The College Solutions Blog

February 19, 2009

My son Ben, who is a junior in high school, is taking a pre-calculus class at a San Diego community college a couple of nights a week. After the first class, Ben told me that the professor explained quite dramatically that he would not accept any excuses for late assignments. To illustrate how serious he was about this edict, the...

January 16, 2009

While back home in San Diego for her winter break, my daughter Caitlin managed to line up a summer internship with the Institute of the Americas at the local University of  California campus. It’s ideal when a college student can find a job or internship that compliments his or her major, which in Caitlin’s case is Spanish. So I’m thrilled....

December 11, 2008

I spent a few minutes with my teenage son last night watching a mad professor flailing a student with cat fur. Actually, the MIT physics professor wasn’t mad, but he was entertaining. Walter H. G. Lewin was giving a demonstration on electrical charges in a class exploring electricity and magnetism. After getting pelted by the swatch of cat fur, the...

November 24, 2008

I hear a lot of crazy things when I drive the teenagers in my carpool to high school, but perhaps the strangest admission happened near the start of the school year. The four kids were talking about their SAT scores when Madison mumbled that his scores were low. I asked him what happened and he said he decided to see...

November 11, 2008

In my last blog I talked about studies that illustrate the potential dangers of college students attending classes with part-time instructors. Students can suffer because adjunct professors often don’t have office hours. Once classes are over the teachers split. Often they are off to the next campus to teach elsewhere. In a school with an overwhelming number of adjunct faculty,...