The College Solutions Blog

June 30, 2014

If you’ve ever spent time  on FinAid, the popular website stuffed with information about financial aid, you’ll definitely want to bookmark a new website called Edvisors. Mark Kantrowitz, the founder of FinAid, and a nationally recognized financial-aid expert, left the site last year to create a new online resource at Edvisors for anyone interested in how to pay for college....

June 23, 2014

When you are contemplating how much a bachelor’s degree is going to cost your family, you must keep this in mind: Colleges and universities are high-stakes businesses that want to charge you more than you feel comfortable paying. Your best weapon to make college more affordable is to become an empowered consumer. I am absolutely dead serious when I say...

June 3, 2014

If your child is a “B” student, he or she may have more options than you might assume. Don’t believe me? Here is a story of a young woman – I’ll call her Katie – whose mom is a friend of mine. Katie attended a private high school in California where she earned a 3.0 GPA. She applied to these...

May 27, 2014

As recently as the early 1990s, most students did not take out college loans. Today about two out of every three students borrow to pay for college due to the runaway cost of college. The typical student borrower is now leaving school with debt of $29,400. Just the outstanding federal college loan debt now exceeds credit-card debt. Is $29,400 a...

May 13, 2014

Today I’m sharing with you a new online tool that you can easily use to generate quick cost estimates and comparisons at individual colleges. All you need is to start playing with the universal net price calculator that you’ll find on the website of the Cost of Learning.  This new website aims to make it easy for families to retrieve...

May 5, 2014

A highly effective way to make college more affordable is to enroll in my upcoming course, The College Cost Lab. You can learn more about the class and enroll here. Lynn O’Shaughnessy Will your child end up going to his or her dream school? The odds are that your child won’t if the college or university is a rankings alpha...

April 27, 2014

Last month, my husband and I sent off our final college payment. Bruce and I made monthly payments for seven consecutive years for our daughter Caitlin and our son Ben, who will be graduating from college in May. We did not take out any loans to pay for college and neither did our children. Our daughter Caitlin took the picture...

April 16, 2014

The No. 1 way to cut the cost of college is to become an educated consumer. You can learn how by attending my popular online course, The College Cost Lab. I’ll be relaunching the course in June 2016 and if you’d like to be notified when I have more details, please click here! As promised, today I am sharing my...

April 14, 2014

Don’t become a victim of the college process like the angry mom you’ll read about below! A highly effective way to make college more affordable is to enroll in my upcoming course, The College Cost Lab. You can learn more about the class and enroll here. Lynn O’Shaughnessy I am sharing with you today an angry comment sent to me...

April 9, 2014

I received an email recently from a mom who was upset because her smart daughter didn’t receive any scholarships from the schools on her list. All the school were prestigious public flagships outside her state. These institutions will be among the toughest to receive meaningful scholarships from because they are most demand from their own state residents and they can...