The College Solutions Blog

January 11, 2022

A critical part of the college search process is creating an excellent list of colleges, which often includes reach, target and safety schools. Families often slip badly on this extremely important yet tricky task of pulling together a solid college list. If a teenager creates a problematic list, parents can easily pay too much money for college. One of the...

July 16, 2015

While there are nearly 2,800 four-year colleges and universities in the United States, there are less than six dozen that claim that they meet 100% of the demonstrated financial need of all or most of their freshmen. The list below includes the names of those schools. I’ve also included institutions on this list that say that they meet at least...

March 11, 2015

This is the time of year when students are getting offered spots on waiting lists. I wanted to share a previous post that I wrote about waiting lists that is just as relevant today.  This weekend I heard from old friends who wanted to share with me stories of brilliant students who got shut out of elite universities. At a...

January 29, 2015

Parents and teenagers are already dreading the new, radically different SAT test that will debut in March 2016. If your child plans to take this test, you absolutely need to read the post below. Jed Applerouth, PhD, the founder of Applerouth Tutoring Services, shared his detailed thoughts about the revamped test with his own families and he gave me permission...

September 29, 2014

If your family will need to depend on financial aid to attend college, your best bet is to find a school that will offer an excellent financial aid package to your child. A handy way to assess the generosity of any school is to look at the percentage of demonstrated financial need it typically meets for its students. Teenagers, who...

April 22, 2014

In case you missed it, the College Board recently released many more details about its planned revision of the SAT test. You can see what’s in store at the College Board’s website dedicated to the SAT changes that are slated for the spring of 2016:  DeliveringOpportunity.org. I wrote a post for my college blog at CBS Moneywatch last week about...

July 3, 2013

I want to thank everyone for such thoughtful and helpful responses to the dad who is stressing out about encouraging his daughter to walk away from an expensive acceptance from Boston College and instead trot off this fall to the honors college at the University of Pittsburgh. I think it’s safe to say that there was an overriding consensus that...

March 19, 2013

What does the financial aid look like for a school that is generous? In my last post, I illustrated what a stingy university looks like using statistics that you can find on the College Board. If you missed the post, here it is: Is This University Stingy? Today I’m going to use the same tools to illustrate what a school...

March 15, 2013

If you require need-based financial, you should hunt for schools that are generous with their aid packages. This is the advice that I shared in my last college blog post: Where Is the Financial Aid Cash? If you didn’t read it, I’d suggest that you do before continuing on with this post. If money is an issue, students should be...

February 28, 2013

Change is coming to the SAT test. A vice president at the College Board emailed its members this week to announce that the College Board will be redesigning the SAT. This will be the first revamping since 2005 when the essay was added and those infuriating analogies (cake is to icing as a unicycle is to __) were banished. The...