The College Solutions Blog

September 29, 2014

Many financial aid letters are confusing. Perhaps the staffers generating these letters have been conversing in financial-aid speak for so long that they have lost their ability to communicate in plain English. Of course, the cynical explanation for unhelpful financial aid awards is that many schools don’t want families to know when an offer is pathetic. Obfuscation is an effective way to keep...

September 29, 2014

While there are nearly 2,800 four-year colleges and universities in the United States, there are just over five dozen that claim that they meet 100% of their students’ financial need. Even though some schools say they meet 100% of need, this doesn’t mean that the financial aid packages will be identical for a student applying to these institutions. Far from...

September 29, 2014

The screenshot above is of a webinar that I recorded for the winter 2017 class where I  discussed ways to boost your child’s chances of admission that may also lead to better aid packages or merit awards. You can watch this webinar by clicking on this link:  Increasing Admission Chances (To watch the entire recording, you MUST download it onto...

September 29, 2014

During this course, I’ve been encouraging families to consider casting a wider net when searching for promising schools and also potentially better prices. Many families, however, are stumped about how to generate ideas beyond the usual suspects. In this lesson I am sharing resources to help families broaden their searches and to evaluate the schools on their lists. I am...

September 29, 2014

College sticker prices are often meaningless because most students at state and private universities don’t pay it. Published prices, however, can be a helpful starting point when exploring what kind of price break, in the form of scholarship and grants, your child might get at a particular institution. Here’s an example: Your teenager receives a $15,000 annual merit award at...

September 29, 2014

This course is focused on how to make college more affordable, but you can’t talk about escalating prices without exploring one of the chief culprits — U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings. For all its power, U.S. News is actually a shell of its former self. It’s not even a magazine anymore. It now rates all sorts of stuff for its survival including...

September 29, 2014

To learn more about the recruiting process, I talked with Avi Stopper, a former college athlete and a co-founder of CaptainU, which could be called an athletic LinkedIn that helps student athletes to connect with athletic coaches. Stopper, who is a former men’s soccer coach at the University of Chicago, launched CaptainU when he was in the school’s MBA program. Over the...

September 29, 2014

Are you wondering if your child will someday win an athletic scholarship? Some of the parents who are dreaming of sports scholarships have children who are only in grade school and middle school. Even my own sister, whose daughter is 12, believes that a soccer scholarship is in her future. The reality is that athletic scholarships aren’t nearly as plentiful or...

September 29, 2014

One of the most infuriating aspects of the college admission process is this: Traditionally, you couldn’t know what any college was going to cost until your child received his or her financial aid or merit award package. Even worse, you might not have gotten the offer until the spring, which would give you little time to select a school by...

September 29, 2014

Millions of parents believe that private scholarships are the largest source of college money. When many parents contemplate how they are going to pay for college, they envision their children hustling for private scholarships that are offered by foundations, charities, companies and civic groups. Private scholarship, however, represent the smallest source of college money. For most students, it’s likely that...