When your college closes

Summary

Today, Explained – “When your college closes”

Date: April 23, 2026
Host: Sean Rameswaram
Guest: Jon Marcus (Senior Higher Education Reporter, The Hechinger Report)

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the growing crisis of small college closures in the United States, using Hampshire College’s impending shutdown as a case study. Host Sean Rameswaram and guest Jon Marcus discuss the reasons behind this trend—demographic shifts, mounting debt, waning public trust, and political forces—and examine what happens to students caught up in closures. They also address the harms—both personal and societal—caused by the loss of regional colleges, and spotlight some institutional reforms aiming to stem the tide.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Hampshire College Closure as a Sign of a Larger Trend

• Hampshire’s Backstory: Financial issues have long plagued Hampshire, including small endowment, high debt ($21 million), and rapidly declining enrollment (<800 students), despite prominent creative alumni.
  • (03:01) Jon Marcus: “...at Hampshire specifically...I looked up the numbers. They were giving back more than 75% of their revenue in the form of discounts just to continue to get people to come there and fill seats.”
• Tuition Discounting: Nearly all students receive scholarships/discounts; Hampshire’s was 75%. National average is over 50%. “If you were a private business and you gave back 50% of your revenue, you'd be out of business. And that's what's happening...” [04:38]
• Scope of Closures: Since the pandemic, ~100 colleges have closed; estimate that 442 (one-quarter of all private nonprofits) are at risk, with 120 at severe risk. [05:29]

Factors Driving the Crisis

• The “Demographic Cliff”: Fewer 18-year-olds (post-Great Recession birth drop) start hitting colleges in Fall 2026.
  • (06:21) Jon Marcus: “So in 2026 is when that hits us 18 years later...The country is heading towards a cliff, a demographic cliff...”
• Enrollment Down, Costs Up:
  • % of high school grads going directly to college dropped from 70% (2016) to just above 60% now. [06:59]
  • Increased skepticism about the cost and ROI of a college degree.
• Political and Policy Factors:
  • Federal aid during Covid staved off closures, but is now disappearing.
  • Crackdown on international student visas hits small colleges hard. 36% decline in new visas last year. [08:11]
• “Perfect storm”: Overextended, indebted colleges facing lower demand and fewer high-paying students. [08:59]

What Happens to Affected Students?

• Most lose out. Research: half transfer, half drop out; of the transfer group, half never finish (“Nothing good happens to those students.” [09:17])
• Problems: cost, loss of credits, closed transfers, or new college closures.
• Cycle: some students, like those recruited from ideological shakeups at other colleges (e.g., New College in Florida), get hit by closure twice. [10:14]
• New, anxious questions from prospective parents: “Will this college still be here in four years?” [10:48]

Societal Consequences of Losing Small Colleges

• Local Economic Damage: Lost jobs, plummeting housing values—especially in rural or aging communities where college is the economic anchor. [11:18]
• National Impact: Declining college attendance while global competitors surge means a threat to American economic and social competitiveness.
  • (12:11) Jon Marcus: “We’re losing the competitive edge that we’ve always had by having a well educated, innovative and entrepreneurial population.”
• Loss of Young Talent Pipelines: Fewer graduates staying, working, or starting businesses in these small towns. [12:30]
• Doom Loop: Several small towns/cities risk entering a “death spiral” as schools fold and community vitality ebbs. [13:00]

Public Attitudes and Culture Wars

• Increasing perception that college is elitist, liberal, unnecessary for all but a few professions. [13:59]
• Marcus: “There’s a real antipathy toward colleges among some people in the public who feel that they are elitist...I don't think colleges have done a very good job at sort of counteracting that narrative. But they're also really important.” [13:59]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Hampshire’s Financial Reality
  • Jon Marcus (04:15): “The discount rate at colleges and universities is more than 50%. So if you were a private business and you gave back 50% of your revenue, you'd be out of business.”
• On Student Outcomes After Closure
  • Jon Marcus (09:17): “Nothing good. Nothing good happens to those students...Of the half that transfer, half of them never graduate.”
• On Demographic Cliff
  • Jon Marcus (06:21): “So in 2026 is when that [dropoff] hits us 18 years later...We’re running out of 18-year-olds.”
• On Social Impact
  • Jon Marcus (12:20): “A lot of these colleges are in remote, isolated places, often rural, and they draw young people to these communities who after they graduate, they stay and they create businesses or they work in jobs...All of these colleges that have closed is another kind of ending of the pipeline that was bringing in young people...”
• On Negotiating Aid
  • Jon Marcus (26:40): “These colleges increasingly need you more than you need them...Number one thing we tell people is negotiate for more. Especially right now, when it’s a buyer’s market, they will give you more financial aid. They need you.”

