The College Solutions Blog

August 9, 2009

As usual, I’m sharing with you the posts that I wrote last week for my college blog for CBSMoneyWatch.com. The post that got the most hits, and also great play on the CBS site, focused on Forbes’ latest college rankings. As you’ll discover when you read The Best Colleges You’ve Never Heard Of, the magazine’s more realistic rankings system humiliated...

August 7, 2009

If you look at the just-released college rankings from Forbes Magazine, you’ll notice some peculiar numbers. Forbes ranks Cornell as the 105th best school in the country, but U.S. News & World Report ranks it as the 14th best national university. Forbes rates Dartmouth and the University of Pennslyvania as the 98th and 83rd  best schools, but US News college...

July 30, 2009

How do you get the most out of a college tour? Here’s how:  talk with professors. As I mentioned in my last post, this is what my son has been doing this week as we tour liberal arts colleges in the Pacific Northwest. Since Ben is interested in physics and a possible 3-2 engineering program, he made appointments to talk...

July 28, 2009

I’m halfway through a scorching college tour with my son Ben. I love visiting colleges, but the relentless weather in Oregon — the temperature reached 105 in Portland today — is insane. I’m thrilled — and I think everybody else is too — when each tour guide herds us all back to the air-conditioned admissions office. This is my second-go-round...

July 17, 2009

I wanted to share with you three college posts that I wrote this week for my other college blog at CBSMoneyWatch. Hope you enjoy them! Is Your College Professor Autistic? It never occurred to me that a college professor could be autistic. But an economist at George Mason University wrote a convincing commentary in The Chronicle of Higher Education that...

July 13, 2009

If you have a child who is attending — or hopes to attend — a school in the University of California or California State University systems, these are scary times. Tuition at the 23 Cal State schools is expected to jump by 30% for the fall semester. Tuition at the University of California campuses will increase more than 9%. Students...

July 9, 2009

I had lunch this week with a professor of medicine at Stanford University. Mercifully, the conversation didn’t dwell on his specialty (urology), but the professor did feel the need to gripe about Stanford’s endowment, which has cratered. In an attempt to cheer him up, I mentioned that Stanford’s endowment problem looks like a mosquito bite compared to Harvard University’s endowment’s...

June 12, 2009

When my daughter’s friends came home from their freshmen year in college, most of them were happy campers. A few of Caitlin’s friends, however, weren’t thrilled with their college choices. It shouldn’t be any surprise that universities don’t always click, but there are plenty of opportunities for college transfers. I  saw this happen with one of Caitlin’s dearest friends who...

June 4, 2009

The annual U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings edition is fun to read. In the past, I’ve poured over it myself. The rankings, however, are flawed. I’ve covered many of the reasons why U.S. News & World Report’s rankings are sketchy in my book, The College Solution, as well as in some of my blog posts. Here’s one reason...

May 13, 2009

College students and their parents hate to see tuition increases. So why are students at the University of Florida, Florida State, the University of Montana and elsewhere clamoring for tuition hikes? Here’s a clue: When universities are starved for cash, academic quality shrinks and students eventually notice. That’s what has been happening at state universities in Florida. According to an...