By Sunny Grewal · Founder, StrivePath College Advising

I'll skip "start early" and "stay organized" — you already know that. Here's what's actually changed in the past 18 months that most families in our area haven't caught up to.

The SAT is back. Pretending it isn't will cost your kid.

When the UCs went test-blind in 2020, the country followed. That era is ending. Yale, Harvard, Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Penn, Cornell, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, and every public university in Florida and Georgia has reinstated the requirement. Score submissions are up roughly 10% year over year, even at test-optional schools (NPR). At schools that went test-optional during the pandemic, the jump in score submissions has been even steeper, with some reporting submission rates back above 75%.

In May, over 600 UC faculty — led by the math chairs — demanded the SAT return for STEM majors, saying they're reteaching middle-school math to freshmen (LA Times). Six hundred professors putting their names on a public letter signals what admissions offices can expect to hear more of, and what's already showing up in classrooms.

Grade inflation made GPA a fuzzy signal. The test cuts through it. At test-required schools, skipping the SAT removes your kid from consideration entirely. Don't skip it on principle.

Your application is being read by software before a human ever sees it.

Eighty percent of admissions offices said they planned to integrate AI into review in 2024 (Inside Higher Ed). Virginia Tech and UNC already pair readers with AI tools that score essays on structure and originality (Collegewise). Put another way: four out of five schools are now running your kid's application through a machine before a person reads a single word.

The implication: an essay ChatGPT could have written — polished, generic, voiceless — is now a liability, not a safe play. AI detection tools flag patterns like hedged phrasing, overly balanced structure, and a conspicuous absence of anything surprising or specific. The essays that score well are the ones a model couldn't plausibly have written, because they're too strange, too personal, or too specific to fake. Have your kid write badly first, in their own voice, and edit from there.

Early Decision matters — but not where you think.

Michigan added a binding ED this cycle. Florida did too. At larger universities, ED can be a real lever — Tulane's ED rate has run ~58% versus 14% overall, Northeastern's ~43% versus 5.2% (Ivy Coach). At those schools, applying ED roughly quadruples your odds. That's the single biggest strategic decision most families aren't treating as a strategy.

At small liberal arts colleges, the math is less clear. Published ED rates at Amherst (22%) and Williams (23%) look like huge advantages over their ~7-8% overall rates — but those numbers don't strip out recruited athletes, who make up 30%+ of a NESCAC class and a large share of the ED pool. Back the athletes out, and the non-athlete ED rate is much closer to the regular rate than the headline suggests. Families chasing a perceived ED boost at highly selective LACs are often buying less advantage than they think, and giving up financial aid negotiating leverage in the process.

ED is binding either way — pick wrong, and you've locked your kid into four years they may resent.

Fit beats name brand. Every time.

Last year, a student of mine turned down two Ivies for the honors business program at a big public flagship. 

One year in, she's landed an internship her Ivy League friends are still chasing and has been personally introduced to alumni by the university president. Another student left Cal's computer science program because he couldn't get face time with a professor — he transferred to a small liberal arts college and is thriving. At large research universities, the student-to-faculty ratio often runs 20:1 or higher. At smaller schools, it can be closer to 10:1, and that access compounds over four years in ways a rankings number never captures.

Name recognition is not a fit. Visit. Sit in a class. Ask students if they're happy. That answer matters more than the bumper sticker.

Sunny is the founder of StrivePath, a leading college advising practice now serving families in Orange County. StrivePath provides personalized academic and college advising, guiding students to discover their strengths and achieve their potential — resulting in happier students, less stressed families, and better admissions outcomes.