The College Solutions Blog

April 17, 2012

I’ve been receiving some fascinating comments lately that were triggered by recent posts that shared the agony of students who aimed for the Ivies and other elite schools and got spurned or who couldn’t afford the tab. If you missed the posts, here they are: Should You Blow the Budget on Cornell? The Odds of Getting Off a Wait List...

April 10, 2012

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’ve been getting questions from parents who are agonizing about where their teenagers should attend college. It’s a tough decision and time is running out to pick the winners. The national deposit day for freshman is May 1. Here are some of choices facing a family that contacted me yesterday: College of Wooster, University...

March 5, 2012

Have you ever taken a look at RateMyProfessors.com? I’m assuming that you haven’t. It never occurred to me to head to the extremely popular site when my two kids were checking out colleges, but it might be worth a look. At RateMyProfessors, you’ll find more than 13 million student comments and ratings of professors at colleges and universities across the...

February 22, 2012

This is the time of year when college students are making plans to study overseas in the fall. Many students attend colleges overseas during their junior year. Curiously enough, most of those students are women. Young men only represent about a third of the 270,600 American students studying overseas. That percentage, by the way, has remained about the same for...

February 17, 2012

My husband took this picture of me and Minerva, my office assistant, yesterday in my horribly messy office. I thought it would help illustrate what I’ve been doing for the past few months. My office is a wreck because I’ve been totally preoccupied with writing the second edition of The College Solution: A Guide for Everyone Looking for the Right...

February 17, 2012

My husband took this picture of me and Minerva, my office assistant, yesterday in my horribly messy office. I thought it would help illustrate what I’ve been doing for the past few months. My office is a wreck because I’ve been totally preoccupied with writing the second edition of The College Solution: A Guide for Everyone Looking for the Right...

February 16, 2012

About a third of students begin college expecting to major in a STEM discipline – science, technology, engineering and math. Less than half of them manage to leave with a STEM degree. At some point, most students switch to an easier major. A couple of years ago UCLA released a study that broke down by race and ethnicity just how...

February 8, 2012

I’ve met a lot of college students who assume that they must slog their way through graduate school to enjoy a successful and lucrative career. What is troubling, however, is how little information young adults know about what is involved in earning a graduate degree that can be expensive and a huge time commitment. No one should pursue a graduate...

February 7, 2012

I received an email over the weekend from a mom who is stressing about whether her accomplished daughter would be better off attending a liberal arts college or a journalism school. I happen to be a graduate of the the nation’s oldest journalism school at the University of Missouri (see photo) and I’ll share some thoughts after the mom’s note....

February 7, 2012

I received an email over the weekend from a mom who is stressing about whether her accomplished daughter would be better off attending a liberal arts college or a journalism school. I happen to be a graduate of the the nation’s oldest journalism school at the University of Missouri (see photo) and I’ll share some thoughts after the mom’s note....