The College Solutions Blog

May 9, 2016

When building a college list, it’s critical to check graduation rates. Paying for college is hard enough without adding a fifth or six year to the tab! And yet most college students do not graduate in four years. Many, many parents whom I’ve talked to over the years seem shocked by this reality. In fact, when I give talks to...

September 13, 2013

I am holding one of my rare workshops at University of California, San Diego on Oct. 5 that will focus on how to find and pay for colleges. This will probably be the last workshop that I do at UCSD because I truly hate doing the marketing for it. If you enroll in this 3.5-hour workshop, I promise you that...

April 10, 2012

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’ve been getting questions from parents who are agonizing about where their teenagers should attend college. It’s a tough decision and time is running out to pick the winners. The national deposit day for freshman is May 1. Here are some of choices facing a family that contacted me yesterday: College of Wooster, University...

August 11, 2011

Some things about college are easy to measure. It’s easy to determine the win-loss record of the football or basketball teams. It’s easy to find out how many kids graduate in four years. (Nationally only about 35% pull this off.) It’s easy to determine if the campus is pretty or if the dorm food sucks. It’s awfully hard, however, to...

May 3, 2011

In my last post, I shared how you can pinpoint the four-year graduation rates of any college or university. If you missed it, here is the post: Will Your Child Graduate From College in 4 Years? As I mentioned yesterday, it should be no surprise that students at private non-profit schools typically graduate sooner than students at state universities, but...

May 2, 2011

One of the best ways to cut the cost of college is to graduate in four years. This might seem like a no-brainer, but most college students can’t pull it off. Just over 50% of students, who started out as full-time freshmen, end up graduating in six years. In general, private schools do a better job than state schools of...

February 2, 2011

Yesterday I wrote a post that explored what types of schools enjoy the best graduation rates. If you missed it, here it is: Who Graduates In 4 Years? Today I’m sharing the 25 public universities where students enjoy the best chances of earning a diploma in four years. I pulled these figures off the federal database that goes by the...

January 31, 2011

Time is money and that is especially true when it comes to college. College students usually don’t graduate in four years and that comes as a shock to most parents. It should be no surprise that students at private non-profit schools graduate sooner than students at state universities, but there is variation within those two broad categories, according to statistics...

June 17, 2010

How do you cut the cost of college? Recently I shared 10 tips on the first session of #CollegeChat, which is a live monthly conversation for teens, college students and parents on Twitter. I pulled all the tips from my new eBook, Shrinking the Cost of College: 152 Ways to Cut the Price of a Bachelor’s Degree. Here are the...

May 17, 2010

Should more high school graduates go to college? This question has been getting a lot of attention since President Obama announced that one of his prime education goals would be to get more Americans to attend college. That’s a laudable and ambitious goal. I worry, however, about students, who are unprepared for college. They often get entangled in a huge...