The College Solutions Blog

March 19, 2013

What does the financial aid look like for a school that is generous? In my last post, I illustrated what a stingy university looks like using statistics that you can find on the College Board. If you missed the post, here it is: Is This University Stingy? Today I’m going to use the same tools to illustrate what a school...

February 26, 2013

Where do the best college professors teach? This is an important question, particularly when you consider that traditional college professors are disappearing. Less than one out of three teachers on college campuses today are tenured or on the tenured track. Most college students today are being taught primarily by graduate students and part-time faculty. (See my post below about why...

February 20, 2013

I received an email the other day from a college professor that reminded me once again that many wonderful schools exist beyond the cramped clique of institutions that hog most of the media’s attention. One place to look for promising academic opportunities can be at honors colleges within state universities. Honors colleges are fairly recent phenomenon. According to the National...

February 13, 2013

In his State of the Union address last night, President Obama struck a blow for higher-ed transparency. In his address, Obama announced the release of a new College Scorecard that, he said,  “parents and students can use to compare schools based on a simple criteria: where you can get the most bang for your educational buck.” Every school now has...

February 6, 2013

The steady trickle of colleges and universities that have admitted to fudging the figures that they send to U.S. News & World Report could end up changing the college rankings submission rules. In an interview published today in Inside Higher Ed, Brian Kelly, the editor and chief content officer at U.S. News, said that the college rankings giant is considering...

December 3, 2012

Today’s post comes courtesy of a new website, LiberalArtsColleges.com, which was created by David Kochanek after he realized that there wasn’t a single online source dedicated to all liberal arts colleges. As some of you know, I’m a huge admirer of liberal arts colleges and both of my children ended up at one.  I believe liberal arts colleges represent the...

November 28, 2012

In my last college blog post I wrote about how some colleges and universities are exploiting their nontenured professors. If you missed it, here it is: The Dangers of Being Taught by Part-Time Professors This is such an important subject for families with college-bound teenagers that I’m sharing more information courtesy of Josh Boldt, an adjunct professor and the creator...

November 26, 2012

When your teenagers reach college, who will be teaching them? Chances are excellent that many of your children’s professors will be part-timers or full-time professors without any chance of getting tenured. The number of adjunct professors on college campuses has soared in the past decade. Today only thirty percent of college professors have tenure or are on the tenure track....

October 24, 2012

Earlier this year, I wrote a college blog post after hearing from an affluent mom in Washington state named Lynne, who used 66 net price calculators (!!) to determine which schools would offer the best awards to her bright daughter. Making Cost Comparisons a Snap It can take a long time to using these invaluable net price calculators and clearly...

October 19, 2012

How do you know if the college or university that your child ultimately attends will provide him or her with an excellent education? You won’t. College pricing is inching closer to transparency thanks to net price calculators, but it’s largely impossible to form an educated opinion about the strength of a school’s learning environment beyond checking  an institution’s graduation rates....