The College Solutions Blog

January 20, 2012

The last  couple of days, I’ve been  exploring why some teenagers can’t emotionally handle their freshman year in college while other students behave worse than toddlers. Here are the posts:  A Nightmarish Experience at an Ohio University Could This Student’s Freshman Year Have Been Saved? I was ready to move on to other topics – some parents have been asking...

August 4, 2011

My son is counting down the days until he arrives back at college. He’s got 23 days to go. Ben will be a sophomore so getting ready for college isn’t going to be as big a deal as it was last year. He was lucky that his school — Beloit College — provides storage for students so he left most...

August 11, 2010

I’m getting up before dawn tomorrow. My son Ben and I are catching a 6:45 a.m. flight to Chicago. Ben will be starting college on Saturday and he’s nervous. But hey, aren’t all college freshmen nervous? Coincidentally, I found a great blog post today, written by two college professors, who shared ways that college freshmen can increase their confidence. Here...

July 14, 2010

Are you jealous that your child is in college and you’re stuck at home paying for it? I feel that way sometimes and so do many of my friends. But when I get nostalgic about my own days at the University of Missouri, I realize that I have conveniently forgotten about a certain aspect of college life. At some point,...

November 17, 2009

Here’s something else for parents of college students to worry about:  students living in coed college dorms end up abusing alcohol more. Students living in a coed college dorm are more likely to drink alcohol and they are roughly 2 1/2 times more likely to drink excessively. In a study conducted by the Journal of American College Health, 41.5% of...

October 26, 2009

When I visited college campuses with both my teenagers, the college dorms were often a big selling point. It seems the tour guides were always raving about the newest dorms on campus and clearly universities are using their new dorms as a recruiting tool. While there are still plenty of dorm rooms on college campuses that look like cinderblock cells,...

February 23, 2009

With the economy in unspeakably bad shape, higher ed insiders have begun wondering if the frills that students and parents have been demanding for years are endangered. Do college students really need sushi bars, omelet stations, full vegan menus and lobster nights? For that matter, how many cereal brands is enough? “Is having seven cereals in the dining hall instead...