The College Solutions Blog

November 17, 2011

Today I’m sharing a great resource for students, who want to learn more about college majors and their career paths – College Majors 101. I’d urge everybody to spend some time on this website, which is stuffed with valuable information about college majors as diverse as biology and engineering to video game design and dance. This is one of my...

November 16, 2011

How can you find schools that offer the college degree that you want? That was the question that I got from a mother whose daughter hopes to become a registered nurse. The mom asked me  how her daughter could find a list of colleges and universities that offer nursing degrees. (Nursing, by the way, is the most popular major in...

November 15, 2011

I want to welcome all my new visitors to my college blog. Spend time at  The College Solution and you’ll find lots of tips on finding great colleges and making them more affordable. What college majors pay the most money? What college majors are the ones most likely to lead to a job in this lousy economy? Which college majors...

November 14, 2011

Over the weekend my sister was telling me about a teenager, who is getting recruited by a couple of Ivy League schools to play softball. The parents are excited about the prospects of her daughter getting a sports scholarship to an Ivy League school. Does anybody out there know what’s wrong with this dream? The eight Ivy League schools don’t...

November 11, 2011

Today I’m sharing a post on college recommendation letters that was written by Lee Bierer, a friend of mine, who is a nationally syndicated higher-ed journalist and an independent college counselor in Charlotte, NC. It’s such a timely subject for high school seniors that I wanted to share it with you: Letters of Recommendation Nuts & Bolts The college application...

November 10, 2011

Are college students getting smarter? If you looked at the grades they are “earning,” you might assume the answer is yes.  The average GPA in college is 3.1. At private schools, the norm is a 3.3 GPA. In contrast, the typical college student had an average GPA of 2.52 in the 1950s. (That’s just about the GPA that my dad,...

November 9, 2011

One of the frustrations of applying to college is the confusing nature of many financial aid awards. Even when a teenager has received a puny financial aid award, schools don’t necessarily want families to know this.  Some parents will look at a misleading financial aid award and think their child has won scholarships to cover much of the cost of...

November 8, 2011

Are colleges and universities playing hide and seek with their net price calculators? As I’ve mentioned in the previous posts below, net price calculators can be extremely valuable tools for families wondering what a specific college will cost their families. I don’t think anyone should be applying to schools unless they have used these college cost calculators in advance. College...

November 7, 2011

When you’re looking at colleges and universities wouldn’t you like to know if their students found jobs after graduating? Wouldn’t you like to know what kind of success students at a particular school enjoyed in getting into graduate school? Duh. Of course, you would. Believe it or not, federal law requires colleges and universities to disclose job and graduate school...

November 4, 2011

I got an email this week from a California mother who was happy that her child would be a attending St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a wonderful public liberal arts college, in the fall. Her husband, however, remained skeptical. He worried that his daughter would be jeopardizing her chances of going to graduate school if she went to an obscure...