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 1, 2026, and remain fixed for the life of the loan.

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 means either the borrower selects a new repayment plan, or will default back into the standard repayment plan.

The bottom line - nearly all of these borrowers will have a payment due in October or November, whether they elect a repayment payment or not.

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 CL Sheldon & Company who works with military and veteran families. Before financial planning, Tyler served in the Army, worked in higher ed at the University of Colorado, and ran his own college planning business advising high-net-worth families on admissions and financial aid.

His central message: families spend too much energy optimizing the savings vehicle and not enough on the conversation that actually determines whether the money is well spent.

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 formally flagged the college as a closure risk.

Anna Maria's announcement came the same day workers at Hampshire College (which announced its own permanent closure on April 14) launched a relief fund ahead of June layoffs. Together, the two Massachusetts institutions underscored the accelerating pressure on small, tuition-dependent liberal arts colleges in the Northeast.

Since the summer of 2025, a steady cadence of small-college shutdowns and high-profile mergers have reshaped parts of American higher education.

A parallel trend has emerged: a growing number of schools are choosing merger or acquisition instead of winding down.

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 rehabilitation and deferment changes following on July 1, 2027, and the legacy income-contingent plans fully sunsetting on July 1, 2028.

The 647-page rule (PDF File) follows a negotiated rulemaking process that opened in late 2025 and drew more than 80,000 public comments. The Department says the package will save taxpayers $409 billion and reduce student debt by $224 billion by curbing over-borrowing.

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 cited work on the return on investment of college and graduate school, to unpack what the numbers actually say — and what students and families should do with that information during admissions season.

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.

Here's a clear look at how RAP calculates your payment, who can use it, and the details that catch borrowers off guard: especially married couples and anyone with Parent PLUS debt.

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 college, you still owe any you student loan debt you've already taken and may face repayment of other aid.

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 massive changes to student loans coming this year.

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 payments to go out to millions of eligible customers. Capital One denies any wrongdoing.

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