The College Solutions Blog

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

Why College Costs Are Rising

My favorite higher-ed commentator is Kevin Carey. I’ve got him on my Google Alert because I always enjoy reading anything he writes. Carey recently became director of the education policy program at the New America Foundation, which is a respected think tank in Washington, DC. You can learn more about him here. Carey has no interest in writing about college...

Is It Okay to Hide Home Equity?

If you missed it, on Monday I wrote a post for my college blog on the dramatic impact that home equity can have on a family’s financial aid package. Here is the link: Will Your Home Equity Hurt Financial Aid Chances: A Case Study If you read the post, you’ll see that even a huge amount of home equity (in...

Will Your Home Equity Hurt Financial Aid Chances? A Case Study

Is your home equity going to hurt your chances of receiving need-based financial aid? The majority of families don’t need to worry about this because most schools don’t consider home equity. These institutions use the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The FAFSA doesn’t even ask if the family owns a home. Some of these schools, however, will use an...

Tracking What a College’s Grads Really Make

I’ve been devoting this week’s posts to college accountability. Are colleges and universities doing what we are paying them to do: educating our children and preparing them for the working world? In most cases we don’t know. If you missed my two previous posts, here they are: Sharing a College’s Return on Investment College + Degree = Joke? In my...

Sharing a College’s Return on Investment

In my last post I discussed a serious dilemma facing families searching for colleges. When we send our teenagers off to college, we expect that our children will return to us smarter, wiser and employable. But it’s nearly impossible to determine which schools are in the best position to help make this happen. Here is the post: College + Degree...

College + Degree = Joke?

With the cost of college so daunting, families are understandably more interested than ever in finding schools where their children can grow academically and secure good jobs when they graduate. That’s not an unreasonable request and yet quite a bit of evidence exists that millions of students have not been learning much in college. In fact, the diplomas that many...

Three Degrees of College Prestige

Today I am happy to share with you a thoughtful post that David Montesano, one of my favorite independent college college consultants, wrote about college rankings. Montesano is the owner of College Match Educational Consultants, which has offices in the San Francisco Bay area, Seattle and elsewhere. Three Degrees of College Prestige In an era where a sour economy is...

Tuition Hogs: The Priciest Schools in America

This week the U.S. Department of Education released its second annual lists of college tuition hogs. For the record, the federal bureaucrats don’t call them them porkers. Congress mandated that the government compile and release annual lists of the five percent of colleges and universities that charge the highest and lowest tuition. The government assembles the lists based on each...

Tuition Hogs: The Priciest Schools in America

This week the U.S. Department of Education released its second annual lists of college tuition hogs. For the record, the federal bureaucrats don’t call them them porkers. Congress mandated that the government compile and release annual lists of the five percent of colleges and universities that charge the highest and lowest tuition. The government assembles the lists based on each...

Why You Can’t Take the SAT in the Summer

I expect that just about any parent or teenagers reading this post will agree with this statement: the SAT and ACT should be offered in the summer. It’s a no brainer. In the summer students have more time to prepare for the test and they can be better rested before they take it. I’ve always wondered why the test giants...