The College Solutions Blog

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...

August 24, 2010

One of the problems with paying for college is that you don’t know how much it’s going to cost. Many students won’t receive their financial aid awards until the spring. And colleges expect families to start paying a short time later. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could know well ahead of time whether a school is going to be...

August 18, 2010

Wednesday was surreal. I got up before dawn and schlepped up to Ontario, CA, to attend an educational conference of a new organization called the National College Advocacy Group. I’ve listened in on some excellent webinars that the NCAG has hosted and this was the first time that I had an opportunity to meet college consultants in the organization. The...

August 17, 2010

It’s back-to-school season, which means college students are on the prowl for cheap textbooks. The average college student spends more than $1,100 a year on college textbooks. With textbook prices rising twice as fast as inflation during the past 20 years, I’d sure be looking for cheap textbooks if I was a student. There are more options than ever to...

August 16, 2010

I had a mom email me today who has been doing her homework this summer. Specifically, she’s been reading my eBook, Shrinking the Cost of College: 152 Ways to Cut the Price of a Bachelor’s Degree, in the hopes of making college more affordable for her family. After I emailed her back, I thought I’d share what I told her...

August 9, 2010

Americans now owe more money on their college loans than they do on credit cards. I just read about that scary reality on The Wall Street Journal’s website. According to Mark Kantrowitz, the financial aid guru over at FinAid and Fastweb, Americans owe about $829.7 billion in student loans. In comparison, consumers owe $826.5 billion in revolving credit card debt....