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For most undergraduates, paying for college starts with a Federal Direct Loan in the student's name, with no credit check and no cosigner. The problem is the size. A dependent freshman can borrow $5,500, and even a senior tops out at $7,500, while the average sticker price at a private four-year college runs well past $40,000 a year. When the federal loan runs out, families turn to a Parent PLUS loan or a private loan, and that is where the "can't get a student loan" problem starts. Parents get denied for adverse credit history, or get approved but hit the new $20,000 annual cap. Students without a creditworthy cosigner get turned down by private lenders, and more than 93% of private undergraduate loans require a cosigner. Each dead end below has a fix, from the federal options most families miss to the handful of private lenders that approve students other lenders won't, along with what those loans cost.

Yes. Unemployment benefits count as income on the FAFSA because the IRS treats them as taxable income, and the FAFSA starts with your adjusted gross income (AGI). Benefits received in 2025 are part of the 2025 AGI that the 2027-28 FAFSA imports directly from the IRS, so they raise the Student Aid Index the same way wages do. The bigger issue for most families is timing. The 2027-28 FAFSA is open now and looks back to 2025 income, so a layoff in 2026 or 2027 doesn't show up on the form at all. Families in that spot can ask each college to adjust their aid through a process called professional judgment. Here's how unemployment benefits are treated on the form, and how to get the aid office to account for a job loss.

More than 870 colleges now advertise free tuition for some students, but a new Brookings Institution analysis finds most of these programs repackage existing financial aid rather than add new money. In a new research brief, economist Phillip Levine concludes that the biggest benefit of free tuition may be marketing: it tells families in plain terms that they won’t pay the sticker price that only 1 in 8 students actually pays. Levine matched a Washington Post database of free tuition policies against federal IPEDS data and net price calculator results from 200 randomly selected four-year colleges. Of the 2,994 colleges in his analysis, 871 (29%) offer free tuition to some group of students, and those schools enroll about 42% of all students, according to Brookings. The programs range from campus-level offers like Rice University’s expanded $200,000 threshold to statewide programs such as New York’s Excelsior Scholarship.

The University of Arizona announced that it will freeze tuition and mandatory fees for every undergraduate and graduate student for fall 2027. Resident undergraduates will have gone four years without a tuition increase, and the freeze extends to nonresident undergraduates and all graduate programs for the first time. For families watching college costs rise three times faster than inflation, a public flagship keeping its price steady gives them one less thing to plan around. The plan still needs a final vote. The Arizona Board of Regents will review the full tuition, fees, housing and meal plan proposal at its November meeting, so the rates below are proposed rather than final. Families can see how the state’s three public universities fit with other Arizona financial aid and college cost options while the vote is pending.

The University of California’s Blue and Gold Opportunity Plan covers systemwide tuition and fees for California residents with family incomes under $100,000 who qualify for financial aid. For students entering UC in 2026-27, that’s worth $15,588 a year, made up of $14,202 in tuition and a $1,386 student services fee, according to UC’s 2026-27 fee schedule. The plan applies at every undergraduate UC campus, including Berkeley and UCLA, and puts UC on the list of colleges offering free tuition below set income limits.

Penn State released final recommendations from its Academic Portfolio and Program Review on October 12, 2026. The university recommends closing 47 of its 403 bachelor’s and associate degree programs, joining a wave of universities cutting jobs and degrees in 2026. The 47 programs enroll 784 students, about 1.1% of Penn State’s 68,390 undergraduates. That’s down from the preliminary list released in April, which flagged 49 programs and 906 students. Students deciding whether to stay or transfer to another college now have a final list to work from.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency fined Bank of America $750 million on October 13, 2026, for failures in its anti-money laundering program. It’s the largest civil money penalty in OCC history, and it hits the bank behind millions of everyday Bank of America savings and checking accounts. The OCC penalty is one part of a larger Treasury action. FinCEN, the Treasury unit that recently ordered banks to report student aid fraud, assessed a $1.2 billion penalty that credits the OCC’s $750 million. The Office of Foreign Assets Control added an $11.6 million settlement over 475 apparent sanctions violations, according to the Associated Press. According to a statement from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, “Financial institutions are on the front lines of protecting our economic and national security. When a bank of this size fails to meet its anti-money laundering and sanctions obligations, the consequences extend far beyond its own walls, exposing the entire U.S. financial system to significant illicit finance risks.“

Consumer prices rose 0.6% in September on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics September CPI report released October 14, 2026. Over the past 12 months, the Consumer Price Index climbed 3.7%, up from 3.4% in August. The report is also the last input for Social Security’s 2027 COLA and the next I bond interest rate. Gasoline was the biggest driver of the increase. The gas index rose 9.1% in September and accounted for more than half of the monthly increase. Energy prices overall are now up 20.4% from a year ago. Core inflation, which strips out food and energy, rose 0.3% for the month and 2.6% for the year.

