The College Solutions Blog

August 20, 2012

Are you stressed about all your children’s college choices? Plenty of parents are.  And it’s not surprising when you consider that there are roughly 2,700 four-year colleges and universities in the U.S.  The littlest ones have less than 100 students while the biggest state school nearly equals the population of Santa Fe, NM. A TED Talk on Choice With the...

August 15, 2012

As I’ve said many times, students shouldn’t be applying to colleges unless they have a good idea of what those institutions will cost them. It’s easy to obtain these formerly elusive cost figures now that schools have installed net price calculators on their web sites. Today I’m sharing the results from a mom (Lynne) who has used the net price...

August 15, 2012

How do you evaluate a college’s learning disability services? In today’s blog post I’m sharing some questions that parents and students should ask when visiting a school (or contacting a disability office by phone.) Joy App, a college consultant in Houston, who was my source for yesterday’s post on learning disabilities, provided the questions that you’ll see below. Like other...

August 12, 2012

Does your teenager have a learning disability? If so, the whole college process might seem even more daunting. With these parents in mind, I recently talked with Joy App, a college consultant in Houston, who has worked with many teenagers with learning disabilities. I am passing along some of her advice for parents of learning disabled teenagers. To start, I’m...

August 7, 2012

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...

August 1, 2012

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...

July 30, 2012

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...

July 20, 2012

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...

July 18, 2012

How do you find colleges with the best financial aid? One way to simplify your search for colleges is to look for the institutions that typically meet the highest percentage of financial need. Of course, the best scenario is for your child to get accepted into a school that meets 100% of all its students’ demonstrated financial needs. Here’s an...

July 15, 2012

While you can’t take the SAT in the summer, this time of the year is a great time to study for the test when there are fewer distractions. Perhaps that’s why I am getting more questions about SAT and ACT prep. Consequently, I’m devoting today’s post to test prep. I have these two goals: No. 1: I want to emphasize...