The College Solutions Blog

October 6, 2008

I’ve always been a nag about college rankings. It’s unfortunate that the first yardstick that many families grab when they are measuring schools is the annual US college rankings by U.S. News & World Reports. Simply whining about college rankings, however, isn’t very helpful, which is why I’m excited about a new report that was released today by the Association...

August 15, 2008

I’ve only run across two or three people out here in California, who have heard of my daughter’s college. Even when Caitlin tells people the name of her school-–Juniata College–they stumble on the pronunciation. I used to do the same thing before we visited the college that’s nestled in the Allegheny Mountains in rural Pennsylvania. It’s obviously easier on the...

July 31, 2008

A new report from the federal National Center for Education Statistics documents there are more transfer students at four-year colleges than you’d think. Nearly one in five students transfer from one four-year college to another. When my daughter’s friends came home from their freshmen year in college this summer, most of them were happy campers. The colleges and universities these...

July 6, 2008

Undergraduates have complained for decades about their teaching assistants. If you attend a university, chances are excellent that you will have at least some classes where a graduate student will serve as the teacher. TA’s are cheap and when they are teaching introductory courses, the professors don’t have to do it. And tenured professors love shirking that responsibility. This is...

July 3, 2008

There is a interesting story in The New York Times today about the changing of the guard among professors at colleges and universities. The article suggests that aging Baby Boomer professors, imprinted with the experiences of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, are more liberal in their outlook and that has effected how they teach. What I found...