The College Solutions Blog

July 6, 2014

How can you find the most generous colleges and universities? I’m talking about the institutions that meet 100% of financial need or close to it? And what about the schools that provide merit scholarships for affluent students who don’t qualify for need-based aid? How can you find schools that provide a large number of these scholarships? In the six-minute video...

June 23, 2014

When you are contemplating how much a bachelor’s degree is going to cost your family, you must keep this in mind: Colleges and universities are high-stakes businesses that want to charge you more than you feel comfortable paying. Your best weapon to make college more affordable is to become an empowered consumer. I am absolutely dead serious when I say...

May 13, 2014

Today I’m sharing with you a new online tool that you can easily use to generate quick cost estimates and comparisons at individual colleges. All you need is to start playing with the universal net price calculator that you’ll find on the website of the Cost of Learning.  This new website aims to make it easy for families to retrieve...

April 27, 2014

Last month, my husband and I sent off our final college payment. Bruce and I made monthly payments for seven consecutive years for our daughter Caitlin and our son Ben, who will be graduating from college in May. We did not take out any loans to pay for college and neither did our children. Our daughter Caitlin took the picture...

April 14, 2014

Don’t become a victim of the college process like the angry mom you’ll read about below! A highly effective way to make college more affordable is to enroll in my upcoming course, The College Cost Lab. You can learn more about the class and enroll here. Lynn O’Shaughnessy I am sharing with you today an angry comment sent to me...

April 3, 2014

What happens when the financial aid or merit aid package that a student receives from a school is inadequate? Is it possible to extract more money from a college? I’ve been getting questions about this lately from parents who are disappointed by some of the awards their children have been receiving. One parent, for instance, told me that she was...

March 24, 2014

FInancial aid letters are often confusing. I believe many colleges and universities intentionally make financial aid awards hard to decipher to trick families into thinking that their institutions are being generous even when they aren’t. Obfuscation is an effective way to keep parents off balance. Since this is the time of year when students are receiving their financial aid letters,...

March 3, 2014

Today I’m sharing an article that Stephanie Hancock, CFP, who is a financial aid expert at College Aid Consulting in Los Angeles, wrote about the potential dangers of  using life insurance to hide assets. What families, who are eager to qualify for more financial aid, don’t understand is that insurance agents, who are suggesting this move, are almost always doing...

February 20, 2014

If you have a child in college, do you qualify for a federal tax credit or tax deduction? These are valuable tax benefits that can help you defray the rising cost of a college degree and yet some parents have no idea that they exist or whether they would qualify. Edvisor Network just launched a valuable online resource that explains...

January 14, 2014

Would you like to make college more affordable? I assume you do since you’re visiting my college blog. While visiting my blog and reading my book will certainly help you become a smart college shopper, plenty of parents, as well as college consultants, have urged me to create an online course that would include step-by-step instructions on how families can...