The College Solutions Blog

September 28, 2008

I spent most of last week in Seattle attending the annual convention of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. About 5,500 high school counselors and college admission officers poured into the city’s convention center for the mega event. I rented a booth at the convention in hopes of spreading the word about my new book, The College Solution: A...

September 17, 2008

Anxious about college? Hey who isn’t, but maybe I can help. Safari Books Online will be hosting a free Webcast that will feature me talking about college strategies. The webcast will be held at 1:30 ET Tuesday (Sept. 23) and you can register here. If you attend the Webcast, you will receive free access to the online version of my...

August 19, 2008

Before teenagers start pouring over the Fiske Guide to Colleges, the Princeton Review’s 368 Best Colleges, U.S. News & World Report rankings or any other publication, they need to think about what makes them tick. Teens can’t really find wonderful academic fits until they examine their own personalities, as well as their likes and dislikes. A friend of mine who...

August 16, 2008

For anyone who would like to hear me talk about college strategies, I will be in the studios of KPBS, the public radio station in San Diego (89.5 FM), on Monday. I’ll be chatting and answering listeners’ questions from 10 a.m. to 10:25 a.m. on the These Days program. If you can’t catch it, you can hear the segment later...

August 7, 2008

When Harvard sneezes, the media rushes to cover it. It’s amazing how Harvard and the seven other Ivy League schools can command so much interest in the national media when so few students even attend these schools. Here is the reality: The only Ivy most teenagers are going to come into contact with is the poison ivy variety. While there...

May 24, 2008

A story that I wrote for USA Today about Gen X-ers and their money troubles appeared this week in the newspaper. Here is the link. A couple of things amazed me about the story. One was the reaction of readers. The article triggered about 900 comments and a lot of them seemed to be from older Americans –baby boomers on...

May 15, 2008

I’m not sure how I get on these mailing lists, but I occasionally receive emails from promoters who assume that I’m in the business of ripping off seniors or anybody else who crosses my path. These promoters promise to show me how to peddle variable and equity indexed annuities to the unsuspecting and make big bucks. Not surprisingly, these emails...

May 2, 2008

Earlier today, I had my own little experience with the global economy when my Internet connection vanished. After trying to dodge Cox Communication’s automated helper who drives me nuts, I finally got to talk to a real person who suggested that Cox wasn’t the problem. “Must be your router,” the Cox technician concluded. As it turns out, she was right....

April 25, 2008

By now most American consumers probably know that they can obtain their credit reports for free. Once a year, anybody can order a gratis credit report from each of the three major credit bureaus — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. You can obtain any of the reports by heading to AnnualCreditReport.com. Obviously, it’s a smart idea to take advantage of this...

April 18, 2008

I’ve spent most of my week working on a series of stories for a national publication on the prospects of Gen Xers and retirement. You are a Gen Xer if you were born roughly between 1965 and 1980. Not surprisingly, the phrase that keeps recycling in my brain as I report on the retirement prospects for many Gen Xers is...