August 31, 2026 · Blake Mischley

Meta Settles Teen Safety & Direct Admission Expands Across The Country | Reach Report No. 24

August 31, 2026 | The Weekly Reach Report | Unpacking Meta's $18 billion rewrite of the teen account, along with what the first week of classes did to campus feeds.

Good morning everyone!

Welcome back to the Reach Report.

Every institution has that one staff member the student body loves. I think this provides a great opportunity to highlight them and bring some recognition, and it clearly resonates with the audience and starts conversations in the comments.

Let's dive in!

What’s New In Social Media

Meta Settles Teen Safety Claims for Up to $18 Billion

On Wednesday, August 26, Meta settled with 47 states, DC, three territories, and separately with Texas. Roughly $12.7 billion is fixed and $5.3 billion is contingent on YouTube and TikTok adopting comparable protections, which tells you the states are aiming at the whole category. The part that matters for your accounts is the under 18 defaults. A two hour combined daily cap across Facebook and Instagram, a midnight to 6am blackout, notifications muted from 8am to 3pm, autoplay off, and like counts hidden. If a 17 year old gets two hours a day and none of it during class, your posting window narrows and follower quality starts to matter more than reach. Not final yet, the judge has a hearing September 16.

Link to full coverage

What’s New Across Higher Ed

Common App Direct Admissions Now Covers 234 Colleges

Common App added 19 institutions on August 26, bringing the total from 215 to 234 across 42 states and DC. Here is the number worth sitting with. Twenty five percent of students who received a direct admission offer applied to a college they had not previously considered. Michigan launched its own version the same week, MI College Match, with 20 institutions and a portal that takes 15 minutes and requires no essays. Offers start going out in September. A student who has never heard of you is about to get an acceptance letter from you, and the first thing they will do is look you up. As direct admission continues to expand, first impressions will matter even more.

Common App expansion · MI College Match

Federal Student Aid Rejected 53,000 Fake Applications in Three Months

At the Education Department's inaugural Higher Education Fraud Summit in July, Under Secretary Nicholas Kent said the FAFSA identity verification screening launched in April has already rejected more than 53,000 fraudulent applications and stopped over $212 million in aid. ED says it has prevented more than $1 billion in student aid fraud since January 2025. The ghost applicant problem is now big enough to distort the metrics enrollment teams report on, and it lands hardest on high volume, low friction channels. The upside for social is that engagement history is one of the few signals a bot cannot cheaply fake. A student who has followed your class account for eight months and asked a question in your comments is a real person with real intent.

ED fraud summit figures · The $1 billion figure

Weekly Higher Ed Social Snapshot

Here's how higher ed accounts performed this past week. Averages across the board, who grew fastest, who got the most engagement, and the posts that pulled the biggest numbers.

Weekly Social Media Benchmark Averages

How the average higher ed account performed over the past 7 days on each platform.

Metric	Instagram	Facebook	TikTok
% Follower Growth	+0.38%	+0.10%	+0.79%
Engagement Rate	2.4%	0.3%	4.8%
Posts Made	5.9	6.9	2.9

Top Growers This Week

The accounts that gained the most followers over the past 7 days, ranked by % follower growth.

Instagram	Facebook	TikTok
1. @ozarkstech +4.7% +356 followers	1. @DordtUniversity +5.2% +864 followers	1. @PurdueUniversity +19.0% +327 followers
2. @ohiostatenewark +4.3% +178 followers	2. @HolyCrossCollegeSaints +1.5% +108 followers	2. @ccsu_official +8.4% +168 followers
3. @ucblueash +4.1% +185 followers	3. @eaststroudsburguniversity +1.4% +386 followers	3. @uofguelph +7.5% +900 followers

Top Engagers This Week

The accounts whose posts from the past 7 days earned the highest average engagement rate — engagements (likes, comments, shares) on a post as a % of followers, averaged across the week’s posts. Minimum 3 posts.

Instagram	Facebook	TikTok
1. @dordtuniversity 45.3% 51,329 engagements	1. @sewanee 2.5% 4,477 engagements	1. @fredoniau 76.5% 6,091 engagements
2. @rutgersnewarkofficial 32.1% 67,038 engagements	2. @MassMaritime 1.8% 2,569 engagements	2. @unccharlotte 69.3% 6,418 engagements
3. @nmhighlands 10.9% 1,318 engagements	3. @UDubuque 1.6% 1,225 engagements	3. @bentleyu 66.0% 9,439 engagements

Trending Hashtags in Higher Ed

First-week energy is doing the heavy lifting right now — schools turned National Dog Day into easy mascot content, ran first-day-of-classes fit checks as students came back, and rolled straight into football home openers.

1. #nationaldogday	▲ 2,200%
2. #fitcheck	▲ 950%
3. #gameday	▲ 400%

Blake’s Bookmarks

A few posts that stopped my scroll this week and why I think they worked.

Activation Around National Dog Day

As seen in the hashtags, it was National Dog Day this week. I saw a creative way to engage audiences across Instagram and Facebook by hosting a giveaway around the day to encourage comments. Great way to engage alumni.

The Magic Wand

This post was in the top three this week, but I felt like it deserved an extra call out. The goal was to teach students about their student IDs. I believe the best way to reach an audience is to make the video itself fun, so in this case, why not treat it like a magic wand? I thought it was very creative.

Mic’d Up Dining Hall

What’s New At Reach

Industry Benchmark Improvements

We have added more timeframes and variables to industry benchmarking! You now can compare over rolling 7, 30, & 90 day periods with MTD, QTD, and YTD options. This allows to see bigger trends but also sets up Reach as we plan to do some industry reporting. Additionally, we have added medians in addition to average (mean) around engagement rate metrics, since in social averages may be inflated since viral posts can carry. This means median will be your way to judge consistency of performace vs average lets you see fuller picture.

That's it for this week.

I want to hear what you thought. What was actually useful, what you skipped, what you'd want more of. If there's a section missing, a metric you'd rather see, or a post you think belongs in Blake's Bookmarks, send it over. Just hit reply, I read all of it.

And if something in here was useful, forward it to whoever on your team needs it.

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Until next time.

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