The College Solutions Blog

February 12, 2010

I wanted to follow up on yesterday’s post: How Much College Loan Debt Is Too Much? In that post I talked about what is an acceptable level of college loans that students should assume. That post prompted Stuart, a blog visitor, to ask me this question about PLUS loans: What about the parents? What is a reasonable amount of student...

February 11, 2010

The typical student graduates from college with $23,200 in college loan debt. That figure, which comes from a recent study from the Project on Student Debt, only includes student loan debt. The $23,200 tab does not include money that parents borrowed through the federal PLUS loan program, a home equity line of credit or by dipping into retirement accounts. Is...

February 9, 2010

What schools offer the best college financial aid? Last month, I wrote this post: 51 Colleges With the Best Student Financial Aid. Please take a look at the list because it includes schools with awesome financial aid policies that will reduce your stress about how you will pay for college. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Amherst College assembled...

December 7, 2009

What’ the right way to pay back your student debt? It’s a question that puzzles a lot of college graduates, who are trying to figure out how to best juggle their student loans. For some college grads, student loan consolidation will be a smart idea. What’s also important is choosing the right payment option for student debt. Kathy Kristof, a...

December 6, 2009

10 Best and Worst States for Student Loan Debt Many of the states with the highest student loan debt levels are in the Northeast. In contrast, the states with the lowest student debt levels are in the West and South. That was one of the subjects that I wrote about last week for CBSMoneyWatch.com.  In my post,  I shared the...

September 22, 2009

Tell me if this makes sense: When private lenders got into the federal student loan business years ago, the federal government guaranteed that it would step in when student borrowers defaulted on their federal loans. The  government (us taxpayers) also gave the student loan lenders a fat subsidy to participate in this virtually risk-free business. You have no idea how...

July 11, 2009

Here’s my weekend college blog roundup of the posts that I wrote during the past few days for CBSMoneyWatch.com. Hope you enjoy them. Is Harvard Going Broke? If you’ve been struggling to stay on a budget, you might appreciate what’s happening at Harvard, which is experiencing the worst financial crisis of its 373-year history. The Soaring Popularity of College Student...