The College Solutions Blog

October 4, 2010

How do you maximize potential financial aid awards? Today I want to share with you a wonderful resource – TuitionCoach — that may be able to help you do just that. Until last week, you had to pay to use TuitionCoach, but not anymore. The site contains college funding videos, a library of financial aid resources and software that can...

October 4, 2010

Should parents help pay for college? For a lot of people who visit my college blog this is going to seem like a no brainer. There are, however, parents who are determined to foist the whole cost of college onto their kids. I can certainly understand why a mom or dad, who makes little money, couldn’t help. But you can...

October 1, 2010

Do you use Expedia, Orbitz or Travelocity when you book a flight or find a rental car? Have you used Zillow when you’re searching for a house or Carfax when looking for a used Honda? Using these website and others like it has made buying all sorts of stuff easier. One big ticket item, however, that’s resisted this kind of...

September 15, 2010

I knew I was in a foreign country today when I looked outside my hotel window and saw a billboard that contained this message: Be health conscience. Eat a coconut every day. I’m in Jamaica, where I’ll be the featured (and apparently heavily promoted) speaker at a first annual college conference in Kingston. What could I possibly tell these Jamaican...

September 13, 2010

In my last blog, I talked about why it’s important to know what your EFC or Expected Family Contribution is. Here is the post: What Is Your EFC? Today, I’m going to show you how you can get a preliminary EFC, which is not as hard as you might think. You just need to use an online EFC calculator. Here...

September 12, 2010

Do you know what the term Expected Family Contribution or EFC means? Most of you probably don’t so I’m going to devote the next couple of blog posts to explaining what an Expected Family Contribution or EFC is and why it’s so incredibly important. If you file for financial aid, you will obtain your EFC, but I think you should...

September 10, 2010

The last two days I’ve been writing about applying early decision in the college admission process. Here are my two posts: Finding the Success Rate of Applying Early Decision Case Study: Applying Early Decision After reading my case study post, a mom posed with her own question about early decision. I decided to answer her here.  I promise this will...

September 9, 2010

Yesterday I shared an easy way to to obtain early decision statistics from individual colleges and universities. Here is the post: Finding the Success Rate of Applying Early Decision As I promised at the time, I want to delve into the specifics of a high school senior, I’m going to call her Sarah, who wants to apply early decision to...

September 5, 2010

How can you tell if a college or university will cut the price for your child? You can get an idea by looking at a school’s Common Data Set. If you don’t know what a Common Data Set is, you’ll want to read the posts that I wrote last week on this valuable document: Researching Colleges With the Common Data...

August 25, 2010

It’s still summer, but I’ve already gotten my first question about early decision. I thought I’d share the question posed by a mom, lets call her Susanna, whose daughter wants to apply early decision to William and Mary College in Williamsburg, VA. If you don’t know what ED is, here is the definition of early decision. This is the mom’s...