The College Solutions Blog

February 1, 2009

Now here’s something you haven’t heard reported in the news media this year: Many colleges and universities are slashing prices even further than they have in the past. Private schools, in particular, are worried that kids are crossing expensive schools off their lists because of the recession and the stock market implosion. Most parents assume that private schools are in...

December 9, 2008

These are scary times for parents of teenagers. Saving for college was challenging enough before experts started comparing the stock market’s current implosion to the Great Depression. Many parents are reacting to the downturn by telling their teenagers to only apply to instate schools to save money. In some cases this is a wise decision, but public universities won’t always...

November 29, 2008

  More colleges and universities than ever are handing out merit aid to students.   I blogged about this phenomenon right before Thanksgiving. It was one of the conclusions of a new report that was released by the National Association for College Admission Counseling that explored financial aid policies of the nation’s colleges and universities.   What I wanted to...

November 26, 2008

I have a friend who is so wealthy that she and her husband don’t qualify for financial aid even though they have three kids attending college right now. She’s a financial planner and her husband is an attorney and they can easily write checks to all three schools including Georgetown University which costs around $50,000 a year. Last spring I...

October 22, 2008

In my last post, I shared how you can get a pretty good idea if your family will qualify for financial aid. You need this information if you are eager to slash the cost of your child’s bachelor’s degree. Here’s an example:  Let’s suppose a bright teenager, whose parents are wealthy, gets accepted into Georgetown University in Washington DC. Here...

September 6, 2008

I read a story in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about the flood of students from the Northeast who have been heading west to attend Indiana University. Among Indiana’s newest crop of freshmen, there are roughly 260 kids from the New York City area alone. With the snootiest schools on the East Coast continuing to reject nearly all comers, more...

July 24, 2008

Millions of parents across the nation hope that their children will someday win an athletic scholarship to college. That might explain why so many parents start yelling at referees when their kids are barely out of preschool. My son, who is a soccer referee in a rec league, tells me that he’s been yelled at by dads of kids who...

October 6, 2007

Last week I talked about how it’s important to determine whether your family will qualify for financial aid or not before you embark on that great college odessey. Once you’ve got a pretty good idea of where you stand on that score, you’ll want to look for schools that are either generous with financial aid, merit aid or both. A...