The College Solutions Blog

October 21, 2009

Here’s a shocker:  College costs continue to rise. That is the verdict of the College Board’s annual college cost study. Tuition and fees at state schools jumped 6.5% and the tuition cost at private schools rose 4.4%. A few months ago, an association of private colleges and universities issued a press release congratulating their members for holding down the cost...

October 18, 2009

As usual, I’m sharing with you the posts that I wrote for my college blog for CBSMoneyWatch.com last week.  It was challenging for me to get them done because my son and I were traveling in the Midwest looking at colleges for the last time. Here are my three most recent posts: Want to Succeed in Business? Play Poker. I’m...

October 7, 2009

A high school counselor in Colombia asked me today how she could find American colleges that provide financial aid for international students who want to study in the United States. Actually, there are many schools that provide need-based aid to international students interested in American colleges and universities. Every year a member of the Overseas Association for College Admission Counseling...

September 30, 2009

I  spent some time yesterday afternoon listening to  Peter Johnson, the dean of admissions at Columbia University, talk to a dozen or so attentive students at High Tech High in San Diego.  The visit from an Ivy League admission dean at my son’s school isn’t as unusual as you might think. During the fall, it’s common to see admission officers...

September 22, 2009

Tell me if this makes sense: When private lenders got into the federal student loan business years ago, the federal government guaranteed that it would step in when student borrowers defaulted on their federal loans. The  government (us taxpayers) also gave the student loan lenders a fat subsidy to participate in this virtually risk-free business. You have no idea how...

September 6, 2009

Being the mother of a college junior and a high school senior, I’ve bought and skimmed through a lot of college books over the years. Many of them disappoint me because they are often focused on getting kids into the Ivy League. This fixation is ridiculously misplaced when you consider that only .2% of kids attend these eight schools. Frankly,...

September 2, 2009

All week I’ve been sharing great tools to research colleges. Today I want to feature the federal College Navigator. The College Navigator is a dull-looking website, but it contains incredible tools that tap into a vast college database that the U.S. Department of Education maintains. To illustrate what College Navigator can do, I’m using as an example Ohio State University,...

September 1, 2009

If you want to shrink the cost of college, you should become acquainted with something called the Common Data Set. The Common Data Set was dreamed up years ago as a way to satisfy collegiate publishers like US News & World Report and the College Board, which have voracious appetites for higher-ed statistics. Rather than answering every publisher’s questions, schools...

August 30, 2009

Don’t have time to track down relevant stories about college admissions, financial aid and important topics for families with teenagers? No worries. You can find lots of them right here at TheCollegeSolutionBlog.com and each weekend I also provide the links to the college posts that I write over at CBSMoneyWatch.com. Here are my CBS stories from the past week: Top...

August 6, 2009

When can a student be considered independent for financial aid purposes? This is a question that a lot of families ask as they contemplate their huge college expenses. When I was back in St. Louis, my hometown, earlier this summer, my nephew Nick asked whether he could qualify for federal financial aid as an independent student.  It’s obvious what the...