treasury Department and winds down the SAVE plan . This comes from a livestream Q&A session , which marks one of the most public conversations yet around the m...

A federal judge has approved a $425 million class action settlement with Capital One over allegations that the bank paid low interest rates to older 360 Savings account holders while offering a nearly identical product (360 Performance Savings) at substantially higher rates. U.S. District Judge David J. Novak signed the final approval order on April 20, 2026 (PDF File), clearing the way for paymen...

High school seniors heading to public four-year colleges this fall could graduate with more than $43,000 in student loans, according to a new NerdWallet analysis of National Center for Education Statistics data. Why It Matters: The projection lands as federal repayment plans change on July 1, the SAVE plan ends , and AI pressure on entry-level jobs pushes more students to question whether a bachel...

Hundreds of thousands of federal student loan borrowers in default could start hearing from the government and their debt collectors as soon as July, as the Treasury Department prepares to take over a piece of the Education Department's collection work, Politico reported . Why It Matters: This would be the first major step in moving the $1.7 trillion federal student loan portfolio out of the Educa...

A group of Democratic senators led by Tim Kaine (D-VA), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), and Cory Booker (D-NJ) introduced a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution (PDF File) this week to overturn the Trump administration’s new PSLF rule that gives Education Secretary Linda McMahon authority to disqualify certain public service employers from the program . A companion resolution was introduced in the...

The Big Number: $1 billion — that’s how much the Department of Education says it saved taxpayers by cracking down on student aid fraud over the past year. Why It Matters: The Department of Education announced that its identity verification requirements for first-time FAFSA applicants, launched in summer 2025, have blocked more than $1 billion in fraudulent federal student aid . The fraud preventio...

The Department of Education processed more I DR applications in March than any month since court-ordered tracking began, cutting the pending backlog to 553,966. That is down from 576,609 in February and from nearly 2 million in April 2025. The March status report (PDF File), filed today in federal court, also shows IDR loan forgiveness resumed after two consecutive months of zero discharges.

The PSLF Buyback backlog grew to 89,720 pending applications in March, according to the latest court-ordered status report (PDF File) filed today. The Department of Education decided just 3,280 applications during the month. At that pace, borrowers at the back of the queue face a wait of over two years. But here’s the part that isn’t getting enough attention: a significant portion of these applica...

College remains a strong financial investment, and the latest data from College Board makes that case with the most recent numbers available. The Education Pays 2026 report (PDF File), shows that workers with a bachelor’s degree continue to significantly out-earn their peers with only a high school diploma and that the gap shows no signs of closing. In 2024, the median earnings of bachelor’s degre...