The College Solutions Blog

August 5, 2011

I got an email recently from a dad named George who shared the bad luck of a young woman who lost lots of college credits when she transferred from one four-year university to another.  His email is pertinent because many students end up hopping from one school to another.  In fact, I believe about one out of four students fall...

June 28, 2011

Should professors work as hard as many of the rest of us? If you compare the sort of work week and vacation time that many professors enjoy with other highly educated professionals, you could conclude that there are a lot of slackers hanging out in the Ivory Towers. I hope that professor productivity becomes a big issue with the published...

June 21, 2011

Today I’m sharing a piece written by Scott Coltrane, the dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon, on the beauty and practicality of a liberal arts degree. The popularity of liberal arts degrees is clearly declining. According to a thought-provoking article I read this month in The New Yorker, only 40% of college students graduate with a...

June 11, 2011

Most of the attention during every admission season is on high school seniors, which means transfer students often get lost in the shuffle. That’s a shame since a sizable number of college students end up transferring every year. According to special transfer student report from the National Association for College Admission Counseling, a third of students end up transferring to...

May 22, 2011

While it might not look like it, the college admission landscape is constantly changing. This month The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a fascinating article about admission trends at colleges across the country. I’m going to share the article with you and also highlight the trends that the Chronicle reporter uncovered: State universities continue to struggle. State budget cuts are...

May 12, 2011

I once calculated that only .2% of freshmen who start college every year head off to the Ivy League, but these eight schools still monopolize much of the national coverage of college issues. The spotlight on the Ivy League has helped to make it nearly impossible to get into these eight schools, as well as a small group of other...

May 11, 2011

Today I want to share a cautionary tale of a student who lost her full-ride scholarship. Her dad wrote and asked me for advice because the family can’t handle the out-of-state tuition at Louisiana State University. Frankly, this should never have been an issue for his daughter because she won a full-ride scholarship to Southeastern Louisiana University. I’ll let the...

May 9, 2011

What does it mean when a teenager says, “I want to go to a medium-sized university?” In the last couple of posts I’ve been discussing the issue of college size. Kids often base a great deal of their decision about college on its size and I’ve been suggesting reasons why that can be a problem. Here are my past two...

May 6, 2011

In my last blog post I complained that too many high school students pick schools based primarily on size. And most of these students only want to look at schools that are large. Here is where I vented: Do You Know the Difference Between A College and University? What’s more important, I argued, is a school’s mission. Today, I want...

May 5, 2011

When I’ve been giving college presentations lately, I’ve begun asking the members of the audience this question: How many people here know the difference between a college and a university? It’s rare that even one person raises his or her hand. Yikes. I think it’s important to understand the distinctions before exploring a student’s higher-ed choices. Consequently, I’m going to...