The College Solutions Blog

Valuable insights from Lynn O’Shaughnessy
a nationally recognized college expert.

An Interview with Me!

Carolyn Z. Lawrence, an independent college counselor, who created the wonderful college blog, AdmissionsAdvice.com, has posted a Q&A session she had with me about my new book, The College Solution: A Guide for Everyone Looking for the Right School at the Right Price. You can check out the interview here. Visit my website at The College Solution....

The Value of a College Degree

It’s been imprinted on the brains of millions of teenagers that the best way to make money in life is to earn a college degree. The College Board conveniently reminds us all of this with its periodic releases about the financial value of a degree. Over a lifetime, for instance, the typical person with a bachelor’s degree will earn about...

The Myth of Private Scholarships

When parents and teenagers start contemplating college costs, they often assume that applying for private scholarships is their ticket to shrinking costs. Unfortunately, they’re usually wrong. Frankly, only 7% of college-bound high school students win a private scholarship. Okay, okay. Admittedly, most teens don’t bother to apply, but even if a teen is an eager beaver and willing to pursue...

SAT Cheating: Does the Crime Pay?

What happens when someone is caught cheating on the SAT or ACT test? Apparently not much, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times. The testing services don’t notify colleges about cheating incidents and they also don’t inform the students’ high schools. The fraudulent SAT scores are simply canceled. The cheaters are welcome to take the tests again. The...

Getting Into College: Playing the Gender Card

My daughter was a junior in high school when I read an op-ed piece in The New York Times that was written by a mother, whose daughter was upset that she had been waitlisted at one of the five colleges on her list. The essay grabbed my attention because the mother was hardly the average parent, who rails against the...

Attending College at Home

One way to shrink the cost of college is to never show up. A story in The New York Times today reports that an increasing number of college students are taking online classes because of the high price of gasoline. With at least 79% of college students living off campus, the exploding price of gas can gut budgets. There obviously...

The Census Bureau's Higher Ed Statistics

The U.S. Census Department released a grab bag of education statistics this week. You might discover some surprising ones in this list: 18.4 million That’s the number of students who will be attending the nation’s colleges and universities this fall. If that seems like a lot of kids, it is. Twenty years ago, 13.5 million students were attending college. 8.6...

Women College Graduates: Selling Themselves Short

If you’re a college coed or you’ve got a daughter in college like I do, the first annual poll of the expectations of graduating college seniors is going to be depressing. According to a new survey, female students expect to earn far less than young male graduates as they begin their careers. While 12% of women expect to earn more...

College Graduation Rates: Getting Out of College in Four Years

When students and families start shopping for schools, they often don’t ask this crucial question: How likely is it that a teenager will graduate in four years? At most colleges and universities the answer is not very likely. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2007-2008 Almanac, only 52.6% of students attending public institutions graduated in SIX years. That number...

Teaching Assistants You Can't Understand

Undergraduates have complained for decades about their teaching assistants. If you attend a university, chances are excellent that you will have at least some classes where a graduate student will serve as the teacher. TA’s are cheap and when they are teaching introductory courses, the professors don’t have to do it. And tenured professors love shirking that responsibility. This is...