The College Solutions Blog

November 8, 2012

I am always amazed by the number of parents I bump into whose children want to attend a film school. After running into yet another parent who was asking about film degrees, I decided to track down the following post that I wrote a couple of years ago… If you want to get into the movie industry, do you need...

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 17, 2012

Ever thought about attending a Canadian university? A growing number of Americans are considering earning a college degree from up North. Actually, it’s not as far north as you might think because most Canadian universities are near the US border. Here are some reasons why you might want to consider exploring schools in Canada. 1. Reasonable price. The costs at...

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 3, 2012

Note: I ran this college blog post last year, but it’s equally relevant today… 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...

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...

September 16, 2012

It seems to me that too many parents are stressing about what their children should select as a college major. I’m of the opinion that what’s important is getting a degree. I believe it’s less relevant what that degree is. Students are more likely to be successful if they choose a discipline that they are passionate about. In this rush...

September 7, 2012

Today I wanted to share some pictures taken before and after my husband and I took our son Ben to the airport. Ben, who is a junior at Beloit College, is spending the semester in Hungary through St. Olaf College’s Budapest Semesters in Mathematics program. A week after quitting his summer job working at a restaurant at Sea World, Ben...

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...