The College Solutions Blog

July 27, 2011

Here is a true story: This spring a Denver teenager got into Dartmouth College, which was her dream school. The girl, however, is going to Princeton in the fall. Why? Her mom lobbied her to attend Princeton because it is No. 2 in US News & World Report’s rankings while Dartmouth is No. 9. This might be an extreme example...

June 6, 2011

When you are looking at colleges, don’t believe the sticker price. Why? Because college are priced like airline tickets. Everybody pays a different fare. When I give talks to families with teenagers, that’s one of the first points that I emphasize. It’s your job then to find colleges and universities that are not only great academic fits, but also financial...

May 31, 2011

As many of you know, I’m not a fan of US News & World Report’s college rankings. I write a college blog for US News, but that has never stopped me from arguing that the magazine’s rankings has prompted many colleges and universities to act badly and sometimes even behave unethically in pursuit of higher college rankings. This institutional behavior...

April 24, 2011

As many of you know, I’m not a fan of US News and World Report’s college rankings. I think the methodology is dreadful and the college rankings have encouraged colleges to behave very badly. After a mom emailed me to complain about the rankings, I decided to use this as an opportunity to share one of my biggest pet peeves...

March 8, 2011

Affluent families, who can afford to send their children anywhere to college, are becoming more discriminating. Some are questioning whether a private college that costs $50,000 or more is really worth the price. That’s one of the take-home messages of a podcast that I listened to recently on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s website. The newspaper interviewed John T. Lawlor,...

February 25, 2011

Here is one reason for runaway college costs: US News’ college rankings. Find out why....

December 18, 2010

Race to Nowhere, a documentary about the stress that college-bound teenagers experience, has gotten a lot of attention. I first heard about Race to Nowhere a couple of weeks ago after I gave a college presentation to a group of financial advisers and their clients in Irvine, CA. An adviser, who raved about the film, wrote its title on his...

December 2, 2010

Can anybody pinpoint which colleges have the best college professors and the worst professors? I doubt it, but that doesn’t mean people won’t try. Yesterday I wrote a college blog post for CBSMoneyWatch that made a stab at establishing which colleges and universities have the best and worst professors. Here are the controversial posts: 25 Colleges With the Best Professors...

November 7, 2010

Nearly one out of every three students who attends a flagship  state university is affluent. Thirty percent of students at these top universities have parents with incomes in the top 20% of all American households. This is just one of the findings of a study from the Education Trust, which is a nonprofit that promotes education opportunities for all. The...

October 20, 2010

Where do you begin a college search? When you research colleges, you’re going to want to find schools that will provide your teenagers with an excellent education and get them out the door in four years. But how do you even start such a daunting college search? Scattered around my blog, I’ve written plenty about how to conduct a college...