The College Solutions Blog

October 4, 2010

How do you maximize potential financial aid awards? Today I want to share with you a wonderful resource – TuitionCoach — that may be able to help you do just that. Until last week, you had to pay to use TuitionCoach, but not anymore. The site contains college funding videos, a library of financial aid resources and software that can...

October 1, 2010

Do you use Expedia, Orbitz or Travelocity when you book a flight or find a rental car? Have you used Zillow when you’re searching for a house or Carfax when looking for a used Honda? Using these website and others like it has made buying all sorts of stuff easier. One big ticket item, however, that’s resisted this kind of...

September 22, 2010

It’s old news that college graduates make more money than Americans who bailed on their education after high school. You don’t need a study to figure this out, but that hasn’t discouraged researchers from crunching the numbers anyway. This week the College Board released a study, Education Pays 2010, that documents what advantages that a bachelor’s degree conveys.  Here are...

September 13, 2010

In my last blog, I talked about why it’s important to know what your EFC or Expected Family Contribution is. Here is the post: What Is Your EFC? Today, I’m going to show you how you can get a preliminary EFC, which is not as hard as you might think. You just need to use an online EFC calculator. Here...

August 17, 2010

It’s back-to-school season, which means college students are on the prowl for cheap textbooks. The average college student spends more than $1,100 a year on college textbooks. With textbook prices rising twice as fast as inflation during the past 20 years, I’d sure be looking for cheap textbooks if I was a student. There are more options than ever to...

August 8, 2010

College costs sure are daunting, but the sticker prices are meaningless. I recently wrote about how my son and the other two boys in his high school carpool shrank their college costs dramatically. The tuition for the three boys for the coming year totaled a whopping $136,500, but they received grants from their respective liberal arts colleges for the 2010-11...

August 2, 2010

The price tag for attending an out-of-state public university can be quite high. It’s easy to understand why. States are interested in holding down the costs for their own residents. You might, however, be able to capture a higher-ed bargain if your state maintains a reciprocal agreement with its neighbors. States commonly maintain reciprocal agreements with public colleges and universities...

July 20, 2010

As some of you know, I am now writing a weekly college blog for US News & World Report. I ain’t gonna lie, it gets tiring writing original material all the time. Consequently, today, I’m going to share one of the recent posts that I wrote for US News. Here it is…… It’s a sad reality that most families with...

July 4, 2010

What is the best student loan? I got an email this weekend from a dad who was hoping to get the answer to that question. His son needed to borrow for the last year of college. That was an easy question to answer. The best education loan available is the federal Stafford loan. There are two types of Stafford loans: ...

July 2, 2010

Before I got sucked into writing about colleges — for three college blogs no less! — I spent most of my time in front of my Mac writing personal finance stories. (This blog, by the way, started out as a personal finance blog more than three years ago.) Since the mid 1990s, I’ve written countless investing stories for such national...