The College Solutions Blog

September 10, 2008

If the cost of milk had risen as fast as college tuition since 1980, you’d now be paying $15 for a gallon of milk. That was one of the depressing facts that a Congressional Committee groused about this week during a hearing that focused on why colleges are so ridiculously expensive. In noting that tuition has been increasing at a...

September 8, 2008

Jane Bryant Quinn, probably the most respected personal finance journalist in the country, complimented my book, The College Solution, in her latest column for Newsweek Magazine. In her column, Quinn mentions ways to shrink the cost of college, including plenty of techniques that I focus on in my book. You can read her column here....

September 6, 2008

I read a story in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about the flood of students from the Northeast who have been heading west to attend Indiana University. Among Indiana’s newest crop of freshmen, there are roughly 260 kids from the New York City area alone. With the snootiest schools on the East Coast continuing to reject nearly all comers, more...

September 4, 2008

Go ahead and call me naive. I didn’t realize how serious and pervasive the college drinking problem was until my own daughter headed off to school. In high school, my husband and I considered ourselves very lucky because Caitlin and most of her friends didn’t drink at all. But I’d be surprised, however, if any of them still shy away...

September 2, 2008

Some of the most prestigious institutions of higher education in this country are liberal arts colleges. Yet while the education you receive at liberal arts colleges, such as Swarthmore, Amherst, Williams and Pomona, can be incredible, just a teeny tiny percentage of students end up at one. According to the latest figures from The Chronicle of Higher Education, a mere...

September 1, 2008

Do young women who graduate from college get a raw deal in the business world? Well, the American Association of University Women found that men who are just a year out of college make 20% more than their female peers. And guess what? The women never catch up. As a group, women college students earn higher grades and participate more...

August 30, 2008

I thought I’d pass along today some of the statistics from the The Chronicle of Higher Education’s annual almanac, which was released this week. Unfortunately, you have to be a subscriber so you can’t take a look yourself. In no particular order, here goes: Graduation rate at four-year colleges & universities: 56.4% (Women 59.2%) (Men 53%) Where high school graduates...

August 28, 2008

This week we got my son’s scores from the standardized test that public school students take each spring in California, My husband, son and I were discouraged by his chemistry score. Since Ben thinks he wants to be an engineer, he’s particularly not happy. His experiential chemistry class last year offered lots of fun moments. The 10th graders created their...

August 26, 2008

Whenever I’ve been in the vicinity of a bookstore lately, I’ve felt compelled to walk in. I wander over to the section with the college guides and the ponderous SAT prep titles and I look to see if my book, The College Solution, is on the shelf. If I can’t find a copy of my book I wonder if that’s...

August 25, 2008

I don’t think I truly understood how financially devastating an unpaid student loan can be until I talked with an engineering graduate from the University of Southern California. I interviewed Alan Collinge for a story I was writing about student loans for Money Magazine last year. The young graduate snagged a position as an associate scientist at Cal Tech, but...