The College Solutions Blog

January 10, 2012

With crazy amounts of psychic energy being spent on getting teenagers into college, too many students and their parents think getting admitted is the hard part of the college process.  Actually, it’s not. Squeezing as much value out of the college experience once you’re a student is far more important. Unfortunately, however,  many students are graduating from college without learning...

January 9, 2012

I have been writing college blog posts recently about teenagers who have arguably been applying to the wrong colleges. (Scroll to the bottom to see my three previous posts.) All my posts have involved families who required financial aid, but today I’m sharing the plight of a father who is too wealthy to receive need-based help. Anxious Dad’s Email Here...

January 6, 2012

Winning private college scholarships can certainly help make college more affordable, but you need to know the realities of competing for college cash. My pet peeve about private scholarships is that people assume that they are the biggest source of college cash when they are really the smallest. Before you start hunting for private college scholarships, here are eight facts...

January 5, 2012

There are a lot of expensive colleges and universities in this country, but as I’ve mentioned many times before on my college blog, the sticker price is meaningless. The only figure that matters is the college’s net price. This is the price you get after any grants (free money) that you receive from a school are subtracted from the sticker...

January 4, 2012

I’ve been writing posts for my college blog recently about the W-R-O-N-G way to assemble a college list. If you missed them, here are my the posts: Another Dreadful College List Applying to the Wrong Universities Assembling a solid list of schools to apply to is critically important, but I’d argue that the vast majority of teenagers do a lousy...

January 3, 2012

During the holidays, I wrote a post about a teenager, who has been applying to inappropriate universities. (At least in my opinion.) If you didn’t get a chance to read the post, here it is: Applying to the Wrong Universities I wanted to revisit this issue because I believe this is arguably the No. 1 college admission mistake that teenagers...

January 2, 2012

I want to give a big thanks to all of my regular visitors — and the new folks too — who helped to make 2011 the best year ever for The College Solution! I know 2011 was my best year because I use Google Analytics to keep track of how many people visit my college blog. Now that we’re in...

December 30, 2011

FAFSA season begins on Sunday. New Year’s Day is always the first day that parents can file the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. While it’s been simplified in recent years, the FAFSA still isn’t what I’d call a user friendly document and it’s easy to make mistakes. Paula Bishop, a CPA friend of mine in Bellevue, WA., who fills...

December 28, 2011

Last night an old high school friend of my daughter’s came over for dinner. We hadn’t seen her in awhile because she now lives in Northern California so it was great catching up with her. We were almost ready for dessert when Christina mentioned that her sister was applying to colleges. I hadn’t realized that her sister, I’ll call her...

December 27, 2011

Hope everyone had a great holiday. I know  it’s the 27th, but it’s still hard for me to jump back into writing about college issues yet – especially when so many people are on vacation. I thought instead that I’d share some photos from my family’s trip to Zion National Park in southern Utah for Christmas. It’s been one of...