The College Solutions Blog

April 20, 2015

Last week at the exercise boot camp that I attend on Sunday mornings, I saw a mom who hadn’t been coming to the workouts for several months. The mom is divorced and is trying to support herself as a manicurist. Her son is a high school senior so I had been giving her some college advice before she stopped showing...

April 7, 2015

If your child is aiming for the most elite schools – the Ivies, MIT, Stanford and a few others at the very top of the rankings heap – you might be wondering how many Advanced Placement courses he or she must take. The short answer is “a lot.” But how many are necessary, depends greatly on how many AP classes...

April 2, 2015

I wrote this post last year, but it’s just as relevant today for families who are upset with puny merit awards. What happens with the merit scholarship that a student receives from a school is inadequate? Is it possible to extract more money from a college? I’ve been getting questions about this lately from parents who are disappointed by some...

March 27, 2015

Most students who hope to earn a bachelor’s degree will enroll at a university. The schools that students dream of attending are almost always research universities. It’s far less common for teenagers to end up at a college. I find that reality unfortunate because a college can often provide a better education for undergraduates than a research university. And it’s...

March 19, 2015

Are you freaking out about your teenager getting into an elite college or universities? If you are, you need to read the following guest column by Frank Bruni, a New York Times Op-Ed columnist, who has created a powerful antidote for the Ivy League jitters. In his excellent book, Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to...

March 11, 2015

This is the time of year when students are getting offered spots on waiting lists. I wanted to share a previous post that I wrote about waiting lists that is just as relevant today.  This weekend I heard from old friends who wanted to share with me stories of brilliant students who got shut out of elite universities. At a...

March 4, 2015

In my last post, I urged parents, who are stressed about how their kids are going to get into the most elite schools, (these are mostly affluent families) to ditch this toxic worry. If you missed the post here it is: Stop Fixating On These Colleges I had a young alum from one of those elite schools write a thoughtful...

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...

February 16, 2015

Financial aid awards are often confusing. I believe many colleges and universities intentionally make financial aid awards hard to decipher to trick families into thinking that their institutions are being generous even when they aren’t. Obfuscation is an effective way to keep parents off balance. Since this is the time of year when students are receiving their financial aid letters,...

February 4, 2015

I’ve always dreaded tax season, but when I had children in college there was one aspect of this unwelcome ritual that I actually looked forward to every year. I loved claiming the American Opportunity Tax Credit, which allows qualified parents to knock up to $2,500 off their tax bill for each of their children in college. I felt even better...