The College Solutions Blog

Valuable insights from Lynn O’Shaughnessy
a nationally recognized college expert.

Evaluating Schools

August 22, 2010

Attending a School With a Lousy College Ranking

Some of you already know that I write a weekly college blog post for US News & World Report. While the magazine’s website contains a treasure trove of valuable information about college, I hate it’s college rankings. This put me in an uncomfortable position when the 2011 college rankings were released with tremendous fanfare last week. To coincide with the...

Research Universities: What You Need to Ask

In my last blog post I complained that too many high school students pick schools based primarily on size. And most of these students only want to look at schools that are large. Here is where I vented: My Pet Peeve: Picking Colleges by Size What’s more important, I argued, is a school’s mission. Today, I want to explore a...

My Pet Peeve: Picking Colleges By Size

Here’s one of my biggest pet peeves about how teenagers look for colleges: When teenagers put together a list of potential colleges, a campus size requirement is often way up at the top of their criteria. I want to go to a big school. I don’t want to go to small school. I’m interested in a medium-sized school. Hardly anyone...

Calculating the Real Cost of College

As some of you know, I am now writing a weekly college blog for US News & World Report. I ain’t gonna lie, it gets tiring writing original material all the time. Consequently, today, I’m going to share one of the recent posts that I wrote for US News. Here it is…… It’s a sad reality that most families with...

Choosing Colleges: 5 Things You Must Do

Need help in choosing colleges? It so, you’ll be interested in this college blog post by David Montesano. David is an admission strategist with College Match, an educational consulting firm that aims to help families find great colleges at discount prices. Here are 5 things that David suggests that you keep in mind when when are looking for college matches:...

Top 10 Best College Websites

What are the best college websites in the country? I tried to answer that question earlier this week when I wrote my first college blog post for US News & World Report. In the post, I nominated my own favorite college websites which can be invaluable for finding colleges, researching schools, pinpointing the generosity of individual colleges and learning about...

Shrinking the Cost of College: Twitter Chat Tonight

If you’d like to learn more about shrinking the cost of college, I’ll be sharing advice on the first edition of #CollegeChat at 6 p.m. PST tonight on Twitter. Don’t worry if you don’t know how to find this one-hour college Twitter chat. You can find the instructions at the bottom of this post. During the live Twitter chat, I...

How Many Hours Does It Take to Research Colleges?

Zillow, where you can find out how much your house is worth, has released a survey that suggests that Americans only spend five hours researching mortgages. That’s the same amount of time that Americans spend planning vacations. It’s significantly less time than the 10 hours that consumers devote to buying a car, which is obviously a much smaller purchase. That...

Who Isn't Graduating From College?

Should more high school graduates go to college? This question has been getting a lot of attention since President Obama announced that one of his prime education goals would be to get more Americans to attend college. That’s a laudable and ambitious goal. I worry, however, about students, who are unprepared for college. They often get entangled in a huge...

Graduate School Programs? Shopping for the Right One

How do you shop for graduate school programs? With the economy still floundering, more Americans are considering attending graduate school. But how do you find the best ones? Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Thomas A. Benton, an English professor at Hope College made a stab at answering that question. He observed that the universities receiving the highest graduate...