The College Solutions Blog

May 13, 2010

I’m a big believer in students studying abroad for a semester in college. My daughter Caitlin is one of the rare students who studied overseas for an entire school year. If I’m remembering correctly, only 5% of college students who study overseas stay for a year. Caitlin studied at the University of Barcelona. I think living in Barcelona was a...

April 9, 2010

European universities are nothing like American colleges and universities. That’s the conclusion that I drew during our family’s two-week vacation in Spain and France. We were visiting my daughter Caitlin, who has been attending the University of Barcelona for two semesters. During the vacation, I kept getting into conversations with Europeans about their universities. I had some knowledge about European...

March 29, 2010

College visit. Yes, it’s that time of year  when high school seniors and juniors are planning college visits during spring break. You can learn a lot during a college visit so you need to make the most of the opportunity. During a campus visit, here are 31 questions that you should ask: College Graduation Track Record What is your four-year...

March 26, 2010

Where are America’s green colleges? Every year GreenReportCard.org attempts to provide the answer with its College Sustainability Report Card. There are lots of ways to find green colleges. If you visit GreenReportCard, you’ll be able to filter for  green campuses in more than 100 ways. To make the search far less intimidating, you’ll find on the organization’s home page the...

March 22, 2010

Never underestimate the ability of college students to drink. Out here in San Diego this weekend, thousands of college students on spring break participated in something called Floatopia. Floatopia drew up to 6,000 college students, who showed up with their swimming suits and beer coolers ready to dodge San Diego’s prohibition on drinking on its beaches. The students cleverly skirted...

February 28, 2010

Want to know what college students are reading? The Chronicle of Higher Education recently surveyed dozens of colleges and universities across the country to compile this top 10 college reading list. You won’t find any heavy literature on this list that includes three books dripping with zombie and vampire antics. I’d recommend reading No. 2 and No. 6. I’m on...

February 26, 2010

It is hard to qualify as an independent college student when seeking federal financial aid. I wrote about this big hurdle recently in this post: Getting Financial Aid as an Independent Student Yesterday about four dozen students posted passionate comments on my blog after Chegg, the giant online source for textbook rentals, carried a post that I wrote earlier this...

February 25, 2010

Beginning this week, it became much harder for college students to obtain a credit card. Many college kids who aren’t 21 yet must get a cosigner to obtain a student credit card. Frankly, I think that’s a good thing. A far better alternative to that first credit card in college is a debit card, which you can use just about...

December 22, 2009

If you can’t get enough news about college, The Campus Buzz should keep you satisfied. The website provides daily links to college-related blog posts and articles from across the country. This week, The College Buzz began carrying my own college blog posts. The Campus Buzz breaks news down into such categories as: Admissions, Money, Sports and Careers. The most popular...

December 9, 2009

At first I ignored most social media. I don’t even have a Facebook page yet though that is high on my to-do list. I decided, however,  I needed to embrace social media if I was ever going to get the word about about this college blog and my other one at CBSMoneyWatch. I initially thought that Twitter was the most...