The College Solutions Blog

December 6, 2010

This is the time of year for parents of high school seniors to start thinking about applying for financial aid. Many families have heard of the FAFSA, but they don’t know what it was. Families need to complete the FAFSA to be eligible for state and federal grants. You also can’t obtain a federal student loan without filling out a...

December 5, 2010

This is the time of year when high school seniors and their parents begin reciting this age-old advice:  Follow your dreams. Families tend to use this advice to justify their children attending expensive dream colleges even if these schools will require taking on crushing student debt. I am a huge advocate of families researching schools before hand to see if...

December 3, 2010

My daughter, who is a Spanish major, will be graduating from college in the spring and like many college seniors, she is stressing about finding a job. While the job market is still ailing, a new national survey of 4,600 employers suggests that jobs will be more plentiful for the graduating class of 2011. According to an annual survey conducted...

December 2, 2010

Can anybody pinpoint which colleges have the best college professors and the worst professors? I doubt it, but that doesn’t mean people won’t try. Yesterday I wrote a college blog post for CBSMoneyWatch that made a stab at establishing which colleges and universities have the best and worst professors. Here are the controversial posts: 25 Colleges With the Best Professors...

November 30, 2010

What are your chances of getting into your dream college? I wanted to share with you a great tool that you can use to help assess what your chances are for getting an acceptance letter from any college on your list. You can find the tool at COLLEGEdata, which is a website shock full of resources for parents and high...

November 29, 2010

My last college blog post focused on a dilemma that many families face. When parents calculate what their Expected Family Contribution is, they discover it’s far higher than they anticipated. If you missed the post, here it is: Is Your EFC Too High? Today I want to stay on that topic and share an email that I received from a...

November 28, 2010

Is your EFC too high? I have been hearing from families of high school seniors who have calculated their preliminary EFC or Expected Family Contribution and are now panicking. They can’t believe how high their EFC is. Your EFC can provide a decent idea of what a college will assume you could pay for one year of college. If you...

November 25, 2010

Before I head into my sister’s kitchen in Pleasanton, CA, to start cooking the Thanksgiving feast and making a terrible mess, I wanted to share some news about my blog. On this day of thanks, I am happy that my college blog has continued to grow in popularity this year.  I want to thank all of you who stop by...

November 23, 2010

Most of the attention during this admission season is on high school seniors, which means transfer students often get lost in the shuffle. That’s a shame since a sizable number of college students end up transferring every year. According to special transfer student report from the National Association for College Admission Counseling, a third of students end up transferring to...

November 21, 2010

I’ve often wondered why colleges and universities are so fixated on admitting students with extremely high SAT or ACT scores. Some of these teenagers only excel at taking tests and earning top grades, which can lead to awfully uninspiring young adults. I’ve heard admission folks privately lament that kids with high test scores can be duds.  If I was an...