The College Solutions Blog

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

Biggest Financial Aid Myths: Do You Know Them?

Will your family qualify for college financial aid? I bet you that most parents think they won’t qualify for financial aid although most will. Here’s a shocker: even families that make $150,000 or even $200,000 may qualify for close to $25,000 in financial aid at very expensive schools. In the college admission process, financial aid misconceptions can easily punish families....

Finding Great Colleges: A Handy Cheat Sheet

I am in Paris this week — at the tail end of a family vacation visiting my daughter, who is studying this year at the University of Barcelona. I’d rather be out exploring Paris and eating chocolate so I’m rerunning one of my favorite posts that explains how students can find wonderful colleges that might not normally be on their...

College Costs: Don't Believe the Sticker Price

College costs for many students attending private schools are shrinking. Sounds crazy, but it’s true. That’s because what counts is not the sticker price, but a family’s “net” college costs. What do parents and students really pay after they receive financial aid and scholarships? At private colleges, only about 18% of families pay the sticker price. A new survey by...

Ivy League: Rejecting More Students – Yawn

Surprise. Surprise. The Ivy League and other elite universities have just gotten even more selective. The Ivy League schools will be notifying applicants today whether they won the higher-ed lottery. And, according to some preliminary numbers gathered by The New York Times, more applicants will be receiving bad college admission news this year than ever before. Or, what is more...

Top 10 Best and Worst College Degrees in 2010

What are the best and worst college majors for students who want to make the highest starting salaries? Engineering students dominate the best college majors by salary. Engineering majors represent eight out of 10 highest-paying bachelor’s degrees. The other two disciplines in the top 10 best college degrees are computer science and information sciences and systems. The best-paying college major...

Transfer Students: Your Ticket to a 4-Year College or University

Today I’m running a guest column by Lan Ngo and Chris Goodmacher, who wrote the The Transfer Book that focuses on advice for college transfer students. Both started at community colleges, but they transferred to Stanford University and Dartmouth College where they graduated. They also received graduates degrees from prestigious institutions including Oxford University and Columbia University. Yes, there are...

College Visit: 31 Questions You Need to Ask

College visit. Yes, it’s that time of year when high school seniors and juniors are planning college visits during spring break. You can learn a lot during a college visit so you need to make the most of the opportunity. During a campus visit, here are 31 questions that you should ask: College Graduation Track Record What is your four-year...

Top 26 Green Colleges in America

Where are America’s green colleges? Every year GreenReportCard.org attempts to provide the answer with its College Sustainability Report Card. There are lots of ways to find green colleges. If you visit GreenReportCard, you’ll be able to filter for green campuses in more than 100 ways. To make the search far less intimidating, you’ll find on the organization’s home page the...

College Scholarships: Can I Ask for More?

I heard this week from the mother of a college freshman at a private college in Texas, who posed this question: Is there any possibility of the school renegotiating my son’s scholarship if we made less money in 2009? Do most schools give money on a year-to-year basis? Let me explain why the answer to both questions is yes. First...

University of California: Bold Reform Missing So Far

Can the players in the University of California financial crisis agree on the sort of bold reforms needed to save it from its fiscal crisis? So far it doesn’t look like it. The University of California’s Commission on the Future released its first recommendations yesterday and one of the ex-officio commission members called them “admittedly bland.” Here are some of...