The College Solutions Blog

October 19, 2012

How do you know if the college or university that your child ultimately attends will provide him or her with an excellent education? You won’t. College pricing is inching closer to transparency thanks to net price calculators, but it’s largely impossible to form an educated opinion about the strength of a school’s learning environment beyond checking  an institution’s graduation rates....

October 10, 2012

Today I’m passing along a fascinating list that comes from Harvard Law School. The list you see below includes the 261 colleges and universities where members of the Class of 2013 law school students come from. Michelle Kretzschmur, the creator of Do-It-Yourself College Rankings sent me the link to the list because she knows how strongly I believe that students...

October 1, 2012

I want to major in art. This is the college major that perhaps more than any other strikes fear in the hearts of parents, who worry that an art degree will condemn their children to a life eating Cheerio’s for dinner and driving old subcompacts with bald tires. The truth is there are a myriad of careers in a wide...

August 24, 2012

I wrote the following post last August, but with college students heading back to school, I decided it was worthwhile to run it again. LO Before my son Ben left to start his sophomore year at Beloit College, we talked about the advice in a chapter of The Thinking Student’s Guide to College: 75 Tips for Getting a Better Education....

August 21, 2012

How do you locate good colleges and universities? I get that question a lot. Today I want to share some online resources to find and research schools. In no particular order, here are resources to check out: 1. Do-It-Yourself College Rankings. Do-It-Yourself College Rankings is the creation of Michelle Kretzschmar, the mother of a college student, who has a background...

August 12, 2012

Does your teenager have a learning disability? If so, the whole college process might seem even more daunting. With these parents in mind, I recently talked with Joy App, a college consultant in Houston, who has worked with many teenagers with learning disabilities. I am passing along some of her advice for parents of learning disabled teenagers. To start, I’m...

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...

June 21, 2012

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...

June 19, 2012

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...

June 15, 2012

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...