The College Solutions Blog

September 13, 2009

The biggest buzz last week in the higher-ed world was the release of a serious tome entitled, Crossing the Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities. The book, which was co-authored by William G. Bowen, a former Princeton president, and two other academics is chock-a-block full of stats and astute observations about why many students manage to graduate from college,...

September 12, 2009

Here are this week’s round up of the posts that I wrote for CBSMoneyWatch.com. Hope you enjoy them…. The Latest Way Kids Cheat on Exams Teenagers are ingenious so I guess it’s no wonder that they are adept at high-tech cheating.  An alarming survey shows just how prevalent cheating with cell phones is in schools. Lending Money to Hot Shot...

September 10, 2009

My son is a senior at a high school that loathes Advanced Placement classes. The school administrators believe that AP classes provide students with knowledge that’s a mile wide and an inch deep. Considering that AP classes demand a lot of memorization and must be taught at a breathless pace to get through the material, I’d have to agree. Students...

September 9, 2009

I’ve always wondered why the media fixates so much Harvard and the other seven Ivy League schools. After all, the percentage of college freshmen attending these schools is a miniscule .2%. I came up with that percentage after crunching numbers that I pulled out of The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Almanac. But if you’re eager to see your little darling...

September 9, 2009

I’m not on Facebook. Okay, I’m a loser. Or at least that’s the vibe that I’ve gotten when people learn that I am Facebook-less. If I truly want to create a buzz around my college book and my college blogs, I’ve been told that I need to be on Facebook. Yet Facebook seems like a endless popularity contest — the...

September 8, 2009

One of my most vivid memories at the University of Missouri was of the strange grade that I received on an honors term paper. The English professor gave me a  “B+ +” for the final paper in my existentialist literature course.  When I saw that grade I was ticked off. What the heck, I wondered, was a B + +?...

September 7, 2009

In the last few days, I’ve been working on an assignment about college rankings — when it’s published I’ll be sure to link to the article. Today, however, I thought I’d provide links to some helpful college lists courtesy of US News & World Report. Colleges Giving the Most Merit Scholarships One question that I get asked frequently is which...

September 6, 2009

Being the mother of a college junior and a high school senior, I’ve bought and skimmed through a lot of college books over the years. Many of them disappoint me because they are often focused on getting kids into the Ivy League. This fixation is ridiculously misplaced when you consider that only .2% of kids attend these eight schools. Frankly,...

September 4, 2009

Here is my latest weekend roundup of the college blog posts that I wrote this week for CBSMoneyWatch.com. Are Ivy League Schools Fudging Their Numbers? This is the post that I was most intrigued by because it explored one of my favorite topics — the insane obsession with college rankings. I wrote that some of the statistics that Ivy League...

September 3, 2009

I got an email this morning from a women who had become frustrated after reading my blog post about the usefulness about the Common Data Set. As an example, I mentioned Washington University’s Common Data Set in the post and she tried tracking it down on the Internet. She couldn’t find it and neither could I. “So now what?” she...