Anna Esaki-Smith

Anna Esaki-Smith examines how shifts in higher education policy, admissions practice and labor-market demands reshape what a college degree is worth and who gets access to it. She writes as both a journalist and an international education specialist, with a consistent focus on how institutions, families and students navigate an increasingly expensive and competitive system.

Admissions mechanics and the fairness of selectivity

Esaki-Smith regularly scrutinizes how selective colleges build their classes and the consequences for applicants. She reports on early decision and early action strategies at institutions such as Barnard, Boston University and the University of Pennsylvania, highlighting cases where more than half of an incoming class is admitted early and asking whether that practice is fair to students who apply in the regular round. Her admissions coverage often dissects specific policies or data points — admit rates, timing of offers, and the profile of early applicants — to show how procedural choices can advantage those with more information or counseling. Across this work, she frames admissions not as a one-off hurdle but as a system of incentives that shapes student behavior and access.

Cost, return on investment and the value of specific institutions

A core thread in her coverage is the rising price of college and what students receive in return. Esaki-Smith writes about elite liberal arts colleges where the total annual cost now exceeds $100,000, using examples like Wellesley College to illustrate how headline tuition figures intersect with institutional prestige and financial aid. She draws on return-on-investment rankings and earnings data to contextualize the cost of attendance, showing how outcomes vary across thousands of institutions and programs. Her reporting often grounds abstract debates about “value” in concrete numbers: published sticker prices, typical debt loads and projected lifetime earnings. She also profiles individual universities and colleges — including research institutions and smaller liberal arts schools — to examine how they justify their price, differentiate their academic offerings and respond to scrutiny from families weighing affordability against long-term payoff.

Policy shifts, global trends and institutional strategy

Esaki-Smith covers higher education as a global and policy-driven sector rather than a purely domestic one. She writes about universities limiting the number of graduate students they accept, connecting institutional decisions to funding pressures, demographic changes and government regulation. She surveys how colleges respond when external rules change, such as altered visa policies or new accountability frameworks, and how those changes affect international student flows and campus finances. Her broader work, including writing outside the masthead, tracks international higher education trends and the evolving global competition for students, often linking these shifts to workforce needs and national economic strategy. This gives her coverage a comparative dimension, placing U.S. developments alongside practices and pressures in other education systems.

Technology, AI and the changing college application

She frequently explores how technology, and AI in particular, is altering both what universities teach and how they select students. Esaki-Smith reports on institutions cutting thousands of traditional university programs in fields that are losing demand and replacing many with AI-related degrees, using those cases to show how universities retool portfolios around perceived future skills. On the admissions side, she covers the rise of optional video introductions in college applications in response to concerns that AI tools can generate essays. In these articles she details how students record short videos on phones or laptops, how colleges like Duke, Vanderbilt, Babson and Wake Forest describe and use the clips, and how this format might change what counts as an authentic self-portrait in admissions. Her technology reporting is grounded in specific institutional examples rather than general commentary, with a focus on how practice changes on the ground.

Student experience, preparation and fit

Beyond policy and pricing, Esaki-Smith writes about the on-the-ground experience of students moving through the system. She covers remedial education needs in basic math and other foundational subjects, tying those needs to the pressure for accelerated coursework in earlier grades and the uneven preparation of incoming university cohorts. She profiles distinctive academic models, such as student-designed curricula at colleges that allow undergraduates to build individualized programs of study, using these examples to question standardized notions of what a “normal” college pathway looks like. Her work also returns to themes of admissions stress, institutional messaging and how students present themselves in applications, painting a picture of a generation balancing competitive pressures with uncertainty about the long-term value of their choices.

Perspective as author and consultant

Esaki-Smith is an author of a book on how to use college as a “superpower,” emphasizing that outcomes depend more on what students do in college than on where they enroll. She also works as an international education consultant, conducting research for education organizations and universities. That dual role informs her journalism: she writes with fluency in institutional strategy and global enrollment markets, but frames her stories around student impact, access, and the practical realities of navigating higher education in a time of rapid change.