The College Solutions Blog

April 13, 2021

As usual, the highly rejective colleges** have attracted the most media attention during this latest admission season. The Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Duke, Northwestern, USC and other highly rejective colleges outdid themselves this year by crushing the college dreams of an historic number of applicants. What gets lost in this slavish attention to the nation’s highly rejective schools is the inside...

January 8, 2019

Does your child need to attend an Ivy League college or other elite university to end up getting great jobs with great salaries? The answer is… No. No! Noooo! NOOOO! Got It? At the risk of being obnoxious, I repeated my answer because the parents, who are most likely to obsess about Ivy League colleges or other elite universities, are...

October 23, 2016

I wrote this post last year, but wanted to share it again because the messages are equally relevant today!  Lynn O’Shaughnessy Plenty of parents, who enroll in my online course – The College Cost Lab –  are affluent and highly educated. Quite a few of these moms and dads would like to see their children attend elite schools. Not surprisingly,...

February 22, 2015

A lot of the parents attending my current online class on how to cut the cost of college are affluent and highly educated. Quite a few of these moms and dads attending my course have indicated to me that they would like to see their children attend elite schools. Not surprisingly, these parents have expressed concern about the cost of...

December 2, 2014

In my experience, high quality, independent test-prep firms produce some of the best college newsletters. One newsletter that I always make sure I read comes from Compass Education Group, which offers test prep in Northern and Southern California.  Today I am sharing a thought-provoking post that Matt Steiner, who is Compass Education’s marketing director, originally wrote for the test-prep firm’s...

June 19, 2014

I want to thank everybody who weighed in on my last post: Dad:  Should I Force My Son to Attend Cornell? I think everyone was in agreement (yeah!) that the young man, who enjoyed a great freshman year at Washington University in St. Louis, should NOT be forced to transfer to Cornell University. My visitors shared all sorts of excellent...

April 19, 2013

In my last post I wrote about a teenager who applied to five Ivy League schools and didn’t get in. Tufts University, the teen’s top choice, also rejected her. For all the teenagers out there who believe they must go to an elite school to ensure an excellent future, there is hope. I firmly believe that it’s not the school...

April 17, 2013

One way that I try to keep up with what’s happening in the higher-ed world is to belong to some LinkedIn Groups including one called College Counseling for the Rest of Us. Last week Michael Szarek, the group’s founder, who is an assistant vice president at Felician College and a college consultant in New Jersey, started a discussion by throwing...

August 3, 2012

The 2012-2013 college admission season hasn’t even officially started, but I’ve already been hearing from parents who are stressed about paying for elite schools that are on their teenagers’ lists. Some of these parents believe that they have an obligation to incur huge debt if their children get accepted into the most prestigious schools. Here’s my worst example: Last spring...

July 26, 2012

Do you need to graduate from an Ivy League school or other ultra elite college to earn the highest salaries? Many families believe that graduates who can put a school like Princeton or Yale on their resume will fare significantly better financially than smart students who end up earning their degrees from elsewhere. In a famous study, two economists tackled...