The College Solutions Blog

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...

December 24, 2012

I wanted to wish everyone who visits my college blog a happy holiday. Unless you are a high school senior or the parent of one, I’d suggest this is an excellent time to forget about college for a week. That’s what I intend to do, which is why I won’t be writing any more blog posts until 2013. I am...

June 29, 2011

I don’t have to tell you that one of the biggest stresses of the entire college process is the standardized testing. The prospects of taking the SAT and/or ACT is daunting, particularly since so much can ride on the results. I resented the amount of time and money spent in my house on these darn tests for my own two...

June 28, 2011

Should professors work as hard as many of the rest of us? If you compare the sort of work week and vacation time that many professors enjoy with other highly educated professionals, you could conclude that there are a lot of slackers hanging out in the Ivory Towers. I hope that professor productivity becomes a big issue with the published...

March 3, 2011

Just what kind of student athletes are playing football in this country? Sports Illustrated and CBS has teamed up to produce an alarming special report that attempts to answer this question:  Special Report: Criminal Records in College Football. In putting together this series, SI and CBS conducted 7,030 background checks on 2,837 players who were on the rosters of SI’s...

January 7, 2011

After being knocked out for about 30 hours, my college blog is back online! I still am not sure what happened, but the host shut down my site after discovering what it termed “excessive activity.” This activity wasn’t coming from me. Someone might have been trying to break into my blog via WordPress and the host shut the whole thing...

August 10, 2009

Why can’t you take a literature course at Amherst College, a physics class at MIT and a journalism class at the University of Missouri and be on your way to obtaining a degree? This might seem like a silly question, but cobbling together a degree after taking virtual classes at different institutions might not seem so far-fetched in the future....

June 2, 2009

Does your child have shot at a college athletic scholarship? Having a daughter who plays varsity soccer in college, I know that parents secretly dream of the day that a Division I coach will call their house. A teenage jock faces a 2% chance of getting a Division I or Division II athletic scholarship. That doesn’t mean, however, that your...

May 20, 2009

My biggest regret after finishing my book, The College Solution, was that I didn’t include a chapter about athletic scholarships. With the book’s deadline looming, I decided to skip writing about college sports scholarships. When my book goes into a second printing, I’ll be sure to add one. I was reminded about my omission today during the most unlikely of...