The College Solutions Blog

October 15, 2008

Baylor University wants to claw its way up the college rankings ladder in the worst way. The university’s student newspaper, The Lariat, caught the school red handed. In an article last week, the newspaper reported that the university had essentially bribed its incoming freshman to retake the SAT. Now this is awfully peculiar. After all, these kids had already been...

October 13, 2008

I received an email from a mother this weekend who was worried about how the stock market implosion would impact the family’s ability to pay for their daughter’s education at one of the nation’s premiere universities. The family’s investment portfolio has dropped 33% since the summer when their daughter enrolled as a freshman at Washington University in St. Louis. The...

October 11, 2008

Today I wanted to pass along some advice about college essays from Bruce Hammond, a former high school counselor and the co-author of numerous Fiske Guides, including one on writing college essays. I read his advice this week on a list serve for members of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. There has been a lot of chatter on...

October 9, 2008

Tis the season of the cursed college admission essay. You can tell that simply by looking at what’s selling on Amazon.com. One of the brisk sellers on Amazon today is a book that was published in 1987: On Writing the College Application Essay: The Key to Acceptance and the College of your Choice. I hope the college essay advice is...

October 9, 2008

Do you know the difference between a federal student loan and a private one? With the stock market imploding, knowing the correct answer is even more important now. Why? Because it’s more likely that people with decimated college accounts are going to have to go into debt–or into greater debt–to pay for a bachelor’s degree. While borrowing intelligently is critical,...

October 7, 2008

I promised in my last blog that I would devote my next one to learning communities. So I called my nephew Kevin O’Shaughnessy tonight before the presidential debate got started. I wanted to talk to Kevin, who is a freshman at the University of Missouri, about his learning community. Mizzou, as well as an increasing number of schools across the...

October 6, 2008

I’ve always been a nag about college rankings. It’s unfortunate that the first yardstick that many families grab when they are measuring schools is the annual US college rankings by U.S. News & World Reports. Simply whining about college rankings, however, isn’t very helpful, which is why I’m excited about a new report that was released today by the Association...

October 4, 2008

I think everybody assumes that winning a college athletic scholarship is extremely difficult. And that’s certainly the case if you expect your kid to earn a full-ride scholarship from a Division I or Division II school. But there are other ways to shrink the cost of college even if your child isn’t a superstar athlete. My daughter Caitlin is a...

October 4, 2008

Today I’m featuring a guest blogger, Avi Stopper, who I met last week at the convention of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. Stopper is the creator of an interesting athletic scholarship web site called CaptainU. This young entrepreneur was the captain of Wesleyan College’s soccer team and he coached at the University of Chicago while he was earning...

October 2, 2008

Loren Pope died last week. If you have ever lingered in the collegiate book section at Barnes & Noble or any other book store, you will probably recognize his name. Pope, a former independent college counselor and New York Times education editor, became famous thanks to his classic book entitled, Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Colleges That Will Change the...