The College Solutions Blog

October 10, 2012

Today I’m passing along a fascinating list that comes from Harvard Law School. The list you see below includes the 261 colleges and universities where members of the Class of 2013 law school students come from. Michelle Kretzschmur, the creator of Do-It-Yourself College Rankings sent me the link to the list because she knows how strongly I believe that students...

September 24, 2012

Note: I wrote this post about priority applications a year ago, but it’s just as timely now. LO I received an email yesterday from a friend of mine whose son is a brilliant high school senior. She wanted to know what they should think about invitations her son has received to apply to colleges through VIP or priority applications. Here...

September 12, 2012

At midnight East Coast time, U.S. News & World Report released its 2013 college rankings. And what a shocker – Harvard and Princeton tied for first in the national university category! Yale came in third. Among liberal arts colleges, Williams got the No. 1 ranking followed by Amherst. Equally shocking. (Please note my sarcasm.) Despite the annual hoopla over these...

August 21, 2012

How do you locate good colleges and universities? I get that question a lot. Today I want to share some online resources to find and research schools. In no particular order, here are resources to check out: 1. Do-It-Yourself College Rankings. Do-It-Yourself College Rankings is the creation of Michelle Kretzschmar, the mother of a college student, who has a background...

June 21, 2012

I’ve been devoting this week’s posts to college accountability. Are colleges and universities doing what we are paying them to do:  educating our children and preparing them for the working world? In most cases we don’t know.  If you missed my two previous posts, here they are: Sharing a College’s Return on Investment College + Degree = Joke? In my...

June 15, 2012

Today I am happy to share with you a thoughtful post that David Montesano, one of my favorite independent college college consultants, wrote about college rankings. Montesano is the owner of College Match Educational Consultants, which has offices in the San Francisco Bay area, Seattle and elsewhere. Three Degrees of College Prestige In an era where a sour economy is...

June 4, 2012

How’s this for a college mystery: Every year Barron’s releases its Profiles of American Colleges directory that categorizes schools based on their selectivity. During the past decade, the number of schools that are considered the easiest to get into declined considerably while the number of schools that are characterized as the most elite rose. According to a new report by...

May 30, 2012

If you didn’t catch yesterday’s college blog post, I’d urge you to check it out: Do-It-Yourself College Rankings I wrote about Michelle Kretzschmar,  who created an impressive spreadsheet system to help families assemble a list of promising colleges based on their own priorities. In today’s post I’m sharing some of the steps that Michelle, the founder of DIYCollegeRankings.com, and her...

May 29, 2012

It’s not often that I stumble across a college blog that I can get really excited about. Today I am happy to share a great resource that stands out from the crowd. I urge everyone to check out DIYCollegeRankings. DIYCollegeRankings (the DIY stands for Do It Yourself), which was created by Michelle Kretzschmar, a former data analyst and the mom...

May 25, 2012

A mom emailed me earlier this week and I’ve somehow managed to stretch out the topic of her concern to three posts. If you’re curious, here are the previous ones: Who Is Stressed Out About College? Do You Really Expect Me To Pay That Much for College? Today I’m going to address her chief question: What do you do if...