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[18:29] Solutions: How Colleges Can Adapt

Three-Year Bachelor’s Degree

• A Major Change: Accreditors now allow for bachelor’s degrees requiring just 90 credits (vs. 120), finished in three years (“applied,” “accelerated,” or “career-focused”).
• Targeted at high-demand fields: e.g., criminal justice, graphic design, some health care roles.
• Employer Reception: Generally positive; grad schools vary, but are reconsidering policies as more students opt for this path. [21:56]
• (19:58) Jon Marcus: “This could work. It’s the first new kind of degree since essentially the advent of the community college.”
• 60 colleges already offering or planning to offer it.

Other Institutional Reforms

• Skills-Based Transcripts: Some liberal arts colleges (e.g., Brandeis) experimenting with an additional transcript for skills—both ‘soft’ (communication, collaboration) and technical (e.g., AI literacy).
  • (24:14) Jon Marcus: “That is a really interesting idea...improving the way people look at liberal arts by saying you didn’t just take philosophy, you learned critical thinking and how to communicate and how to write.”
• Changing Student Demographics: Shift away from traditional residential models, more adult learners, nontraditional paths.
  • Jon Marcus (25:07): “There's just going to be fewer students...the proportion of students...enrolled in those kinds of institutions will be much, much lower because they're gonna have a lot more choice.”

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[25:40] Advice for Prospective Students

• The power dynamic has shifted: “These colleges increasingly need you more than you need them.”
• The average acceptance rate for colleges is now over 70%—far easier than Ivy League rates.
• Always negotiate for more financial aid; it’s a buyer’s market.
  • (26:40) Jon Marcus: “Pick the one that's going to be best for you...They will give you more financial aid. They need you.”

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Segment Timestamps

• [00:00–02:12]: Introduction & context: The Hampshire closure as a pivot to a larger college closure crisis.
• [02:12–05:18]: Hampshire’s story: Fame, finances, debt, tuition discounting.
• [05:29–09:08]: Scope and reasons for crisis: closures since pandemic, demographic cliff, cost/ROI skepticism, policy/political factors, international student crackdown.
• [09:08–10:53]: The student experience when a college closes; loss of credits; cycle with multiple closures.
• [10:53–14:39]: Societal and personal consequences; economic ripple effects; national competitiveness; shifting public attitudes.
• [18:29–24:41]: Solutions and reforms: 3-year degree, skills transcripts, nontraditional education paths.
• [25:40–27:16]: Student advice: power dynamics, negotiating aid, buyer’s market.

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Summary

This episode offers a grounded, empathetic look at a little-reported aspect of the higher education crisis. Through the lens of Hampshire College’s closure, Sean Rameswaram and Jon Marcus dissect the intertwining issues—demographic shifts, unsustainable debt, vanishing confidence in ROI, political headwinds, and changing student needs—that imperil the survival of hundreds of small colleges. The episode doesn’t just sound the alarm, but also highlights pragmatic experiments (accelerated degrees, skills-based transcripts) and practical advice: negotiate for aid, realize the market has shifted, and understand both the risks and the real, ongoing value of a college education—even as that concept rapidly evolves in twenty-first-century America.

Transcript

[Shawn Ramasuram]

Last week, Hampshire College, a private liberal arts school in Amherst, Massachusetts that I had never previously heard of, announced it was shutting down. And I thought, bummer for Hampshire College. But then I read this is much bigger than Hampshire. The United states currently has 4,000 colleges and more and more of them are closing every year. In an article at the Atlantic titled the Looming College Enrollment Death Spiral, the writer Jeffrey Salingo says that your Harvards and Yales and universities of Michigan and Alabama are going to be just fine, but that smaller regional schools that you maybe haven't heard of won't be. And that means that students who can afford to go to out of state schools for their education will continue to do so. But more importantly, those who can afford it might not go to college at all. We are at risk, Solingo explains, of turning a four year education back into a luxury good in this country when your college closes. Coming up on Today, explained Adobe Acrobat, your new foundation, use PDF spaces to generate a presentation. Grab your docs, your permits, your moves, AI levels up, your pitch gets it in a groove. Choose a template with your timeless cool. Come on now, let's flex those tools, draft, design, deliver, make it sing. AI builds the deck so you can build that thing. Do that, do that, do that with Acrobat. Learn [e-mail] do that with Acrobat. Where do the negotiations with Iran stand? What can a deal actually look like? And does diplomacy still have a chance? I personally believe we will get an agreement.

