The College Solutions Blog

Today I’m running a guest blog post by Jessica Yeager, a grad of Harvard and MIT, who is a tutor and college consultant for high-achieving students and their parents. You can get her four-step workbook: Base Brainstorming Workbook  for free. The college application is one of the most stressful, scary, and overwhelming experiences for most teenagers and their parents. How can...

Some of my most popular blog posts are generated by comments from parents whose children face agonizing college decisions. I got an email today from a dad who is grappling with what to do with his son, who was accepted to Cornell University last year through deferred admission or guaranteed transfer option.  Under this arrangement, Cornell requires an applicant to...

Fifty eight percent of students who attend college pick a school that’s located within 100 miles of their home and 72% choose schools in their own state. Clearly most teenagers and their parents don’t throw a wide net even though it can sometimes lead to better academic fits and also greater tuition discounts. The latest evidence that students aren’t wandering...

If your child is a “B” student, he or she may have more options than you might assume. Don’t believe me? Here is a story of a young woman – I’ll call her Katie – whose mom is a friend of mine. Katie attended a private high school in California where she earned a 3.0 GPA. She applied to these...

Last month, my husband and I sent off our final college payment. Bruce and I made monthly payments for seven consecutive years for our daughter Caitlin and our son Ben, who will be graduating from college in May. We did not take out any loans to pay for college and neither did our children. Our daughter Caitlin took the picture...

This is the time of year when students begin getting offered spots on waiting lists. I wanted to share a previous post I wrote about waiting lists that is just as relevant today. I  have updated the wait list statistics for the University of Notre Dame. Lynn O’Shaughnessy This weekend I heard from old friends who wanted to share with...

Research that’s being described as a landmark study was released today that shows that high school students with strong grades and lower standardized ACT and SAT scores do as well in college as those who perform better on the standardized tests. The ambitious study, which was conducted on behalf of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, compared the academic...

The College Board released its latest annual AP report this week. You can also see the entire report here: 10th Annual AP Report to the Nation AP classes are a creature of the College Board so keep in mind that the organization will always spin the AP statistics in a positive way in its report. One of the great unresolved...

Today I am sharing a guest post by Bradford Pine, a financial advisor in Garden City, NY, who wrote about his experience with his daughter, who has been receiving acceptances and merit aid scholarships from schools. He explains how he lassoed a $14,000-a-year scholarship just by asking. Lynn O’Shaughnessy Here is the link to his entire blog post: My Personal...

You can learn much more about how to afford college by enrolling in my upcoming online course –  Cutting the Cost of College. I designed this course to help you save money by making you a smart college shopper.    Lynn O’Shaughnessy What happens if your child recently received a college admission deferral letter? Plenty of students, who applied to schools...