The College Solutions Blog

December 19, 2011

Last week our son Ben called the house wanting to know if we wanted to Skype. We usually call him every Sunday to find out how he’s doing so whenever he contacts us it’s a big surprise. His primary reason for calling was to share with us how hard he was studying for his math final exam. He ended up...

November 21, 2011

Do you assume that most teenagers face lousy odds of getting accepted into a good college? Lots of families believe that the admission process is stacked heavily against applicants, but this isn’t true. I largely blame the media’s obsessive coverage of the most elite universities for that misconception. A new report from the College Board, Trends in College Pricing 2011,...

November 18, 2011

What students are the biggest slackers? A report released on Thursday by the National Survey for Student Engagement suggests that business majors may have earned that title. In the survey, which polled college students at hundreds of colleges and universities earlier this year, concluded that business majors and social science majors spend the least amount of time studying.  The typical...

November 7, 2011

When you’re looking at colleges and universities wouldn’t you like to know if their students found jobs after graduating? Wouldn’t you like to know what kind of success students at a particular school enjoyed in getting into graduate school? Duh. Of course, you would. Believe it or not, federal law requires colleges and universities to disclose job and graduate school...

November 4, 2011

I got an email this week from a California mother who was happy that her child would be a attending St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a wonderful public liberal arts college, in the fall. Her husband, however, remained skeptical. He worried that his daughter would be jeopardizing her chances of going to graduate school if she went to an obscure...

October 31, 2011

Do you need to graduate from an Ivy League school or other ultra elite college to earn the highest salaries? Many families believe that graduates who can put Princeton or Yale on their resume will fare significantly better financially than smart students who end up earning their degrees from elsewhere. In a famous study, two economists tackled this question about...

October 17, 2011

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...

September 14, 2011

Do you have to visit a college before you apply? It’s always better if you arrange a college tour and spend quality time at schools before finalizing your list, but financially it’s often not possible. There are things you can do, however, to help you assess whether a college would be a great match while at the same time letting...

September 2, 2011

What happens when religious teenagers head off to college? It’s a issue that Alex Chediak, an associate professor of engineering and physics at California Baptist University. has given a lot of thought. In his new book, Thriving At College, he offers suggestions on how student can keep and build their faith while in college, as well as succeed in college. I’ll...

September 1, 2011

Is anybody else out there concerned about the popularity of vocational college degrees? I’m talking about degrees like sports management, film production, park & recreation, information technology, homeland security and communications. And, of course, the biggest vocational major of all – business. Vocational degrees have always been around. Until the mid 1960s, there was a balance between vocational degrees and...