[John Marcus]

I think there's going to be an agreement forthcoming of one kind or another. I think the world needs that. I think we desperately need to calm things down.

[Shawn Ramasuram]

I'm Jake Sullivan. And I'm John Finer and we're the hosts of the Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, former Secretary of State John Kerry joins us on the podcast. The episode's out now. Search for and follow the Long Game

[John Marcus]

wherever you get your podcasts you listen to.

[Shawn Ramasuram]

Today Explained.

[John Marcus]

I'm John Marcus, the senior higher education reporter at the Heckinger Report. We're a nonprofit that covers education.

[Shawn Ramasuram]

Okay. So, John, last week it was announced that the private liberal arts college Hampshire College would close after its fall semester. Tell us the story of what happened to Hampshire.

[John Marcus]

Yeah, so like a lot of small colleges, Hampshire had a lot of problems hidden just below the surface. Well, actually, in Hampshire's case, they weren't that well hidden. It had been having problems for more than six years, since before the pandemic, but was kind of being kept afloat by its very loyal alumni who includes some people that have been extremely successful largely in the arts.

[Shawn Ramasuram]

Who we talk about, should we drop some names?

[John Marcus]

We're talking about the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, predominantly. He's probably the most famous alumnus of Hampshire at that moment. Said I want to be a filmmaker and then going to college and sort of having my molecules rearranged. At Hampshire College with teachers who were social documentary still photographers. Barry Sonnenfeld, the director, he directed the Men in Black movies. Who are you really? Really? I am just a figment of your imagination. Lupiti Nyong', O, the actress.

[Caller/Listener/Guest]

Hello, I am Rosam7134.

[John Marcus]

Leif Schreiber, the actor.

[Caller/Listener/Guest]

But the fact remains, a Boston priest abused 80 kids. We have a lawyer who says he can prove law knew about it. And we've written all of two stories

[John Marcus]

in the last six months. Jon Krakauer, the author, all of them went to Hampshire. And so I think a lot of people were legitimately pulling for Hampshire. It's a school that enrolls people that are very interested in the creative arts. It was started in 1970, so by new England standards it's in western Massachusetts. By New England standards, it was reasonably young, but it was never very big. Its endowment was very small. Its enrollment continued to decline. It had fewer than 800 students left. At the end it had $21 million in debt. Debt is a really important and largely misunderstood componen of this. When people think of debt and college, they think of student loan debt. But there's also institutional debt and it is really piling up. Colleges and universities have borrowed significant amounts of money and so servicing that debt becomes a big drain on their operating budgets. To attract students, colleges do something else that isn't widely known. They discount the tuition. Almost no one pays the list price you see on the website at Hampshire specifically, or everywhere at colleges in general. The discount rate at colleges and universities is more than 50%. So if you were a private business and you gave back 50% of your revenue, you'd be out of business. And that's what's happening to a lot of these small colleges at Hampshire. I looked up the numbers. They were giving back more than 75% of their revenue in the form of discounts just to continue to get people to come there and fill seats.

[Shawn Ramasuram]

So Hampshire gets a lot of attention, but it sounds like from what you're saying, this is happening maybe far more often than we know that four year colleges, universities are going out of business.

[John Marcus]

About 100 colleges are closed since the pandemic. Many of Them only made it this far because they got federal aid during the pandemic to keep them open. Had they not, they would have probably closed sooner. And there's a new estimate that shows that 442 private nonprofit colleges and universities, that's one quarter of the total, are at risk. And about 120 of them are at severe risk of closing. And we can talk about some of the reasons for that if you'd like.

[Shawn Ramasuram]

Please go for it.

[John Marcus]

So we are running out of students. The number of 18 year olds is way down. People stop having children during financial downturns. And if you do the math, the Great recession was in 2008. So in 2026 is when that hits us 18 years later, we're running out of 18. And that will begin to have an impact on college enrollment in the fall. The last big class was the one that enrolled in this most recent fall. The next fall is when the, what they call the demographic cliff begins to hit. The country is heading towards a cliff, a demographic cliff. Over the next decade, there will be fewer 18 year olds available to fill the nation's universities. Those missing babies aren't around to go to college.

