The College Solutions Blog

November 26, 2008

I have a friend who is so wealthy that she and her husband don’t qualify for financial aid even though they have three kids attending college right now. She’s a financial planner and her husband is an attorney and they can easily write checks to all three schools including Georgetown University which costs around $50,000 a year. Last spring I...

November 24, 2008

I hear a lot of crazy things when I drive the teenagers in my carpool to high school, but perhaps the strangest admission happened near the start of the school year. The four kids were talking about their SAT scores when Madison mumbled that his scores were low. I asked him what happened and he said he decided to see...

November 22, 2008

The University of California has been living on a starvation diet for a long time. For the past 18 years, state support for the campuses has dropped 40% and now Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed draconian mid-year cuts. In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle today, Stanton Glantz, a prominent UC professor, had this to say: I think what...

November 20, 2008

It was my morning to drive the carpool and since there was one high school senior slumped in the back seat of my aging Volvo station wagon, the topic of college applications arose. Shannon began stressing out loud about the essay she had to write for her application to a University of California campus. Like all other teenagers that I’ve...

November 19, 2008

The other day someone signed up on my blog to be notified whenever I post something new. This wouldn’t have been remarkable except the visitor was from Russia. Looking at one of my blog’s analytical tools I discovered that just about one out of every four visitors are from a foreign country. So in honor of visitors from Singapore, Mexico,...

November 16, 2008

I was talking to a professor at the University of California, San Diego, at a dinner party earlier this year about colleges (naturally) and we ended up discussing why it’s taking so long for kids to get college degrees today. At UCSD the four-year graduation rate is 53%. While that number is underwhelming for a top research university, if you...

November 14, 2008

If you spend enough time reading about the higher ed community it’s easy to become a cynic. Learning what really motivates schools, for instance, to drop SAT requirements or to offer certain types of kids tuition breaks and not others can make you incredibly skeptical. I am even more skeptical about anything that the student loan industry says. Lately, lenders,...

November 13, 2008

Whenever I talk to parents or kids about college there’s one topic that always stuns them. The topic? Four-year graduation rates at many state universities. Out here in California, there are lots of schools in the Cal State system where the four-year graduation rates is below 10%. Nationwide the four-year graduation rate at public universities is 28%. For private universities...

November 11, 2008

In my last blog I talked about studies that illustrate the potential dangers of college students attending classes with part-time instructors. Students can suffer because adjunct professors often don’t have office hours. Once classes are over the teachers split. Often they are off to the next campus to teach elsewhere. In a school with an overwhelming number of adjunct faculty,...

November 10, 2008

Here is one of the cruel realities of getting a college degree today: While prices keep going up so do the number of part-time professors who are teaching on college campuses. Why does this matter? Because part-time instructors can pose a threat to your child finishing his or her degree. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to explore this topic...