The College Solutions Blog

August 19, 2011

How do you cut the cost of college? The best way to shrink college costs is to be an educated consumer. If money is an issue – and it almost always is – you need to evaluate schools to determine which ones are generous and which are stingy. Here are 10 ways that can help you shave significant dollars off...

August 18, 2011

If anybody is interested in checking out a webinar that I did earlier this week on shrinking the cost of college — a favorite topic of mine — you can watch it now. I pulled together the webinar for Kaplan Test Prep and it was free and open to the public. I spoke for about 45 minutes on these sorts...

August 3, 2011

How do colleges decide which teenagers will win their merit scholarships? And, just as importantly, how do schools determine how much each scholarship winner will receive. I was excited to gain some insight into that question yesterday when I talked to Jonathan Burdick, the undergraduate admissions and financial aid director at the University of Rochester. After the latest admission season...

July 26, 2011

If you’ve spent much time on my college blog, you already know that published college price tags are meaningless. Most students receive some type of price break, thanks to federal or state grants and/or discounts from the schools themselves. What is far more important than a sticker price is a school’s net price. It’s All About the Net Price A...

July 21, 2011

Interested in some summer reading? I’ve got bookcases packed with college books in my home office. In this YouTube video, however, I share some of my favorite books about college. College Workshop I’ll be giving the final college workshop this Saturday (July 23) in a summer series for parents and teenagers at the University of California, San Diego. If you’d...

July 20, 2011

The majority of families end up borrowing for college. But when parents and teenagers talk about how they are going to divide up that responsibility, they rarely possess a good idea of what this debt burden is going to mean for them when the bills come due. That’s why I’m recommending a  tool from SimpleTuition, an aggregator of private student...

July 15, 2011

My last post focused on net price calculators that colleges and universities must have installed on their websites by late October. If you missed it, here it is: A New Way to Add Up the Cost of College Today, I want to share a nifty online tool from COLLEGEdata that can help you get a sense of how much a...

July 1, 2011

This week the U.S. Department of Education released lists of the most expensive state and private colleges and universities in America. The goal of pointing fingers, which was mandated by Congress, was to shine the spotlight on schools which don’t seem at all ashamed of their high prices. Here’s where you can find all the college lists. I wasn’t surprised...

June 19, 2011

When students are shopping for colleges, admission representatives typically urge them to ignore the sticker price. Here’s what these college reps routinely say:  We’ve got lots of financial aid and scholarships. Just APPLY! I was reminded of why applying blind is such a reckless strategy when a mom contacted me after her husband heard me give a college talk recently...

June 6, 2011

When you are looking at colleges, don’t believe the sticker price. Why? Because college are priced like airline tickets. Everybody pays a different fare. When I give talks to families with teenagers, that’s one of the first points that I emphasize. It’s your job then to find colleges and universities that are not only great academic fits, but also financial...