The College Solutions Blog

March 17, 2011

I’m rooting for two teams in the NCCA basketball tournament. The University of Missouri (I graduated from Mizzou’s world famous journalism school) and San Diego State University, which is a 10-minute drive from my house. With the tournament revving up on St. Patrick’s Day, I wanted to share a post that I wrote for my CBS MoneyWatch college blog that...

October 18, 2010

I am sure that I ticked off a fair number of high school counselors yesterday when I wrote this post: Why High School Counselors Don’t Know Much About College I wanted to follow up with a list of things that the typical high school counselors doesn’t know. This list could have been much longer, but since people are impatient on...

April 15, 2010

Here’s a grim college graduation rate statistic:  Fewer than 60% of college students graduate in six years. Of course, noncompetitive schools, which accept nearly all comers, drag down the national graduation rates. For instance, only 12.1% of students at Mountain State University in Beckley, WV, which accepts all its applicants, graduate in six years. In contrast, 96.8% of Harvard students...

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...

January 8, 2010

Yesterday I wrote this provocative post: Why High School Counselors Don’t Know Much About College.  Today I wanted to follow up with 10 things that the typical high school counselors doesn’t know. Here goes: 1. There are roughly 50 colleges and universities in the country that are no-loan schools, which means they meet a student’s financial aid need with grants...

December 8, 2009

Graduation rates at most universities is a disgrace.  Fewer than 60% of  college  students graduate in six years. Many of the rest never do earn  a bachelor’s degree. I’ve written about low graduation rates many times (see links below) and it’s always struck me as unfair that so many educators blame this tragedy solely on the students. That’s why I...

September 2, 2009

All week I’ve been sharing great tools to research colleges. Today I want to feature the federal College Navigator. The College Navigator is a dull-looking website, but it contains incredible tools that tap into a vast college database that the U.S. Department of Education maintains. To illustrate what College Navigator can do, I’m using as an example Ohio State University,...

June 17, 2009

Here’s a grim statistic:  Fewer than 60% of four-year college students graduate in six years. Of course, noncompetitive schools, which accept nearly all comers, drag down the national graduation rates. For instance, only 18% of students at Mountain State University in Beckley, WV, which accepts all its applicants, graduate in six years. In contrast, 97% of Harvard students have earned...