😎 Hey There, Thursday

📆 What’s Happening Today. The 2026 DIII football season begins today.

🎶 Your Morning Pick Me Up. CBS College Football Theme. Lloyd Landesman

Last Tuesday, the NCAA Division III governance staff conducted a webinar outlining the NCAA Power Index, commonly known as the NPI, for member institutions.

The staff is in the midst of creating documents with education of each sport’s dials and all formulas; bringing all materials into one location on the NCAA.org web page; and creating training video(s) covering the educational information.

In 2026-27, Division III will enhance the NPI with greater frequency in data pushes with a majority of sports pushing twice weekly and then daily two weeks prior to the selection, as well as an earlier initial push date than previous. The staff will also create “what-if” scenarios for staff/committees to assist with selections and bracketing preparation.”

A MESSAGE FROM FACTOR

Try Factor, America's #1 ready-to-eat meal delivery service.

Made from ingredients you recognize. Whole food. Nothing unnecessary. Let’s eat real.

Get 50% off your first Factor box + Free Breakfast for a year *1 free breakfast item per box for 1 year while subscription active.

Try Factor Now

“Maintenance employees buzz around outside the admissions building, sprucing up the campus for commencement as, inside, a new crop of prospective students and their parents take their seats for a presentation from a recruiter.

It’s a typical scene in the longstanding cycle of American higher education. But at many institutions—including Brandeis University, where this group of 42 potential applicants has gathered—this once straightforward process has been stood on its head. Instead of waiting for new students to show up and make their cases, universities and colleges are in the uncharacteristic position of having to plead their own.”

» The Problem. “The problem, myriad surveys over the last 10 years have shown, is that consumers are increasingly questioning the return on an investment in a higher education. This poses a particular challenge for liberal arts schools such as Brandeis, just outside Boston, whose annual sticker price will reach nearly $98,000 for residential students in the new academic year. Yet most have done little to effectively respond to it.”

» The Solution. “Until now. As the crisis becomes existential, some colleges and universities are finally confronting this threat by doing the seemingly simplest possible thing: setting out to make good on their implicit promise that specific classes and majors lead to jobs. And few are doing that as aggressively as Brandeis.”

» DYK? “Liberal arts graduates are in surprising demand in the technology industry, where they actually outnumber graduates from technical programs, a study by the Strada Institute for the Future of Work found. LinkedIn discovered that more liberal arts than computer science and engineering graduates were being hired by tech employers—mostly to work in sales and marketing but also as software developers.”

“A college endowment is supposed to last forever, supporting students, professors and research in perpetuity.

Instead, many cash-strapped schools are draining their nest eggs just to stay alive.”

» Driving The News. “Faced with multi-million dollar deficits, Hiram College in rural Ohio borrowed from its $56 million endowment. The 1,000-student liberal arts school — which boasts a statue of US President James Garfield, who worked as a janitor there to pay his tuition — eventually pulled more than $47 million from the fund. It even tapped money that donors had explicitly set aside for specific purposes, not for balancing the budget.”

» Of Note. “Nearly 200 private colleges borrowed from restricted endowment funds in 2025, up from about 130 in 2021, according to estimates from higher-ed consulting firm Perspective Data Science. Other colleges have avoided loans but are drawing more from their endowments each year than advisors consider sustainable. Analysts liken both strategies to borrowing from a 401(k) — it may help in the short-term but carries long-term risks, such as downgrading a school’s credit rating.”

» Reality Check. “Schools generally assume their endowments’ value will grow 7% to 8% per year on average over the long-term, according to the American Council on Education. They budget accordingly, trying to draw no more than 5% of the value in a given year. But as the financial pressure on them increases, many schools with relatively small endowments have been pulling more from their funds. Colleges with endowments of $51 million to $100 million have increased their spending rate by more than a third since 2016, reaching 5.5% in 2025 compared to 4.1% in 2016.”

» Quotable. “What a lot of these small colleges do is they think that things are going to turn around,” Hiram president David Haney said. “‘If we just invest in new athletic facilities, everything is going to be fine.’ In most cases, that doesn’t happen. To me, that’s why borrowing from the endowment and taking out debt is not the way to go about it.”

» Education. “Four Michigan colleges, including Adrian College, are offering 90-credit bachelor’s degrees, which is 30 credits and one year less than the traditional timeline.”

» Politics. “New York’s private colleges and universities are facing fiscal challenges and enrollment declines that advocates warn could lead to more closures without additional support from the state.”

» Tuition. “Ripon College, a highly regarded private liberal arts college in Wisconsin, will expand its financial aid program by matching the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s in-state tuition rate for incoming students from any state in the nation.”

“After finding success with floors and hair, Dyson hopes your mouth will be its next frontier. The air-bending gadget company launched an AI-powered electric toothbrush yesterday that doubles as a sharpshooting water pick.

Open wide for the CameraJet. Dyson’s $499 oral product is geared toward people who lie to the dentist about how often they floss, and who are willing to pass their sink time by viewing a livestream of their teeth rather than scrolling.”

☕ Thanks for starting your day with us.
Please support D3Playbook with a subscription

Copyright © 2026, D3Playbook.com All rights reserved