The College Solutions Blog

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...

May 5, 2014

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 Will your child end up going to his or her dream school? The odds are that your child won’t if the college or university is a rankings alpha...

April 16, 2014

The No. 1 way to cut the cost of college is to become an educated consumer. You can learn how by attending my popular online course, The College Cost Lab. I’ll be relaunching the course in June 2016 and if you’d like to be notified when I have more details, please click here! As promised, today I am sharing my...

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 9, 2014

I received an email recently from a mom who was upset because her smart daughter didn’t receive any scholarships from the schools on her list. All the school were prestigious public flagships outside her state. These institutions will be among the toughest to receive meaningful scholarships from because they are most demand from their own state residents and they can...

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 26, 2014

Along with Michelle Kretzschmar at DIY College Ranking, I am launching a five-week course  – Cutting the Cost of College – on April 16 that will provide you with a step-by-step blueprint on how to make college more affordable. This class is recommended for the parents of teenagers, independent college consultants, high school counselors and financial aid professionals, who want...

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 21, 2014

If you have a child in college or heading there this fall, have you filed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid yet? Many parents never do file it. In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Education less than 55% of high school seniors compete the FAFSA. That’s a depressing statistic when you consider that low and middle-income students...