The College Solutions Blog

August 7, 2012

When students are developing their college lists, most of them (unless their parents are wealthy and don’t mind writing monster checks) should be paying attention to the net price of all their school picks.  Net price is what a school will cost you after scholarships and grants are deducted. An email that I received from a mom over the weekend...

August 6, 2012

Below you’ll find a guest blog that Bob Bessette, the father of a rising senior at Bowdoin College in Maine, wrote. This post first appeared on my college blog in December when Bessette’s daughter  was finishing up her semester abroad in Ireland. I am rerunning this blog post primarily because my own son Ben, who is a rising junior at...

August 3, 2012

The 2012-2013 college admission season hasn’t even officially started, but I’ve already been hearing from parents who are stressed about paying for elite schools that are on their teenagers’ lists. Some of these parents believe that they have an obligation to incur huge debt if their children get accepted into the most prestigious schools. Here’s my worst example: Last spring...

August 1, 2012

In my last college blog post, I wrote about the enmity that admission officers at elite colleges and universities tend to exhibit toward independent college counselors. If you missed it, here it is: Elite Schools Dissing College Consultants While elite schools argue that families can navigate the process by themselves, they ignore this fact:  colleges operate as businesses and their...

July 30, 2012

In June I gave a keynote talk at the annual conference of the Higher Education Consultants Association in New Jersey. I decided to tag along on the group’s college tour that took the consultants to a half-dozen campuses. What I found predictable is that the most elite schools were the least hospitable to the consultants. Princeton and Columbia universities told...

July 26, 2012

Do you need to graduate from an Ivy League school or other ultra elite college to earn the highest salaries? Many families believe that graduates who can put a school like Princeton or Yale on their resume will fare significantly better financially than smart students who end up earning their degrees from elsewhere. In a famous study, two economists tackled...

July 24, 2012

I’ve been linking my posts to the federal student aid sites for years, but I haven’t done it with any enthusiasm. These websites, which have included information about federal student loans and grants, have been disjointed and borderline unhelpful. The websites reeked of bureaucratic jargon and didn’t provide any context for federal aid programs. I felt sorry for the parents...

July 24, 2012

I’ve been linking my posts to the federal student aid sites for years, but I haven’t done it with any enthusiasm. These websites, which have included information about federal student loans and grants, have been disjointed and borderline unhelpful. The websites reeked of bureaucratic jargon and didn’t provide any context for federal aid programs. I felt sorry for the parents...

July 23, 2012

Today I’m sharing a wonderferul resource for students, who want to learn more about college majors and their career paths – College Majors 101. I’d urge everybody to spend some time on this website, which is stuffed with valuable information about college majors as diverse as biology, video game design, dance and biomedical engineering.  . The goal of College Majors...

July 20, 2012

If you’ve got a Kindle or a Nook and you haven’t bought a copy of the second edition of my book, The College Solution yet, you are in luck! The publisher is temporarily giving away the electronic version of my new book for free!   I don’t know how long this price will last, but I’d jump on it. If...