The College Solutions Blog

Valuable insights from Lynn O’Shaughnessy
a nationally recognized college expert.

Do-It-Yourself College Rankings, Part II

If you didn’t catch yesterday’s college blog post, I’d urge you to check it out: Do-It-Yourself College Rankings I wrote about Michelle Kretzschmar, who created an impressive spreadsheet system to help families assemble a list of promising colleges based on their own priorities. In today’s post I’m sharing some of the steps that Michelle, the founder of DIYCollegeRankings.com, and her...

Do-It-Yourself College Rankings

It’s not often that I stumble across a college blog that I can get really excited about. Today I am happy to share a great resource that stands out from the crowd. I urge everyone to check out DIYCollegeRankings. DIYCollegeRankings (the DIY stands for Do It Yourself), which was created by Michelle Kretzschmar, a former data analyst and the mom...

College Choices for Affluent Families

A mom emailed me earlier this week and I’ve somehow managed to stretch out the topic of her concern to three posts. If you’re curious, here are the previous ones: Who Is Stressed Out About College? Do You Really Expect Me To Pay That Much for College? Today I’m going to address her chief question: What do you do if...

Who Is Stressed Out About College?

In my last post I shared an email from a mom whose is concerned that her family makes too much money to qualify for financial aid at schools on her son’s list. If you missed the post, here it is: Do You Really Expect Me to Pay That Much for College? I had intended to write a followup post that...

Do You Really Expect Me to Pay That Much for College?

I wanted to share an email that I received over the weekend from a mom named Linda, who is questioning whether her bright son’s No. 1 college choice – Cal Tech – is out of reach financially. Mom’s Email Here is what Linda wrote: My son, a rising freshman, has dreamed of attending Cal Tech for years, which others have...

The Best Way to Study for Final Exams

What is the best way to ace your teenager’s final exams? This is a timely question as millions of high school students are getting ready to take their final exams. You might assume that reading textbooks and notes over and over again is the best way to study, but researchers from Purdue and Washington University insist that it’s not the...

15 Ways to Cut the Cost of Borrowing

How can reduce your dependence on college loans? About this time last year, Mark Kantrowitz, the publisher of FinAid and FastWeb, sent me some suggestions on how families can reduce their dependence on college loans. I am running the suggestions again along with links to some of my college blog posts that I’ve written on the same topics. Here are...

Financial Aid Practices in the 50 States

When you take into account all the sources of college aid that are available to students in this country, roughly nine percent comes from state governments. Recently that amounted to $9.2 billion. How states dispense this aid varies significantly. While nearly all states are strapped for cash, some are far more generous than others to college students. The requirements for...

The Last Colleges Left Standing

Today I am reprinting an article written by Lee Bierer, a friend of mine, who is a nationally syndicated columnist and independent college counselor in North Carolina. Lee writes the Charlotte Observer’s weekly Countdown to College column, which is syndicated nationally to McClatchy Newspapers. I asked Lee if I could reprint her column because it reinforces what I’ve been saying...

Stunning: How Many Are Borrowing for College

One aspect of the top story that appeared in yesterday’s New York Times shocked me. The number of students who borrow for college is much higher than I thought. I’ve routinely seen estimates that two-thirds of students take out loans for college. The New York Times, however, conducted an analysis that concluded that 94% of students who earn a bachelor’s...