The College Solutions Blog

August 19, 2011

How do you cut the cost of college? The best way to shrink college costs is to be an educated consumer. If money is an issue – and it almost always is – you need to evaluate schools to determine which ones are generous and which are stingy. Here are 10 ways that can help you shave significant dollars off...

August 18, 2011

If anybody is interested in checking out a webinar that I did earlier this week on shrinking the cost of college — a favorite topic of mine — you can watch it now. I pulled together the webinar for Kaplan Test Prep and it was free and open to the public. I spoke for about 45 minutes on these sorts...

August 16, 2011

Is your family going to qualify for financial aid? Many families I talk to assume that they won’t qualify for financial aid. Why are so many parents pessimistic about their chances for financial assistance? I think a lot of them assume that the money they’ve squirreled away in their college savings accounts will kill their chances. I find it ironic...

August 10, 2011

It’s hard keeping up with the changes sweeping the textbook industry, which is why I asked Colin Barceloux, the founder of BookRenter, about a hot trend –  renting textbooks. Here is a Q&A with Barceloux, who created his company as a student at Santa Clara University after he began collecting discarded textbooks on his campus. Can you speak about some of...

August 5, 2011

I got an email recently from a dad named George who shared the bad luck of a young woman who lost lots of college credits when she transferred from one four-year university to another.  His email is pertinent because many students end up hopping from one school to another.  In fact, I believe about one out of four students fall...

August 2, 2011

If you are a rising high school senior, you probably thought you had all summer to get prepared for the upcoming college admission frenzy. But guess what? You’re running out of time. To avoid the time crunch in the fall, here are five things you can do now: 1. Examine school prices. I think it’s reckless to apply to a...

July 26, 2011

If you’ve spent much time on my college blog, you already know that published college price tags are meaningless. Most students receive some type of price break, thanks to federal or state grants and/or discounts from the schools themselves. What is far more important than a sticker price is a school’s net price. It’s All About the Net Price A...

July 22, 2011

I’ve gotten a couple of questions lately about whether cashing out home equity and putting it into an annuity is a legit way of increasing a family’s chances of getting financial aid.   Consequently, I decided to share a post on the topic that I wrote earlier in this year in response to an email from a dad, who was interested...

July 20, 2011

The majority of families end up borrowing for college. But when parents and teenagers talk about how they are going to divide up that responsibility, they rarely possess a good idea of what this debt burden is going to mean for them when the bills come due. That’s why I’m recommending a  tool from SimpleTuition, an aggregator of private student...

July 15, 2011

My last post focused on net price calculators that colleges and universities must have installed on their websites by late October. If you missed it, here it is: A New Way to Add Up the Cost of College Today, I want to share a nifty online tool from COLLEGEdata that can help you get a sense of how much a...