[Caller/Listener/Guest]

So that means that there's a possibility

[John Marcus]

for some schools, each incoming class could be smaller than the last. And it's just math. We have too many colleges and we have too few traditional age college students. Of the ones we still have, a smaller proportion of graduates from high school are choosing to go to college. So we hit a peak in 2016 of 70% of high school graduates going to college. That's now down to just a little bit better than 60%. That is a big, big drop in a very short time. And that has to do with the cost of higher education and the grow skepticism about the return on the investment. So that's really taking a toll.

[Shawn Ramasuram]

Okay, so we've got the demographic cliff, we've got the cost. There's also a culture war around our colleges and universities currently being waged by this administration. Does that have something to do with it?

[John Marcus]

That is not helping. It's clearly under this current presidential administration, we are seeing a lot of other impacts on higher ed that people have been reading about, in my opinion, kind of obscuring the reality of what's going on about the sustainability of higher education has been the kind of the focus that we've all understandably had on this fire hose of funding cuts and lawsuits and attacks on dei. You see what we're doing with the colleges and they're all bending and saying, sir, thank you very much. We appreciate it. In the end, though, the kinds of colleges that we're talking about that are at risk of closing, this doesn't affect them because they don't do federally funded research. The one sort of policy under this administration that is hurting some of these small colleges is the crackdown on international students. Some of these small colleges have recruited international students because they're profitable. They. They pay the full tuition. And so we've seen now a 36% decline last year in the number of visas issued for new international students. That's a giant hit. Universities across the country have seen a decline in new international students. More than 75 international students in Tex are facing an uncertain future. Essentially, it's just a perfect storm of all of these things happening at the same time to colleges that are already overextended, overly indebted, and don't have enough students.

[Shawn Ramasuram]

What happens to a student who goes to one of these schools when they find out their school is closing and they're, you know, whatever. A sophomore.

[John Marcus]

Yeah, Nothing good. Nothing good happens to those students. So everybody that's more like. Of like relative underclassmen is just screwed after the end of this semester.

[Shawn Ramasuram]

Rest in peace, Hampshire College. Thank you for giving me a place to be weird and gay.

[John Marcus]

I really did love this place. It really felt like I had found a family here. And this is really sad. There is research that shows that half of those students transfer, half of them don't. Half of them end their pursuit of a degree. Of the half that transfer, half of them never graduate. And the reasons for that include just the sort of, the cost, the fact that the successor college often doesn't take all of their credits or won't accept their transfer credits toward the major. And in many cases, students have left these small colleges that have closed, gone to another college, and then it closed. So students have experienced this more than once. And that includes some students in Hampshire who already came there. Well, New College in Florida didn't close, but it significantly kind of changed its ideological approach to higher education. And so Hampshire College reached out and recruited those students and said, come here. You'll be welcome here. They came to Hampshire and then announced that it will close. So this is becoming a cycle. And one really fascinating thing that I started hearing a few years ago from a student tour guide at a small college was that parents were beginning to ask a question he never heard. And it wasn't, how's the food? It was, will this college still be here in four years?

[Shawn Ramasuram]

Oh, no.

[John Marcus]

So people are beginning to pay Attention. Bleak, isn't it?

[Shawn Ramasuram]

To some degree. You're speaking about market forces, right? I mean, there's not enough students, the costs are too high. So the market's correcting and these schools are closing. But what do we lose when we lose these smaller regional liberal arts colleges?

[John Marcus]

Yeah, that's a great question. And it's something I've learned a lot about by visiting communities where colleges have closed. And I've been surprised by the answer to that. So the first and most important thing is not everyone needs to go to college, but somebody needs to go to college. And college going in the United States is down. In economic rival countries globally, college going is way up. So we're losing the competitive edge that we've always had by having a well educated, innovative and entrepreneurial population. That's the big picture. The small picture is more immediately, as you might assume, a college that closes is a problem for its community because you lose jobs, housing values go down when you lose a major employer. But here's the one that surprised me that I never really thought about. A lot of these colleges are in remote, isolated places, often rural, and they draw young people to these communities who after they graduate, they stay and they create businesses or they work in jobs. And a lot of the colleges that have closed are in places where the population is aging. And all of these colleges that have closed is another kind of ending of the pipeline that was bringing in young people to a place where they were needed to diversify the economy.

