The College Solutions Blog

December 15, 2009

This is the time of year when families of high school seniors start asking questions about financial aid forms. Most parents will only need to complete the FAFSA or Free Application for Federal Student Aid. A few hundred private schools also require the CSS/Financial Aid PROFILE. I just got a call from a dear friend, who had been notified by...

December 10, 2009

This is the time for parents of high school seniors to start thinking about applying for financial aid. I was reminded of that today when the college counselor at my son’s high school asked me to talk to his advisory group about the FAFSA and the CSS Financial Aid Profile. Just about everybody in the room had heard of the...

December 7, 2009

What’ the right way to pay back your student debt? It’s a question that puzzles a lot of college graduates, who are trying to figure out how to best juggle their student loans. For some college grads, student loan consolidation will be a smart idea. What’s also important is choosing the right payment option for student debt. Kathy Kristof, a...

December 6, 2009

10 Best and Worst States for Student Loan Debt Many of the states with the highest student loan debt levels are in the Northeast. In contrast, the states with the lowest student debt levels are in the West and South. That was one of the subjects that I wrote about last week for CBSMoneyWatch.com.  In my post,  I shared the...

November 24, 2009

I’m going to be surprised if the soaring level of college student loan debt doesn’t become a political issue. The number of student loan defaults and delinquencies are rising. The latest statistics on student loan delinquencies are shocking.  The Student Lending Analytics Blog just crunched the Federal Reserve numbers on student loan delinquencies and came up with these dreary stats: More...

November 15, 2009

Here are links to my college blog posts for CBSMoneyWatch for the past week: The Horrors of Defaulting on a Student Loan In some respects, the college admission process can be fun. It’s fun to visit colleges and it’s fun to  receive acceptance letters in the mail. What’s not fun is paying for college. Sometimes that turns into a nightmare...

September 22, 2009

Tell me if this makes sense: When private lenders got into the federal student loan business years ago, the federal government guaranteed that it would step in when student borrowers defaulted on their federal loans. The  government (us taxpayers) also gave the student loan lenders a fat subsidy to participate in this virtually risk-free business. You have no idea how...

August 2, 2009

I told you so! That’s what I was thinking when I wrote one of my college blog posts last week for CBSMoneyWatch.com. With the media writing nonstop about how teenagers could only afford public institutions in this wretched economy, I must have looked like a lunatic when I insisted that private colleges could still be the cheapest alternative for many...

July 11, 2009

Here’s my weekend college blog roundup of the posts that I wrote during the past few days for CBSMoneyWatch.com. Hope you enjoy them. Is Harvard Going Broke? If you’ve been struggling to stay on a budget, you might appreciate what’s happening at Harvard, which is experiencing the worst financial crisis of its 373-year history. The Soaring Popularity of College Student...

July 6, 2009

The new federal student loan forgiveness program sounds like a great idea, but it’s not nearly as helpful as it could be. The public service student loan forgiveness plan is intended to help college students who are leery about going into lower paying public-service and nonprofit jobs, such as teaching and social work, because of their student debt. To nudge...