The College Solutions Blog

November 1, 2010

Has your teenager received flattering email or literature from universities or even VIP college applications from schools that are already prefilled? If your child has gotten any of these communications, let me make this quite clear, it doesn’t mean anything. Despite all the collegiate flirting, the schools may not be interested in your child. Flattering College Email I wanted to...

October 28, 2010

I’ve gotten questions lately from parents whose children are being recruited by college coaches. I wanted to share the questions because it might help other families who are or will be navigating the Byzantine world of college athletics. I talked to Karen Weaver, my go-to-expert on college athletics. Weaver is the director of athletics at a Penn State campus and...

October 26, 2010

Yesterday I wrote a post about attending nearby colleges and universities. Here it is: Sticking Close to Home for College For students who are adventurous enough to explore colleges in other states, I wanted to mention a trend that I read about in The Chronicle of Higher Education a couple of days ago. More private colleges and universities are relying...

October 21, 2010

If you want to attend an elite college or university, you can increase your chances if you apply early decision. That’s one of the conclusions that you can draw from a new annual study released by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, The State of College Admission 2010. Highly selective colleges are increasingly relying on early decision applications to...

October 1, 2010

Before I left for St. Louis, my hometown, to attend the annual conference of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, I asked my college blog readers to pose questions that I could ask to college experts here. Here was one of my reader’s questions: Why do schools ask applicants where else they are applying? Are students obligated to answer?...

September 10, 2010

The last two days I’ve been writing about applying early decision in the college admission process. Here are my two posts: Finding the Success Rate of Applying Early Decision Case Study: Applying Early Decision After reading my case study post, a mom posed with her own question about early decision. I decided to answer her here.  I promise this will...

September 9, 2010

Yesterday I shared an easy way to to obtain early decision statistics from individual colleges and universities. Here is the post: Finding the Success Rate of Applying Early Decision As I promised at the time, I want to delve into the specifics of a high school senior, I’m going to call her Sarah, who wants to apply early decision to...

September 8, 2010

Should you apply early decision? I got an email last night from a psychologist who asked if his daughter should apply early decision to The College of New Jersey, which is a public liberal arts college. Last month, I wrote about the early decision dilemma that a mom from Minnesota was facing regarding her daughter’s desire to apply early decision...

August 25, 2010

It’s still summer, but I’ve already gotten my first question about early decision. I thought I’d share the question posed by a mom, lets call her Susanna, whose daughter wants to apply early decision to William and Mary College in Williamsburg, VA. If you don’t know what ED is, here is the definition of early decision. This is the mom’s...

August 24, 2010

One of the problems with paying for college is that you don’t know how much it’s going to cost. Many students won’t receive their financial aid awards until the spring. And colleges expect families to start paying a short time later. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could know well ahead of time whether a school is going to be...