The College Solutions Blog

June 12, 2013

In my last blog post, I shared this reality:  many college career service offices are lame. Too many schools are failing to prepare students adequately for the work world and part of the problem can be traced to moribund career services. If you missed the post, here it is: What’s Wrong With College Career Offices A college career services office...

June 10, 2013

Before spending an obscene amount of money on a bachelor’s degree, families want to know if their children’s job prospects are good. As I’ve mentioned in past college blog posts, it’s difficult to get a good grasp of this because the employment statistics that schools share are usually meaningless. Institutional job statistics usually rely on grads returning surveys and few...

June 7, 2013

When students are shopping for colleges, admission representatives typically urge them to ignore the sticker price. Here’s what these college reps routinely say:  We’ve got lots of financial aid and scholarships. Just APPLY! I was reminded of why applying blind is such a reckless strategy when a mom contacted me after her husband, who is a financial advisor, heard me...

June 5, 2013

Should  you take the SAT or ACT? This is a question that has puzzled millions of teenagers. Today I’m sharing test-selection advice from Adam Ingersoll, a co-founder of Compass Education Group, which is a large test-prep firm in Southern California. I wrote about his predictions regarding the SAT changes to come in this recent blog post: Predictions About the New...

June 3, 2013

On Sunday Michelle Kretzschmar at Do It Yourself College Rankings and I launched our summer college webinar series. We want to thank the hundreds of people who showed up to listen to our webinar and also a big thank you to those who asked questions. Wow. Were there a lot of great questions! If you didn’t have a chance to...

May 31, 2013

How much do you know about the ACT and SAT? I thought I knew a lot, but I learned more when I attended an illuminating session on standardized testing at the recent annual conference of the Western Association of College Admission Counseling. I’m sharing some of the presentation that was put together by Adam Ingersoll, who is co-founder of Compass...

May 29, 2013

Today I’m passing along an interesting list that I pulled from the website of Harvard’s law school. The list that you see below includes the 161 colleges and universities where members of the law school’s Class of 2015 received their bachelor’s degrees. Harvard’s law school accepted 865 applicants out of a pool of 5,438 for an acceptance rate of 15.9%....

May 28, 2013

How do you evaluate a college’s learning disability services? Today I’m sharing some questions that parents and students should ask when visiting a school (or contacting a disability office by phone.) Joy App, a college consultant in Houston, who was my source for my last post on learning disabilities, provided the questions that you’ll see below. Like other college-bound students,...

May 24, 2013

Does your teenager have a learning disability? If so, the whole college process might seem even more daunting. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, 11% of undergraduates have a disability and most of them are learning disabilities. With these parents in mind, I talked with Joy App, a college consultant in Houston, who has worked with many teenagers with...

May 22, 2013

How much do college admission reps know about financial aid? Many of them know next to nothing. I was reminded of this reality this week when I was attending the annual conference of the Western Association for College Admission Counseling in Costa Mesa, CA. This is a group that represents colleges, as well as high school counselors and independent college...