[Shawn Ramasuram]

So for someone out there who's like Hampshire College, never heard of her, doesn't affect me. What they might be missing is that if enough of these schools close, which from what you've said, it sounds like we're definitely, you know, at risk of you're going to see a bit of a death spiral, a doom loop in smaller American cities, yes, I would say

[John Marcus]

more small towns than cities. But even in some cities where colleges close again, it's a lot of payroll, there's a lot of employees, there's the add on spending of the students who buy pizza or rent apartments. But to your point, the immediate reaction I've noticed on social media and elsewhere is good, let them close.

[Shawn Ramasuram]

Unless you're going to be a doctor, a lawyer or an accountant, college is

[John Marcus]

a total waste of time. More and more jobs are saying four year degree or a couple years experience degree or certifications. Some jobs don't even care about a degree.

[Shawn Ramasuram]

What are you studying?

[Caller/Listener/Guest]

I am studying creative writing.

[Shawn Ramasuram]

Going to a private institution for a degree that typically does not have the best return on investment.

[John Marcus]

But I have a passion for this

[Caller/Listener/Guest]

kind of of writing.

[Shawn Ramasuram]

What is the degree required?

[John Marcus]

There's a real antipathy toward colleges among some people in the public who feel that they are elitist, that they are woke, that they're overly liberal, that they're indoctrinating young people. Whether that's true or not, that's the public perception. And I don't think colleges have done a very good job at sort of counteracting that narrative. But they're also really important. We need them, we need them in some form to continue to educate young people for jobs that require those skills.

[Shawn Ramasuram]

How colleges can save themselves or at least die a little slower in a minute on Today Explained. Support for the show today comes from Bombus. If your sock drawer could use a little love, you can upgrade to Bombass. They have a range of well made socks designed for every activity, every activity. Like their cushioned sweat wicking sports socks. They say you don't need to worry about sliding down your foot while you stay active. This spring they have more than socks too with breathable socks, high quality basics underwear and T shirts. Our colleague Nisha Chital has tried Bombas.

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[Shawn Ramasuram]

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[Caller/Listener/Guest]

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[Shawn Ramasuram]

Today Explain is back. I'm Shawn Ramasuram and we're still talking to John Marcus from the Hechinger Report about the trouble colleges are having enrolling students. But now we're going to talk about things colleges can do to stem the tide.

[John Marcus]

For a long time, colleges didn't do anything about this. There's a lot about American higher education that consumers don't immediately know. We've held colleges and universities until the more recent past. We've kind of held them on a moral high ground. But in fact, of people that go to four year universities, fewer than half of them graduate within four years. A quarter of freshmen drop out before their sophomore year. Colleges and universities in the United States, and I'm talking collectively, many of them, have very high graduation rates and do an extraordinarily good job, but collectively they have terrible outcomes. We are paying an enormous amount of money, not just families and students, but taxpayers, are injecting enormous amounts of money into institutions that have not only not done a great job at actually graduating students, which is their basic and most simple promise, but doing it on time, doing it affordably. And so we're in an existential crisis. And there's nothing like an existential crisis to kind of focus people's attention. And by people, I mean the people that run colleges and universities. So finally, we're getting some reforms. Here's a couple of things that are happening. The most dramatic one, I don't know that people are paying close enough attention to, is that accreditors have finally approved something that a small group of reformers has been pushing for a long time, which is the idea that you could get a bachelor's degree in three years instead of four.

[Shawn Ramasuram]

Aha.

[Caller/Listener/Guest]

A three year college degree may be

[John Marcus]

an option for students in the future. Supporters say shorter programs will help students

[Shawn Ramasuram]

to graduate faster and reduce the cost of college.

[John Marcus]

That's true in many countries, that you get a bachelor's degree in three years instead of four, but not in the United States. Now, accreditors, who are also under a lot of pressure, have approved an idea that they previously rejected, which is a bachelor's degree that only requires 90 credits and three years instead of 120. They've made one stipulation, which is you can't just call them a bachelor's degree. You have to call them an applied bachelor's degree or an accelerated bachelor's degree or a career focused bachelor's degree. And these are now, for the first time, being offered in person and some of them online. You can get in certain fields where there's very high demand. Criminal justice, graphic design, some healthcare fields. We don't know yet what will happen to those students, but I'll tell you, I have visited a program, a criminal justice program, where the students will graduate in three years with 90 credits. The way they do this is essentially they get rid of all the electives and these students were laser driven to finish. And so I think this actually has legs. I think this could work. It's the first new kind of a degree since essentially the advent of the community college. The big question is, will employers accept them and can you use them to go to graduate school?

