The College Solutions Blog

April 28, 2011

How do you know if a school is going to be generous to your child? Here’s a quick answer:  Check the numbers. Or as I like to say, check the financial fingerprint of any school that’s on your teenager’s list. There are many ways to determine whether a school is generous or not, but today I’m going to focus on...

February 6, 2011

I wrote this post for my college blog over at US News & World Report last week. I wanted to share it with you….. Winning private college scholarships can certainly help make college more affordable, but you need to know the realities of competing for college cash. A handy resource to turn to is a new book, Secrets to Winning...

November 29, 2010

My last college blog post focused on a dilemma that many families face. When parents calculate what their Expected Family Contribution is, they discover it’s far higher than they anticipated. If you missed the post, here it is: Is Your EFC Too High? Today I want to stay on that topic and share an email that I received from a...

November 28, 2010

Is your EFC too high? I have been hearing from families of high school seniors who have calculated their preliminary EFC or Expected Family Contribution and are now panicking. They can’t believe how high their EFC is. Your EFC can provide a decent idea of what a college will assume you could pay for one year of college. If you...

November 15, 2010

If you’ve been a regular visitor to my college blog, you know that college price tags are meaningless. A $50,000 college, for example, could cost some families less than a $25,000 school. More families in my state of California are beginning to realize this. I bet that’s why expensive private schools such as Whitman College, Colgate University and Swarthmore College...

October 18, 2010

I am sure that I ticked off a fair number of high school counselors yesterday when I wrote this post: Why High School Counselors Don’t Know Much About College I wanted to follow up with a list of things that the typical high school counselors doesn’t know. This list could have been much longer, but since people are impatient on...

October 10, 2010

Should colleges continue to give merit scholarships to rich students? The vast majority of colleges and universities in this country dispense money to rich kids through merit scholarships or grants. The higher-ed world isn’t proud of this practice, but it’s pervasive. I ended up talking about this phenomenon this weekend when I was visiting my daughter Caitlin, who is a...

September 12, 2010

Do you know what the term Expected Family Contribution or EFC means? Most of you probably don’t so I’m going to devote the next couple of blog posts to explaining what an Expected Family Contribution or EFC is and why it’s so incredibly important. If you file for financial aid, you will obtain your EFC, but I think you should...

September 9, 2010

Yesterday I shared an easy way to to obtain early decision statistics from individual colleges and universities. Here is the post: Finding the Success Rate of Applying Early Decision As I promised at the time, I want to delve into the specifics of a high school senior, I’m going to call her Sarah, who wants to apply early decision to...

September 5, 2010

How can you tell if a college or university will cut the price for your child? You can get an idea by looking at a school’s Common Data Set. If you don’t know what a Common Data Set is, you’ll want to read the posts that I wrote last week on this valuable document: Researching Colleges With the Common Data...