The College Solutions Blog

July 15, 2009

How much do you know about college financial aid? Take this financial aid quiz to find out. 1. If your adjusted gross income exceeds $120,000, you won’t be eligible for financial aid at any school. A. True. B. False. 2. After receiving a financial aid package from a college, the amount can only be increased for dire reasons such as...

July 13, 2009

If you have a child who is attending — or hopes to attend — a school in the University of California or California State University systems, these are scary times. Tuition at the 23 Cal State schools is expected to jump by 30% for the fall semester. Tuition at the University of California campuses will increase more than 9%. Students...

July 11, 2009

Here’s my weekend college blog roundup of the posts that I wrote during the past few days for CBSMoneyWatch.com. Hope you enjoy them. Is Harvard Going Broke? If you’ve been struggling to stay on a budget, you might appreciate what’s happening at Harvard, which is experiencing the worst financial crisis of its 373-year history. The Soaring Popularity of College Student...

July 10, 2009

Want your high school student to be prepared for college? You can find some of the best training wheels at community colleges. For a high school student, taking a community college class is equivalent to enrolling in an Advanced Placement class. A friend of mine, who is a top dog at a community college district in Southern California, argues that...

July 9, 2009

I had lunch this week with a professor of medicine at Stanford University. Mercifully, the conversation didn’t dwell on his specialty (urology), but the professor did feel the need to gripe about Stanford’s endowment, which has cratered. In an attempt to cheer him up, I mentioned that Stanford’s endowment problem looks like a mosquito bite compared to Harvard University’s endowment’s...

July 7, 2009

Here’s a way to find cheap college textbooks: rent them. This seems so logical, but it’s taken an awfully long time for the idea of renting used college textbooks to take root. At least a couple of companies are now renting cheap college textbooks to students who are eager to shrink their book tab. A story in The New York...

July 6, 2009

The new federal student loan forgiveness program sounds like a great idea, but it’s not nearly as helpful as it could be. The public service student loan forgiveness plan is intended to help college students who are leery about going into lower paying public-service and nonprofit jobs, such as teaching and social work, because of their student debt. To nudge...

July 5, 2009

One of the best ways you can prepare your teenager for college is to encourage them to read.  As a practical matter, a teenager who reads is not only likely to achieve better grades in high school, but also earn higher scores on the SAT or ACT. I understand how hard it can be to get many teenagers to read....

July 3, 2009

For those of you who can’t stop thinking about college — even during the Fourth of July weekend — I’m sharing with you the three posts that I wrote this week for my other college blog at CBSMoneyWatch. 1. Ten Hottest Careers for College Graduates Whether you’re a college student, a recent college grad or looking for a mid-career move,...

July 1, 2009

Are colleges going  to be the next big bubble that bursts? College prices continue to rise even as fewer and fewer parents are remotely able to cover the tab. Ever since George Washington University broke the $50,000-a-year barrier awhile ago, a growing number of elite schools now charge at least that much. Imagine that. Or rather, imagine paying that. I...