The Social Security Administration announced a 3.6% cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) for 2027 on October 14. The increase follows September consumer price index data, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the same morning. Nearly 72 million Social Security beneficiaries get the raise starting in January 2027. About 7.3 million SSI recipients see higher payments on December 31, 2026. The 2027 raise is the largest since 2023, and it runs 0.8 percentage points above the 2.8% COLA for 2026. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) notes it also beats the Social Security Trustees’ recent projection by 0.9 points, a sign of how fast inflation ran this year.

A growing group of states has turned the FAFSA into a high school graduation requirement. The idea, known as “universal FAFSA,” is simple: every senior either files the federal aid application or formally opts out before getting a diploma. The label hides several variations of the policy. Some states withhold a diploma from a student who does neither, while others only require schools to track who filed. Here’s where every state stands heading into the 2027-28 FAFSA cycle, which states walked their policies back, and what the data says about whether any of it works.

Sen. Jeff Merkley introduced the Homeownership Promise Act (PDF File) on September 23, 2026, a bill that would have the federal government match first-time homebuyers’ down payment savings at a 5-to-1 rate. A saver who puts away the $10,000 maximum would receive up to $50,000 from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), for a combined $60,000 at closing. Sen. Ron Wyden is the lone cosponsor, according to Merkley’s announcement. The new Homeownership Promise Accounts would function as savings accounts with a large federal grant paid out on purchase day. The concept resembles the match Foyer offers on home down payment savings and the $1,000 federal Saver’s Match coming to retirement accounts in 2027, but at a far larger multiple. The bill defines an “eligible family” as one or two first-time buyers, so a couple buying together would share one account and one $60,000 cap rather than each opening their own (another marriage penalty).

Two former for-profit college students filed a proposed class action against the U.S. Department of Education on September 24, 2026, alleging the agency keeps telling credit bureaus they owe federal student loans it cancelled years ago. The case, Woods v. U.S. Department of Education (No. 1:26-cv-3335), was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by the Project on Predatory Student Lending (PPSL), the legal group behind the Sweet v. Cardona borrower defense settlement. The lawsuit seeks damages under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. At issue are the Department’s group discharges that were announced by the Biden Administration between April 2022 and January 2025, which covered more than 1.5 million borrowers and $23.4 billion in loans tied to schools where the agency found widespread fraud and misconduct. Those schools, including Corinthian Colleges, ITT Tech, the Art Institutes and Ashford University, appear on our for-profit college loan forgiveness list. PPSL estimates, based on public data, that the Department is still reporting $4.6 billion of that cancelled debt as owed, affecting more than 300,000 people. This aligns with a lot of the comments that we saw on our videos reporting on this, where borrowers reported that their loans are still not showing as canceled.

The U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of the Treasury launched the Defaulted Loans Support Center on September 30, 2026, a new section of StudentAid.gov where borrowers with defaulted federal student loans can apply online to rehabilitate or consolidate their loans. According to the joint press release, the portal replaces “outdated websites and burdensome mail and fax-based processes” that have governed default resolution for decades. It is the first major borrower-facing product to come out of the ED-Treasury partnership that moved defaulted loan collections to Treasury earlier this year. The portal lives at studentaid.gov/default-support and uses a borrower’s existing StudentAid.gov login. That alone is a change from the old MyEdDebt.ed.gov system, which required a separate account tied to a Social Security number. This is important give then fact that the Treasury takeover affects 7.8 million defaulted borrowers.

The U.S. Department of Education announced on September 29, 2026 that it was extending the enrollment window for its temporary 1% student loan interest rate reduction by three months. Borrowers who enroll in auto pay by December 31, 2026, or who are already enrolled, keep the reduced rate through June 30, 2028. The original deadline would have closed at the end of September. The 1% discount replaced the old 0.25% auto pay discount on July 1, 2026 for eligible borrowers. The Department says nearly 2 million borrowers have signed up for auto pay since the benefit was announced this summer. Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said in the statement that the discount is already lifting repayment rates across the federal portfolio, which has been struggling as 9.3 million borrowers sit in default.

The U.S. Senate passed the Protect College Sports Act (PDF File) by a 77-22 vote late Monday, after nearly six hours of debate and seven amendments. Drafted by Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Maria Cantwell (D-Washington), the bill would write the House v. NCAA settlement into federal law, including the revenue-sharing model that turned schools into direct payers of their athletes. This is exactly what we broke down in how NIL athletes actually make money. For families, this is a money story as much as a sports story. Athletes can now get paid directly from schools, collectives, and brands, but each dollar carries self-employment tax, financial aid consequences, and agent commissions. The bill would replace today’s patchwork of state NIL laws with one national rulebook, according to a Senate Commerce Committee fact sheet on the bill.