The College Solutions Blog

June 15, 2012

Today I am happy to share with you a thoughtful post that David Montesano, one of my favorite independent college college consultants, wrote about college rankings. Montesano is the owner of College Match Educational Consultants, which has offices in the San Francisco Bay area, Seattle and elsewhere. Three Degrees of College Prestige In an era where a sour economy is...

June 4, 2012

How’s this for a college mystery: Every year Barron’s releases its Profiles of American Colleges directory that categorizes schools based on their selectivity. During the past decade, the number of schools that are considered the easiest to get into declined considerably while the number of schools that are characterized as the most elite rose. According to a new report by...

May 30, 2012

If you didn’t catch yesterday’s college blog post, I’d urge you to check it out: Do-It-Yourself College Rankings I wrote about Michelle Kretzschmar,  who created an impressive spreadsheet system to help families assemble a list of promising colleges based on their own priorities. In today’s post I’m sharing some of the steps that Michelle, the founder of DIYCollegeRankings.com, and her...

May 29, 2012

It’s not often that I stumble across a college blog that I can get really excited about. Today I am happy to share a great resource that stands out from the crowd. I urge everyone to check out DIYCollegeRankings. DIYCollegeRankings (the DIY stands for Do It Yourself), which was created by Michelle Kretzschmar, a former data analyst and the mom...

April 9, 2012

This is the month when high school seniors must decide where they will attend college. It’s not surprising then that I’ve been getting emails from families agonizing about their choices. Here is one of those notes from a mom named Carmen: I would appreciate your professional advice in the following matter:  My son has narrowed down his choice to two...

February 17, 2012

My husband took this picture of me and Minerva, my office assistant, yesterday in my horribly messy office. I thought it would help illustrate what I’ve been doing for the past few months. My office is a wreck because I’ve been totally preoccupied with writing the second edition of The College Solution: A Guide for Everyone Looking for the Right...

February 17, 2012

My husband took this picture of me and Minerva, my office assistant, yesterday in my horribly messy office. I thought it would help illustrate what I’ve been doing for the past few months. My office is a wreck because I’ve been totally preoccupied with writing the second edition of The College Solution: A Guide for Everyone Looking for the Right...

February 14, 2012

Yesterday I described how you can use College Results Online to help you generate a promising list of college. If you missed it, here it is: Getting Ideas For a College List Here’s another idea:  Head to The Center for College Affordability and Productivity, which is the think tank that generates Forbes magazine’s annual college rankings. On the center’s site...

February 10, 2012

Today I’m sharing with you a great post from Michelle Kretzschmar, who writes a college blog that focuses on using data to create your own college rankings:  DIYCollegeRankings. I hope you read it and also visit her blog. Football and US News Rankings Like more than 100 million other Americans, I watched the Super Bowl. I always like the part...

February 3, 2012

Yesterday, in writing about the latest college rankings scandal on my college blog, I mentioned that the institutional pursuit of college rankings glory, has hurt millions of students in ways they can’t even imagine. Today I want to elaborate on that observation. If you missed yesterday’s post, here it is: Colleges and Universities That Cheat Millions of students are adversely...