The College Solutions Blog

October 25, 2009

As usual, I am sharing with you the posts that I wrote for my college blog for CBSMoneyWatch.com during the past week. Baby Einstein Bust: Toys That Will Make Your Child Smarter. Did parents really think that plunking their infants in front of Baby Einstein DVDs was really going to make them geniuses. Come on. Surely they knew Baby Einstein...

September 12, 2009

Here are this week’s round up of the posts that I wrote for CBSMoneyWatch.com. Hope you enjoy them…. The Latest Way Kids Cheat on Exams Teenagers are ingenious so I guess it’s no wonder that they are adept at high-tech cheating.  An alarming survey shows just how prevalent cheating with cell phones is in schools. Lending Money to Hot Shot...

September 9, 2009

I’ve always wondered why the media fixates so much Harvard and the other seven Ivy League schools. After all, the percentage of college freshmen attending these schools is a miniscule .2%. I came up with that percentage after crunching numbers that I pulled out of The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Almanac. But if you’re eager to see your little darling...

July 9, 2009

I had lunch this week with a professor of medicine at Stanford University. Mercifully, the conversation didn’t dwell on his specialty (urology), but the professor did feel the need to gripe about Stanford’s endowment, which has cratered. In an attempt to cheer him up, I mentioned that Stanford’s endowment problem looks like a mosquito bite compared to Harvard University’s endowment’s...

June 28, 2009

When my husband returned last week from a business trip on the East Coast, he brought home a copy of the Boston Globe that contained a story about layoffs at Harvard. Harvard is cutting loose 275 people and this comes on top of other recent cuts, including the postponement of an ambitious and very expensive campus expansion. If Harvard’s in...

March 6, 2009

For many wannabe investment bankers, the key to unlocking Wall Street’s treasure chest was traditionally getting a Harvard MBA. So this shouldn’t come as a surprise:  Harvard tops the list of business school that have produced the most Wall Street scoundrels in our current financial mess. Here are the top three winners: Harvard New York University Cornell University Do business...

January 2, 2009

It was a rare morning because I spent it eating breakfast out instead of nibbling on toast at my computer. A friend of my husband’s was interested in talking about the stock market over French toast and Mexican scrambled eggs and ultimately the conversation veered to college. His son had just gotten his SAT scores back and he was worried...

December 4, 2008

I had just woken up yesterday when my husband Bruce motioned me over to his laptop to show me a news bulletin about Harvard. The august institution had announced that thanks to the turmoil of the financial markets it had lost $8 billion of its $36.9 billion endowment since the summer. My husband’s boss, who happens to work in Cambridge,...

September 20, 2008

Everybody knows how ridiculously hard it is to claw your way into an elite school like Harvard, Princeton or Notre Dame. Every year though plenty of students who possess lower grades and less impressive resumes find a way to game the system. What’s their secret? They’ve got the right parents. Schools hate to talk about the students who saunter through...

July 22, 2008

The most emailed story in The New York Times on Monday focused on Berea College, a little school in Kentucky with a heart of gold. The college charges no tuition and only accepts low-income teenagers. Every student graduates with no debt. Not surprisingly, the school is mobbed every year with applicants. Berea is dedicated to accomplishing what a lot of...