The College Solutions Blog

December 16, 2008

The double whammy of the recession and the stock market implosion is making the college matchmaking ritual even more tense. Is there anybody out there who is in better shape to pay for college today than a few months ago? I didn’t think so. Ways still remain to shrink the cost of college, but you have to toss aside at...

December 14, 2008

My daughter Caitlin called the other day to tell me how she thought she fared on her Spanish final. She said her hands were still shaking — not because she was nervous about the exam — but because she had been gobbling up chocolate-covered coffee beans to stay awake. I concluded that getting pumped up with caffeine so she could...

December 12, 2008

With today’s economy drawing comparisons to the Great Depression, plenty of students will be working longer hours to underwrite the costs of their degrees. But how many hours can a student work without jeopardizing his or her grades? In an analysis of studies on this question, the American Council on Education determined that college students who work more than 15...

December 11, 2008

I spent a few minutes with my teenage son last night watching a mad professor flailing a student with cat fur. Actually, the MIT physics professor wasn’t mad, but he was entertaining. Walter H. G. Lewin was giving a demonstration on electrical charges in a class exploring electricity and magnetism. After getting pelted by the swatch of cat fur, the...

December 9, 2008

These are scary times for parents of teenagers. Saving for college was challenging enough before experts started comparing the stock market’s current implosion to the Great Depression. Many parents are reacting to the downturn by telling their teenagers to only apply to instate schools to save money. In some cases this is a wise decision, but public universities won’t always...

December 7, 2008

I always love to read articles that question the wisdom of Advanced Placement courses that ambitious teenagers feel compelled to take in high school. Consequently, I enjoyed this New York Times’ article  today that revisited the decision of a wealthy suburban high school to phase out AP classes. A year after Scarsdale (NY) High School decided to begin shutting down its AP...

December 4, 2008

I had just woken up yesterday when my husband Bruce motioned me over to his laptop to show me a news bulletin about Harvard. The august institution had announced that thanks to the turmoil of the financial markets it had lost $8 billion of its $36.9 billion endowment since the summer. My husband’s boss, who happens to work in Cambridge,...

December 3, 2008

A report that was released today made me feel guilty. The study concluded that the number of part-time instructors who are teaching our kids at public universities and colleges has reached an alarming level. Temporary faculty members now teach 49% of the more than 1.5 million undergraduate classes that are held each semester at public colleges and universities. The vast...

December 1, 2008

FAFSA. This acronym has made millions of parents weep. That may be overstating it, but it’s turned the college application process into more of a hassle than it needs to be. FAFSA is a clumsy acronym for an even more awkward title: Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Every time I mention FAFSA during a conversation or a speech I...

November 29, 2008

  More colleges and universities than ever are handing out merit aid to students.   I blogged about this phenomenon right before Thanksgiving. It was one of the conclusions of a new report that was released by the National Association for College Admission Counseling that explored financial aid policies of the nation’s colleges and universities.   What I wanted to...