The College Solutions Blog

June 15, 2009

With colleges struggling to provide adequate financial aid to their students, will affluent alumni step in to help? That apparently is what’s beginning to happen.  Last month three Harvard grads started a nonprofit loan program called UniThrive.  The goal is to play matchmaker to financially struggling students with alumni who are happy to make interest-free loans that come due five...

June 10, 2009

Are colleges favoring rich kids more than usual? A story in The New York Times suggests that private schools, which are hurting financially, are favoring affluent students whose parents can write fat tuition checks. The article focused on Reed College, which is an academically celebrated school that’s a magnet for iconoclastic students. With its endowment in the crapper and more...

May 29, 2009

How would you like to research a college in 10 minutes? Sound impossible? Not really. In my most recent college post for CBSMoneyWatch.com, I share three quick ways to research a school. I use these shortcuts all the time to help me size up a school pretty quickly....

May 28, 2009

Gov. Schwarzenegger has proposed putting the 50-year-old Cal Grant program on the chopping block. This would be a disaster for more than 200,000 students. According to The Institute for College Access & Success, these students would lose anywhere from $576 to $9,708 a head this fall. To save roughly $250 million, the governor would eliminate all Cal Grants, which students...

May 25, 2009

Many parents are frustrated that they can’t get face time with the college counselor at their teenager’s high school. All too often families can’t meet with a counselor until the spring of their child’s junior year. By then overworked counselors are finished with their latest batch of seniors and they are ready to devote their attention to the juniors. What...

May 11, 2009

One morning at a breakfast chat with parents at my son’s high school, the principal mentioned that he is always amazed at how few students at the end of each semester ask teachers how they might improve their grades. It should be a no brainer, the principal suggested, for students to ask their teachers if they can do extra credit...

April 28, 2009

Everybody whose child is in college or is heading there in the fall needs to repeat after me:  I will not leave money on the table. Huh? I suggested the oath after I discovered that millions of students are not applying for federal student aid. According to a new analysis by Mark Kantrowitz, who runs FinAid.org, 8.4 million students never...

April 19, 2009

I bet when you were touring college campuses you never heard anyone utter the word “gapping.” Gapping is an unpleasant phenomenon that strikes many families in the spring. It happens when a college offers a student a skimpier aid package than the financial aid formula would suggest. Here’s an example: Let’s say the formula concludes that your family could afford...

April 10, 2009

Colleges loath the “N” word. Administrators hate it when parents call them up and want to negotiate a better financial aid package. Well, that’s too bad. Colleges cost too much money for families to automatically agree to a six-figure commitment. If you’re going to negotiate, however, you’re nearly out of time. The traditional deadline for deposits to secure a spot...

April 1, 2009

While everyone likes to gripe about the cost of college, in the world of state flagship universities true bargains exist. UCLA and the University of California, Berkeley, are two of them. The tuition at each of those schools is below $7,000. In comparison, Harvard’s tuition is more than $36,000. The protests against annual rises at state institutions, however, has masked...