The College Solutions Blog

January 22, 2009

This is an exciting and nerve wracking time of year for high school seniors as they contemplate getting acceptance packages in the mail. Before making their final decisions, however, high schoolers should examine the freshmen retention rates of the colleges and universities remaining on their list. They should be extremely leery if any of their favorites has experienced a mass...

January 15, 2009

Underclassmen have been attending classes at universities the same way for generations. Students plunk down in a large lecture hall and listen (sometimes) to the professor droning up on a stage. The difference for today’s students is that increasingly it’s difficult to fall asleep during these lectures because the halls are often so jammed that stragglers have to stand in...

December 22, 2008

An increasing number of high school seniors are deciding to skip applying to private colleges and universities because they worry that the costs will be too high in these hard economic times. That was the gist of a story in today’s New York Times. While it’s always essential to apply to financial safety schools, families could be cutting off their...

November 16, 2008

I was talking to a professor at the University of California, San Diego, at a dinner party earlier this year about colleges (naturally) and we ended up discussing why it’s taking so long for kids to get college degrees today. At UCSD the four-year graduation rate is 53%. While that number is underwhelming for a top research university, if you...

November 13, 2008

Whenever I talk to parents or kids about college there’s one topic that always stuns them. The topic? Four-year graduation rates at many state universities. Out here in California, there are lots of schools in the Cal State system where the four-year graduation rates is below 10%. Nationwide the four-year graduation rate at public universities is 28%. For private universities...

November 10, 2008

Here is one of the cruel realities of getting a college degree today: While prices keep going up so do the number of part-time professors who are teaching on college campuses. Why does this matter? Because part-time instructors can pose a threat to your child finishing his or her degree. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to explore this topic...

November 4, 2008

It’s ridiculous trying to compete with the election hoopla, but I’m going to try and then I’ll be following the returns for the rest of the night… During the Bush years, the federal government argued that colleges and universities needed to prove that they are successfully educating their students. While I agreed with George W. Bush on few issues —...

October 25, 2008

One of the niftiest tools you can use when evaluating whether you can afford a college or university is its Common Data Set. When I was researching my book, The College Solution, I remember I was excited when I discovered the Common Data Set. Anytime that I research a school, I check out its latest Common Data Set. When you...

October 6, 2008

I’ve always been a nag about college rankings. It’s unfortunate that the first yardstick that many families grab when they are measuring schools is the annual US college rankings by U.S. News & World Reports. Simply whining about college rankings, however, isn’t very helpful, which is why I’m excited about a new report that was released today by the Association...

September 21, 2008

Finally, there’s a new way to evaluate colleges. No longer will you have to rely heavily on those monster guide books from such corporate types as The Princeton Review, Fiske and Kaplan. Nor will you have to become a slave to U.S. News & World Report’s stupid ranking system. A whiz kid, who graduated four years ago from Wesleyan College,...