The College Solutions Blog

August 25, 2014

My son Ben is heading back to high school this week. Ben graduated from Beloit College in May with a degree in mathematics, but his new school year started this morning at Lincoln High, a predominantly Hispanic school in Denver.  He will be spending the year as a teacher-in-training in the classrooms of two mentor mathematics teachers. Through the Teacher...

December 4, 2011

Last week, a mom asked me on my Facebook page what constitutes good SAT scores. I told her it depends on the caliber of the school. At some colleges a 1600 out of a 2400 score is above average while at other schools, applicants with that kind of score wouldn’t even be seriously considered. At some of the nation’s most...

June 3, 2011

Here is something that really irritates me about the whole college process:  too many families view it as a game. Their aim is to get their child into the best school possible. Fair enough, but what’s often overlooked is making sure that teenagers are well prepared for whatever college they end up at. Too many parents assume that their children...

November 16, 2010

How many times have you read news accounts about American students lagging behind countless other countries in academic achievement? In a recent standardized test of math proficiency, we’re way behind Taiwan (No. 1), Hong Kong (No. 2) and Korea (No. 3), but wait. We can’t even compete with the likes of Slovenia and the Slovak Republic. When I’ve read the...

October 13, 2010

There are a couple of reasons why I’m glad that my two children, who are both in college, aren’t toddlers. One reason is obvious. I don’t think I’d have the energy today to chase toddlers around. The second reason occurred to me last week when I reading a story in The New York Times entitled, Picture Books No Longer a...

November 19, 2009

Are high school students ready for college? Many of them aren’t. According to ACT Inc., only 23% of recent high school graduates, who took the ACT test, were prepared for college. When the ACT examined its latest crop of statistics, the test maker concluded that less than one in four high school graduates was academically prepared in these four key...

July 5, 2009

One of the best ways you can prepare your teenager for college is to encourage them to read.  As a practical matter, a teenager who reads is not only likely to achieve better grades in high school, but also earn higher scores on the SAT or ACT. I understand how hard it can be to get many teenagers to read....