The College Solutions Blog

August 23, 2013

On Sunday at 4:30 p.m. PDT Sunday, Michelle Kretzschmar of Do It Yourself College Rankings and I will be holding our last college webinar. I will be demonstrating a valuable online tool that allows you to sort colleges by generosity. Please visit my webinar page at 4:30 p.m. PDT to see the webinar. People who watch live will be able...

February 26, 2013

Where do the best college professors teach? This is an important question, particularly when you consider that traditional college professors are disappearing. Less than one out of three teachers on college campuses today are tenured or on the tenured track. Most college students today are being taught primarily by graduate students and part-time faculty. (See my post below about why...

February 6, 2013

The steady trickle of colleges and universities that have admitted to fudging the figures that they send to U.S. News & World Report could end up changing the college rankings submission rules. In an interview published today in Inside Higher Ed, Brian Kelly, the editor and chief content officer at U.S. News, said that the college rankings giant is considering...

October 10, 2012

Today I’m passing along a fascinating list that comes from Harvard Law School. The list you see below includes the 261 colleges and universities where members of the Class of 2013 law school students come from. Michelle Kretzschmur, the creator of Do-It-Yourself College Rankings sent me the link to the list because she knows how strongly I believe that students...

October 3, 2012

Note: I ran this college blog post last year, but it’s equally relevant today… I got an email this week from a California mother who was happy that her child would be a attending St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a wonderful public liberal arts college, in the fall. Her husband, however, remained skeptical. He worried that his daughter would be...

September 12, 2012

At midnight East Coast time, U.S. News & World Report released its 2013 college rankings. And what a shocker – Harvard and Princeton tied for first in the national university category! Yale came in third. Among liberal arts colleges, Williams got the No. 1 ranking followed by Amherst. Equally shocking. (Please note my sarcasm.) Despite the annual hoopla over these...

August 29, 2012

I’m always excited when I run across a new resource to help families research colleges. Today I’m happy to share a valuable one from The Chronicle of Higher Education. College Completion is a microsite within the website of the higher-ed trade publication. I mentioned the tool briefly in this recent college blog post: 12 Ways to Find and Research Colleges....

August 21, 2012

How do you locate good colleges and universities? I get that question a lot. Today I want to share some online resources to find and research schools. In no particular order, here are resources to check out: 1. Do-It-Yourself College Rankings. Do-It-Yourself College Rankings is the creation of Michelle Kretzschmar, the mother of a college student, who has a background...

July 26, 2012

Do you need to graduate from an Ivy League school or other ultra elite college to earn the highest salaries? Many families believe that graduates who can put a school like Princeton or Yale on their resume will fare significantly better financially than smart students who end up earning their degrees from elsewhere. In a famous study, two economists tackled...

June 18, 2012

With the cost of college so daunting, families are understandably more interested than ever in finding schools where their children can grow academically and secure good jobs when they graduate. That’s not an unreasonable request and yet quite a bit of evidence exists that millions of students have not been learning much in college. In fact, the diplomas that many...