The College Solutions Blog

Valuable insights from Lynn O’Shaughnessy
a nationally recognized college expert.

Admission practices

Checking the Generosity of Your Child’s College Picks

When students are developing their college lists, most of them (unless their parents are wealthy and don’t mind writing monster checks) should be paying attention to the net price of all their school picks. Net price is what a school will cost you after scholarships and grants are deducted. An email that I received from a mom over the weekend...

Finding An Independent College Counselor

In my last college blog post, I wrote about the enmity that admission officers at elite colleges and universities tend to exhibit toward independent college counselors. If you missed it, here it is: Elite Schools Dissing College Consultants While elite schools argue that families can navigate the process by themselves, they ignore this fact: colleges operate as businesses and their...

Elite Schools Dissing College Consultants

In June I gave a keynote talk at the annual conference of the Higher Education Consultants Association in New Jersey. I decided to tag along on the group’s college tour that took the consultants to a half-dozen campuses. What I found predictable is that the most elite schools were the least hospitable to the consultants. Princeton and Columbia universities told...

Dirty Secrets of College Admission Officers

If you’ve got a Kindle or a Nook and you haven’t bought a copy of the second edition of my book, The College Solution yet, you are in luck! The publisher is temporarily giving away the electronic version of my new book for free! I don’t know how long this price will last, but I’d jump on it. If...

Hope for the 3.4 GPA Student!

Yesterday I wrote a post about a teenager with a 3.4 GPA who failed to capture a scholarship from any of the schools where he applied. This is hard to do when you consider that two-thirds of college student don’t pay the sticker price for college. If you missed yesterday’s post, here it is: Getting Stiffed by Colleges After reading...

Hope for the 3.4 GPA Student!

Yesterday I wrote a post about a teenager with a 3.4 GPA who failed to capture a scholarship from any of the schools where he applied. This is hard to do when you consider that two-thirds of college student don’t pay the sticker price for college. If you missed yesterday’s post, here it is: Getting Stiffed by Colleges After reading...

Getting Stiffed by Colleges

When students are shopping for colleges, admission representatives typically urge them to ignore the sticker price. Here’s what these college reps routinely say: We’ve got lots of financial aid and scholarships. Just APPLY! I was reminded of why applying blind is such a reckless strategy when a mom contacted me after her husband heard me give a college talk at...

Getting Stiffed by Colleges

When students are shopping for colleges, admission representatives typically urge them to ignore the sticker price. Here’s what these college reps routinely say: We’ve got lots of financial aid and scholarships. Just APPLY! I was reminded of why applying blind is such a reckless strategy when a mom contacted me after her husband heard me give a college talk at...

Why College Costs Are Rising

My favorite higher-ed commentator is Kevin Carey. I’ve got him on my Google Alert because I always enjoy reading anything he writes. Carey recently became director of the education policy program at the New America Foundation, which is a respected think tank in Washington, DC. You can learn more about him here. Carey has no interest in writing about college...

2 Reasons Why More Colleges Look Selective

How’s this for a college mystery: Every year Barron’s releases its Profiles of American Colleges directory that categorizes schools based on their selectivity. During the past decade, the number of schools that are considered the easiest to get into declined considerably while the number of schools that are characterized as the most elite rose. According to a new report by...