The College Solutions Blog

May 2, 2011

One of the best ways to cut the cost of college is to graduate in four years. This might seem like a no-brainer, but most college students can’t pull it off. Just over 50% of students, who started out as full-time freshmen, end up graduating in six years. In general, private schools do a better job than state schools of...

April 7, 2011

I received an email this week from a dad, whose daughter is weighing three college choices. Here they are: University of Texas at Austin University of Texas at Dallas University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School The dad explained to me that his daughter had won a full-ride scholarship to both Texas schools. The Penn degree would not be free. After subtracting...

March 28, 2011

This is an excerpt of a post that I wrote for my college blog at CBS MoneyWatch last week after attending the biggest annual college fair in San Diego. You can read the entire post here: What’s Wrong With America’s Dream Colleges When I looked at The Princeton Review’s newly released lists of America’s most popular dream colleges, Iimmediately saw...

March 13, 2011

Do you need to graduate from an Ivy League school or other super elite college to earn the highest salaries? Many families believe that graduates who can put Harvard or Yale on their resume will fare significantly better financially than smart students who end up earning their degrees from elsewhere. In a famous study, two economists tackled this question nearly...

March 8, 2011

Affluent families, who can afford to send their children anywhere to college, are becoming more discriminating. Some are questioning whether a private college that costs $50,000 or more is really worth the price. That’s one of the take-home messages of a podcast that I listened to recently on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s website. The newspaper interviewed John T. Lawlor,...

February 2, 2011

Yesterday I wrote a post that explored what types of schools enjoy the best graduation rates. If you missed it, here it is: Who Graduates In 4 Years? Today I’m sharing the 25 public universities where students enjoy the best chances of earning a diploma in four years. I pulled these figures off the federal database that goes by the...

January 31, 2011

Time is money and that is especially true when it comes to college. College students usually don’t graduate in four years and that comes as a shock to most parents. It should be no surprise that students at private non-profit schools graduate sooner than students at state universities, but there is variation within those two broad categories, according to statistics...

January 27, 2011

Earlier this week I shared some thoughtful comments from Alice Kleeman, a high school counselor in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Kris Hintz, an independent college counselor in New Jersey, who were responding to a post that I wrote on the higher-ed documentary Race to Nowhere. Here is the post that contains Kris and Alice’s comments: Phooey: Race to...

January 11, 2011

Yesterday I wrote a post on Asian parenting after reading a disturbing essay in the Wall Street Journal that was written by a Yale law professor/mother, who admitted to calling her daughter “garbage” and demanding that her children be No. 1 in academics. Here is my original post: Asian Students At UCLA, UCSD and UC Berkeley: The Price of Success?...

December 18, 2010

Race to Nowhere, a documentary about the stress that college-bound teenagers experience, has gotten a lot of attention. I first heard about Race to Nowhere a couple of weeks ago after I gave a college presentation to a group of financial advisers and their clients in Irvine, CA. An adviser, who raved about the film, wrote its title on his...