The College Solutions Blog

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

Admissions

2 College Case Studies: Where Should These Teens Go to College?

Over the past two years, I’ve written scores of posts on this college blog about how to evaluate schools. Just the other day, I wrote a piece about my 10 favorite college websites. It can be challenging for families, however, to know how to use these tools to find the right colleges at the right price. Consequently, I wanted to...

10 Great Ways to Cut College Costs

How do you cut the cost of college? Recently I shared 10 tips on the first session of #CollegeChat, which is a live monthly conversation for teens, college students and parents on Twitter. I pulled all the tips from my new eBook, Shrinking the Cost of College: 152 Ways to Cut the Price of a Bachelor’s Degree. Here are the...

How I Ended Up Writing Three College Blogs!

How many college blogs is too many? I am sheepishly asking this question because I’ve just started writing for my third college blog. You can find my newest college blog at US News & World Report. My first post, The 10 Best College Websites, went live on the site this afternoon. I launched my first college blog, The College Solution,...

No. 1 Tip for Writing a Great Admission Essay

Hey, how about starting your college admission essay today? Are any parents out there already bugging their soon-to-be high school seniors to start writing their college admission essay? I realize this is going to be a hard sell with teenagers, but summer is the perfect time to write the admission essay. So here’s my No. 1 tip for writing a...

Censoring Financial Aid Information

With about 800 other people, I’ve been spending the last couple of days at the WACAC conference at the University of San Francisco. WACAC stands for the Western Association for College Admission Counseling. I gave a speech on shrinking the cost of college — one of my favorite topics — at the educational conference that attracts high school and independent...

Top 50 Colleges That Produce Science PhD's

I got an email this week from a California mother who was happy that her child would be a attending St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a wonderful public liberal arts college, in the fall. Her husband, however, remained skeptical. He worried that his daughter would be jeopardizing her chances of going to graduate school if she went to an obscure...

A Law Professor's Take on College Admissions

Does anybody else use Google Alert to see what other people are saying about you? I confess I do. I have Google alert me if someone mentions me or my college blogs on the Internet. And that’s how I stumbled across a post written by Tom Smith, a law professor, at a blog called, The Right Coast: Thoughts from San...

UC Admissions: 7 Facts You Need to Know

The University of California’s admission practices generated a lot of angst and speculation in recent months, which led to a lot of curiosity about how the UC schools would handle the the latest crush of college applications with money tighter than ever. Now that the most recent UC admission season is history, here are 7 facts about who got in...

Shrinking the Cost of College: Twitter Chat Tonight

If you’d like to learn more about shrinking the cost of college, I’ll be sharing advice on the first edition of #CollegeChat at 6 p.m. PST tonight on Twitter. Don’t worry if you don’t know how to find this one-hour college Twitter chat. You can find the instructions at the bottom of this post. During the live Twitter chat, I...

College Wait Lists Run Amuck

Has it become a status symbol to end up on a college wait list? During a fundraiser at my son’s high school last night, a mother shared with me that Duke University had waitlisted her son. She appeared to be bragging when she shared this news. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that Duke had also placed 3,382...