The College Solutions Blog

July 7, 2009

Here’s a way to find cheap college textbooks: rent them. This seems so logical, but it’s taken an awfully long time for the idea of renting used college textbooks to take root. At least a couple of companies are now renting cheap college textbooks to students who are eager to shrink their book tab. A story in The New York...

May 31, 2009

What happens if your child becomes severely depressed in college? As parents we worry because we wouldn’t  be around to spot the symptoms. If my daughter, who attends college 2,500 miles away, started skipping classes, ignoring friends or losing weight because of depression I wouldn’t know unless she told me. Colleges and universities offer mental health services, but research suggests...

May 12, 2009

You don’t need to read this blog post to know that the prices of college textbooks are obscene. Amazon.com, however, is aiming to change this. I wrote a post about Amazon’s efforts to crack the electronic textbook market with its launch of the Kindle DX at my other college blog at CBSMoneyWatch.com. On that post I also explain why  college...

May 3, 2009

If your child is heading to college this fall will he or she be covered by your health insurance? Unfortunately, it’s no longer a given that students will be protected by their parents’ health insurance policies. In fact, the federal government has estimated that roughly 20% of students don’t have college student health insurance. Here’s one reason for the lack...

April 18, 2009

When I was in college I owned a fake ID. One of my friends, who  worked at the DMV in St. Louis, gave it to me as a birthday present. So I wasn’t exactly a prude in college though I don’t remember ever making a fool of myself at a kegger. But now that I’m a mom with two teenagers,...

February 3, 2009

When I think back to my dorm days at the University of Missouri, what I remember most vividly is getting scalded in the shower. I lived in Johnston Hall, which was named after a woman Latin professor when it was built right after World War II. The girls’ dorm was known for being centrally located and for its decrepit plumbing....

January 6, 2009

To make money, some universities are offering up their own students to the credit card industry as sacrificial lambs. Credit card issuers have happily been paying schools for access to their students. Consequently, it’s been common to see credit card marketers at tables stacked with cheap bling on campus quads. They will gladly give students a free t-shirt, a towel...

December 14, 2008

My daughter Caitlin called the other day to tell me how she thought she fared on her Spanish final. She said her hands were still shaking — not because she was nervous about the exam — but because she had been gobbling up chocolate-covered coffee beans to stay awake. I concluded that getting pumped up with caffeine so she could...

September 4, 2008

Go ahead and call me naive. I didn’t realize how serious and pervasive the college drinking problem was until my own daughter headed off to school. In high school, my husband and I considered ourselves very lucky because Caitlin and most of her friends didn’t drink at all. But I’d be surprised, however, if any of them still shy away...

August 10, 2008

Last night my daughter got a disturbing text message from one of her college classmates, who had spent the summer interning and attending classes with her in Orizaba, Mexico. “Did you hear the horrible news?” her friend Sarah texted. We had settled in to watch the Olympics when Caitlin got the message that was followed up seconds later with a...