The College Solutions Blog

September 30, 2008

At the convention of the National Association for College Admission Counseling last week, the SAT generated a lot of angst. Big surprise. What I found amusing, however, was the discussion about developing a different test. At a crowded conference session, experts seemed to be kicking around the idea of a personality test. An executive at the College Board suggested building...

September 29, 2008

Whenever I talk to other parents about college, there’s one higher-ed statistic that almost always makes them gasp in disbelief: The four-year graduation rates at state universities. Most parents have no clue about how few students graduate from state universities in the traditional eight semesters. According to UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, only 28% of students at public institutions earn...

September 28, 2008

I spent most of last week in Seattle attending the annual convention of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. About 5,500 high school counselors and college admission officers poured into the city’s convention center for the mega event. I rented a booth at the convention in hopes of spreading the word about my new book, The College Solution: A...

September 25, 2008

If a teenager plans to major in theater or social work should he or she assume more student debt than a kid who plans to become an engineer or an accountant? Most families aren’t concerned about the earnings potential of their children when exploring colleges. According to a recent commentary in The Christian Science Monitor, 70% of students and parents...

September 22, 2008

More bad news for the dreaded SAT test. The number of colleges and universities making the SAT or ACT optional continues to grow. In a new survey from FairTest.org, more than 775 colleges no longer require most students to submit scores from either standardized test. What’s more, a high-powered panel led by William R. Fitzsimmons, who oversees Harvard’s admission office,...

September 21, 2008

Finally, there’s a new way to evaluate colleges. No longer will you have to rely heavily on those monster guide books from such corporate types as The Princeton Review, Fiske and Kaplan. Nor will you have to become a slave to U.S. News & World Report’s stupid ranking system. A whiz kid, who graduated four years ago from Wesleyan College,...

September 20, 2008

Everybody knows how ridiculously hard it is to claw your way into an elite school like Harvard, Princeton or Notre Dame. Every year though plenty of students who possess lower grades and less impressive resumes find a way to game the system. What’s their secret? They’ve got the right parents. Schools hate to talk about the students who saunter through...

September 18, 2008

Do you know what’s on your teenager’s MySpace or Facebook? You might not care, but plenty of colleges might. A story in today’s Wall Street Journal reports that some colleges are skulking around on the MySpace and Facebook pages of their applicants. In a survey of 500 top colleges, 10% of admission officers acknowledged that they take a peek at...

September 17, 2008

Anxious about college? Hey who isn’t, but maybe I can help. Safari Books Online will be hosting a free Webcast that will feature me talking about college strategies. The webcast will be held at 1:30 ET Tuesday (Sept. 23) and you can register here. If you attend the Webcast, you will receive free access to the online version of my...

September 13, 2008

For the last three days, I’ve been attending the 100th anniversary of the journalism school at the University of Missouri. My alma mater. The most amazing thing that I saw while I was on campus for the first time in 28 years didn’t occur at the journalism school though it was bustling with J School graduates. Attendees during the celebration...