The College Solutions Blog

May 3, 2011

In my last post, I shared how you can pinpoint the four-year graduation rates of any college or university. If you missed it, here is the post: Will Your Child Graduate From College in 4 Years? As I mentioned yesterday, it should be no surprise that students at private non-profit schools typically graduate sooner than students at state universities, but...

May 2, 2011

One of the best ways to cut the cost of college is to graduate in four years. This might seem like a no-brainer, but most college students can’t pull it off. Just over 50% of students, who started out as full-time freshmen, end up graduating in six years. In general, private schools do a better job than state schools of...

April 16, 2011

Where do you begin a college search? When you research colleges, you’re going to want to find schools that will provide your teenagers with an excellent education and get them out the door in four years. But how do you even start such a daunting college search? Scattered around my blog, I’ve written plenty about how to conduct a college...

April 15, 2011

It’s decision time for high school seniors who typically have until May 1 to decide where they’re going to attend college in the fall. Recognizing it’s crunch time, someone at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA, sent me a list of eight tips that Suzanne Holland, an ethics and religion professor at the liberal arts college, compiled. Most...

March 28, 2011

This is an excerpt of a post that I wrote for my college blog at CBS MoneyWatch last week after attending the biggest annual college fair in San Diego. You can read the entire post here: What’s Wrong With America’s Dream Colleges When I looked at The Princeton Review’s newly released lists of America’s most popular dream colleges, Iimmediately saw...

March 10, 2011

Yesterday I wrote about college coop programs that link students up with jobs while they are still students. Here is the post: Do You Need a Coop Program To Get a Job? What I am far more interested in sharing is what these and other private universities, many of which are located on the East Coast, cost. I’m going to...

March 8, 2011

Affluent families, who can afford to send their children anywhere to college, are becoming more discriminating. Some are questioning whether a private college that costs $50,000 or more is really worth the price. That’s one of the take-home messages of a podcast that I listened to recently on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s website. The newspaper interviewed John T. Lawlor,...

March 4, 2011

With support from their state governments dwindling, some state flagship universities are seeking greater autonomy. Among the schools clamoring for more freedom are the University of Oregon, Louisiana State and University of Wisconsin, where my mother earned her master’s degree decades ago. I read a story in The New York Times yesterday about these universities lobbying for more freedom here:...

February 17, 2011

There are many websites that you can research the financial aid practices of individual schools. Today I’m going to focus on an especially helpful site — the federal College Navigator. The College Navigator is not flashy, but it contains incredible tools that tap into the US Department of Education’s vast college database. The College Navigator provides information on individual schools...

February 10, 2011

Many teenagers that I meet would love to attend a public university outside their state – or at least they think they would. Out here in California, teenagers seem to be particularly interested in other flagships in the West – University of Colorado, University of Washington and University of Oregon. Of course, plenty of teenagers in places where it’s currently...