[Shawn Ramasuram]

My theory is yes, because I've been working since, like, I graduated, and no one's ever asked to see my college degree.

[John Marcus]

Exactly. Employers probably don't care as much as faculty and registrars do about how you got your bachelor's degree. They just care that you have it. And in fact, a survey by one of the colleges that's doing this, Johnson and Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island, a survey of its employers who typically hired its grads. The employers are like, yeah, we love this idea. Do it. On the other hand, graduate school admissions officers said, no, we won't take people with a three year bachelor's degree. Or importantly, they said, we won't take American students with a three year bachelor's degree. We will take international students whose systems only take three years. But an important footnote was they also said, but now that more people are doing it, we're going to take a closer look. So we won't know whether this will succeed, but I can tell you that 60 colleges are doing it now or are getting ready to do it. So this is a massive change. And that's one thing colleges are doing to respond to this.

[Shawn Ramasuram]

Are there other things? Yes, I would hope there are other things.

[John Marcus]

I just wanted to stop for a moment and let you say, let you get a word in. So there are other small reforms here and there that I think we're all paying attention to. One that's very interesting. I was at a conference of liberal arts colleges at which a speaker stood up in front of the room and said, right now in America the two worst words are liberal and arts. So liberal arts colleges are kind of having a, having trouble making a case for themselves. One liberal arts university near Boston called Brandeis University, pretty well known national brand, they are pushing the liberal arts but also creating a second transcript so that they can show employers not only the first transcript is what everybody gets when they finish college. Here are all the courses that I took, which means essentially nothing to an employer. The second transcript says, here are the skills I learned.

[Shawn Ramasuram]

We're looking at, at skills such as durable skills like communication, collaboration, critical thinking. Some of those soft skills or durable skills will be reflected as well as emerging technology linked skills like AI literacy.

[John Marcus]

And that is a really interesting idea. On the one hand, you could look at it as what that's doing is sort of reinforcing people's idea that there's a difference right. Between liberal arts academics and liberal arts skills. But you could also look at it as improving the way that people look at the liberal arts by saying you didn't just take philosophy, you learned critical thinking and how to communicate and how to write.

[Shawn Ramasuram]

It's not throwing out the research and throwing out the liberal arts. It's saying we can be both and. Or I guess it's and, and, and it's research and liberal arts and the career readiness. Do you think we're on a one way street to ultimately decline in American education at the college university level?

[John Marcus]

There's no way around the fact that there's just going to be fewer students separate and apart from the percentage of them that actually choose to go to college, there's just fewer of the traditional age 18 year olds. So I think what you're going to see is the way that higher education exists is going to change. The conventional residential college where you live in a dorm and walk across the grassy quad and go to class and take philosophy, the proportion of students that are enrolled in those kinds of institutions will be much, much lower because they're gonna have a lot more choice.

[Shawn Ramasuram]

You make a show that's sort of college student facing. I think it's called College Uncovered and it's meant to help people understand the maybe biggest decision of their lives before they head off to a four year school. What would you tell someone who's 18 years old and lives in rural Vermont and wanted to go to Hampshire College but isn't going to anymore and is on the cusp of maybe not going to college at all?

[John Marcus]

What we often preach on our podcast, College Uncovered, is that these colleges increasingly need you more than you need them. The average acceptance rate, we all focus on Harvard and Caltech that take one out of 33 applicants. On average, colleges take more than 70% of their applicants. And that's easier to get in than it was 10 years ago, just because there's fewer students. And so colleges have kind of benefited from this idea of scarcity. It isn't true. You're going to get into college. You should pick the one that's going to be best for you and not let colleges sort of create the narrative that you're lucky that they're even considering your application. That's no longer true. It's also not true that when they offer you financial aid that you have to take it. The number one thing we tell people is negotiate for more. Especially right now, when it's a buyer's market, they will give you more financial aid. They need you.

[Shawn Ramasuram]

You can read John [e-mail], you can listen to him on College Uncovered. I'm not sure if that's one of those podcasts you watch. I think it's not. Dustin De Soto made the show today. David Tadashore mixed. Gabriel Donatov graded the exam. And Abhishai Artsy made his today Explained editing debut. Congrats, bud. You graduated. For the rest of you, have you heard America actually yet? It's the show in this feed on Saturdays this week. Estad's gonna ask Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego about the allegations against former Congressman Eric Swalwell, who Gallego initially defended. Oops. If you don't want to wait until Saturday to hear that, Vox members can hear it early. It's available right now if you go to patreon.com Vox all right.