The College Solutions Blog

February 26, 2014

A new Gallup survey that polled business leaders on higher-education issues revealed that executives hold a low opinion of the ability of colleges to prepare students for the workplace. American adults also  believe just as strongly that higher-ed institutions are not readying students for employment. According to the survey, which was conducted in partnership with the Lumina Foundation, only 11%...

February 7, 2014

Teenagers often pick college major without knowing much  about what they entail or whether they can handle the work. I was thinking about this today when I read a new report from ACT Inc., entitled, The Condition of STEM 2013. The report shared statistics on the number of high school students in the 2013 graduating class, who were interested in...

February 4, 2014

Is your child interested in picking a college major based on those ubiquitous lists of the country’s highest-paying college degrees? Plenty of students are pursuing degrees that they perceive will generate the biggest salaries. I assume that’s why business is the most popular major – more than one out of every five students select it. I can’t resist mentioning that...

December 30, 2013

Today I’m sharing a guest post from Stuart Nachbar, who is the president of EducatedQuest.com, an excellent college admissions blog and guide to some of the best values in higher education. He can be contacted at stuart@educatedquest. I thought you’d appreciate Nachbar’s advice about how to evaluate an institution’s career placement services. If you haven’t already read it, please see...

December 26, 2013

I will be launching a six-week, online course called Cutting the Cost of College beginning Feb. 12. Please scroll to the bottom of this post to learn more and email me at Lynn@TheCollegeSolution.com if you want further notifications! Lynn O’Shaughnessy Before spending an obscene amount of money on a bachelor’s degree, families want to know if their children’s job prospects...

February 5, 2013

Today I’m sharing a guest post from Stuart Nachbar, a former executive at a major education software company, who is the creator of a valuable website called EducatedQuest.com. On this website, you’ll find a growing number of in-depth profiles of state universities that Nachbar writes after campus visits that includes lengthy interviews. I have never seen anyone squeeze so much...

November 19, 2012

Parents and teenagers are understandably interested in colleges and universities that prepare students for eventual jobs. What schools, they wonder, will give their grads an advantage in the job world? It’s a tough question to answer because the statistics that schools share about their graduates’ success in finding jobs are often wrong. To learn more about this sad reality, read...

October 1, 2012

I want to major in art. This is the college major that perhaps more than any other strikes fear in the hearts of parents, who worry that an art degree will condemn their children to a life eating Cheerio’s for dinner and driving old subcompacts with bald tires. The truth is there are a myriad of careers in a wide...

June 21, 2012

I’ve been devoting this week’s posts to college accountability. Are colleges and universities doing what we are paying them to do:  educating our children and preparing them for the working world? In most cases we don’t know.  If you missed my two previous posts, here they are: Sharing a College’s Return on Investment College + Degree = Joke? In my...

June 19, 2012

In my last post I discussed a serious dilemma facing families searching for colleges. When we send our teenagers off to college, we expect that our children will return to us smarter, wiser and employable. But it’s nearly impossible to determine which schools are in the best position to help make this happen. Here is the post: College + Degree...