The College Solutions Blog

September 14, 2011

Do you have to visit a college before you apply? It’s always better if you arrange a college tour and spend quality time at schools before finalizing your list, but financially it’s often not possible. There are things you can do, however, to help you assess whether a college would be a great match while at the same time letting...

March 24, 2011

Can Facebook hurt a teenager’s chances of getting accepted to colleges? Specifically can the stuff that students post on Facebook impact their chances? Unigo, the popular college research website, recently posed that question to admission experts from around the country. Unigo offered to share some of the responses with my college blog visitors.  You can find the rest of the...

September 30, 2010

What is the best way to support your college students when they head off to college? I began exploring this question in my last post: Staying in Touch With College Students Today I’m going to share some examples of what parents can do for their children besides writing those big tuition checks.  These ideas come from the authors of The...

September 28, 2010

When children head off to college how much contact should parents have with them? This question has generated a lot of angst over the years and maybe it’s because nobody knows how much communication is appropriate. Is one call a week enough? How about a dozen? Do text messages and E-mails count? And what about Skype, instant messaging, Google Voice...

January 11, 2010

Want to research colleges, but not sure where to start? It’s no surprise. When I just typed “college” into Google, I got 634 million college websites. To make your job easier, I’m sharing wonderful websites that can help you assemble a great list of colleges. If you want to research specific colleges, here are my Top 10  College Websites: College...

December 30, 2009

High schools students have started receiving college acceptance letters. A student writing on The New York Times’ college blog today suggests that teenagers shouldn’t brag when they start getting acceptance letters. Specifically, she believes that sharing college admission news on Facebook is in poor taste. The freshman at Northwestern argues that bragging about college acceptances will crush the spirits of...

October 8, 2009

How do teenagers find great colleges? Traditional ways have included buying a copy of one of those big, fat guidebooks such as Princeton Review’s The Best 371 Colleges and the Fiske Guide to Colleges. Or teenagers look at US News’ college rankings. Today, however, you can discover higher-ed possibilities by turning to online college matchmakers. Here are two popular matchmakers:...

September 28, 2009

For those of you who have been visiting my college blog for awhile, you know that every weekend I link to college posts that I wrote during the week for CBSMoneyWatch.com. I never got to do that this weekend because while I was in Baltimore covering an education convention my net book broke. Exquisitely bad timing. I’m now back in...

September 9, 2009

I’m not on Facebook. Okay, I’m a loser. Or at least that’s the vibe that I’ve gotten when people learn that I am Facebook-less. If I truly want to create a buzz around my college book and my college blogs, I’ve been told that I need to be on Facebook. Yet Facebook seems like a endless popularity contest — the...