For more than thirty years, there was a quiet safety net underneath the college conversation in this country. If the aid package didn’t cover the bill, a parent with reasonable credit could borrow the rest. The whole rest. Up to the entire cost of attendance, no ceiling.

Families didn’t usually think of it as a plan. They thought of it as the thing that would be there if they needed it.

On July 1, 2026, it stopped being there.

Under the law passed last year, Parent PLUS borrowing is now capped at $20,000 per year and $65,000 in total for any one student. For a family looking at a school that costs $52,000 a year, that is not a technical adjustment. That is a four- or five-figure hole that opens up every single year, and it opens up quietly, because nobody sends you a letter about a loan you haven’t applied for yet.

I have spent most of my career on the other side of this. Twenty years in admissions and enrollment management, up to the vice president level, building the pricing models that decide what your family gets offered. I now spend my time explaining those models to the families on the receiving end. And in the last two months I have had the same conversation more times than I can count: a parent who has done everything right, saved carefully, kept the credit clean, and has no idea that the thing they were counting on has a ceiling on it now.

So let me lay out what changed, what didn’t, and the one number worth writing down this week.

The trap inside the numbers

Twenty thousand dollars a year, times four years, is eighty thousand dollars. The lifetime cap is sixty-five.

Borrow the full amount available in years one, two and three and you arrive at senior year with five thousand dollars of federal borrowing left and a bill that hasn’t gotten any smaller. At that point your options are private credit at worse terms, or a conversation nobody wants to have in the spring of a student’s junior year of college.

The families who handle this well are the ones who plan the cap across all four years from the start — roughly sixteen thousand a year — rather than taking what’s offered because it’s offered.

What did not change

The headlines have been worse than the reality in a few places, and it’s worth saying so plainly.

Your student’s own federal loans are untouched: $5,500 freshman year, $6,500 sophomore, $7,500 after that. Subsidized loans still exist for undergraduates with need. Work-study is unchanged. Pell Grants are still here for most families who qualified before. And every dollar of institutional aid — the money a college gives from its own budget, which for most private colleges is the largest single piece of your offer — is entirely unaffected by this law.

There’s even a piece of good news buried in the changes that matters more in this state than in most: family-owned farms, small businesses and commercial fisheries no longer count as assets in the federal aid formula. If you have been told for years that the business was hurting your aid eligibility, that changed.

There is a grandfather clause, and it is narrow

If a Parent PLUS loan was already disbursed for your student before July 1, 2026 — or if your student had a federal direct loan disbursed for that program before then — you may be able to keep borrowing under the old rules for up to three more academic years.

Read the conditions carefully, because they are strict: same school, same program, continuous enrollment. A transfer can break it. A change of major into a different program can break it. A gap year can break it.

If you have a student already in college, this is worth a phone call to their financial aid office this week. Ask them to confirm your legacy status in writing before the next billing cycle. Don’t accept a verbal yes.

The FAFSA is open right now

The 2027–28 FAFSA opened October 1. If your student will be enrolled anywhere between July 2027 and June 2028, that is your form, and it uses your 2025 tax return — a year that is already closed, which means nothing you do now changes the inputs.

What you can still change is the timing. State grant money and institutional aid come out of limited pools, and a number of private colleges set priority deadlines in November and December that they do not advertise loudly. Filing in March in a first-come, first-served state is how eligible families end up with less money than eligible families who filed in October.

Here is the fifteen minutes almost nobody spends: create the federal student aid accounts tonight. Your student needs one. Every parent whose income goes on the form needs their own, with a separate email address and a separate phone number. Verification takes a few days, and a second household or a stepparent adds another layer. This one step is the most common reason a family’s FAFSA stalls in October.

Come get the rest of it

On Monday, October 5 at 5:00 PM Central, I’m running a free 45-minute session on Crowdcast called The New Rules of Paying for College. We’ll walk through exactly what changed, who is exempt, what repayment looks like now, the dates on this year’s calendar, and the five-line gap worksheet I use with every family I work with — the one that tells you what a school actually costs you before anyone falls in love with it.

Everyone who registers gets the take-home sheet with every number and date on it, whether or not you can make it live. Bring your questions. There is no such thing as a question that’s too basic in this room; half of the people on the call are wondering the same thing.

Register free: crowdcast.io/@class-101-brookfield