The College Solutions Blog

April 15, 2011

It’s decision time for high school seniors who typically have until May 1 to decide where they’re going to attend college in the fall. Recognizing it’s crunch time, someone at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA, sent me a list of eight tips that Suzanne Holland, an ethics and religion professor at the liberal arts college, compiled. Most...

April 11, 2011

I got an opportunity to visit my son Ben this weekend at Beloit College in Wisconsin and I was surprised about what he wanted to talk about when we met up for dinner. Moral relativism. Ben has been studying moral relativism in his philosophy class and he finds the concept intriguing.  Over a meal of tacos and burritos (truly dreadful...

March 7, 2011

I’m the kind of person who sadly has a hard time relaxing. I can’t, for instance, just walk my Golden Retriever. It’s too boring watching her sniff the same bushes and tree trunks every day. I used to try to read a newspaper or magazine on these walks, but turning pages when the wind is blowing or the dog is...

February 23, 2011

I have parents ask me variations of this question all the time: What are the best colleges and universities to attend that will ultimately generate jobs for my child? I think it’s rare that going to any particular school, by itself, will result in an automatic job for a new college graduate. I am willing to concede, however, that there...

February 21, 2011

Last month, I wrote a couple of posts about this reality:  many students are graduating from college without absorbing much of an education. From a parent’s perspective that’s a lot of wasted money. And, of course, there are serious ramifications for students who have spent their college years living in a Bud Lite commercial. Here are the two posts: Do...

February 14, 2011

In one of my college blog posts last week, I was raving about a new book, The Thinking Student’s Guide to College by Andrew Roberts, who is an assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University.  If you missed the post, here it is: The Thinking Student’s Guide to College Today I wanted to share just a few of the...

January 28, 2011

The big buzz in the higher-ed world today was the release of UCLA’s annual survey of the nation’s college freshmen. I wrote a post for my college blog at CBS MoneyWatch on the findings of the country’s most comprehensive annual survey of freshmen. Here it is: 25 Facts About Today’s College Freshmen While there were a lot of interesting revelations...

January 18, 2011

Do undergrads learn much in college? Many students don’t. That’s the conclusion of a new book that’s got the higher-ed world buzzing today. The book is Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, which was published by the University of Chicago Press. A pair of professors at New York University and the University of Virginia wrote the book based on...

January 17, 2011

I wanted to share an email that I got recently from Mark Couch, an assistant professor of philosophy and director of the Liberal Studies Program at Seton Hall University. He was reacting to a post that I wrote for my CBS MoneyWatch college blog. I thought what the philosophy professor had to say was worth sharing because too many parents...

January 8, 2011

If you want to get into the movie industry, do you need to go to film school? That’s what I was wondering after two stressed dads, within the space a few days, emailed me about how they are going to pay for their teenagers’ dreams to attend a film school. Film schools tend to be located in extremely expensive universities...