The College Solutions Blog

August 16, 2019

Should you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to send your child to his or her dream college? My answer to that dream college question has always been a resounding NO! Some of the universities that U.S. News & World Report loves to gush over now cost $300,000 or higher. And that’s for a SINGLE bachelor’s degree. If you’re really...

May 8, 2017

Last month I heard from many parents agonizing about whether to let their teenagers attend their dream colleges. These dream colleges were inevitably highly selective to elite universities which cost $65,000 to $70,000 a year! I don’t believe any college or universities is worth paying that kind of money! My most recent blog post, which originally ran in 2014, focused...

April 24, 2017

Will your child end up going to his or her dream school? The odds are that your child won’t if the college or university is a rankings alpha dog. And that’s especially true if you don’t enjoy a powerful hook such as being a celebrity or a one-percenter kid, a legacy or an athlete. The story I’m sharing today is...

May 5, 2014

A highly effective way to make college more affordable is to enroll in my upcoming course, The College Cost Lab. You can learn more about the class and enroll here. Lynn O’Shaughnessy Will your child end up going to his or her dream school? The odds are that your child won’t if the college or university is a rankings alpha...

July 3, 2013

I want to thank everyone for such thoughtful and helpful responses to the dad who is stressing out about encouraging his daughter to walk away from an expensive acceptance from Boston College and instead trot off this fall to the honors college at the University of Pittsburgh. I think it’s safe to say that there was an overriding consensus that...

October 19, 2012

How do you know if the college or university that your child ultimately attends will provide him or her with an excellent education? You won’t. College pricing is inching closer to transparency thanks to net price calculators, but it’s largely impossible to form an educated opinion about the strength of a school’s learning environment beyond checking  an institution’s graduation rates....

July 26, 2010

In my last blog post I complained that too many high school students pick schools based primarily on size. And most of these students only want to look at schools that are large. Here is where I vented: My Pet Peeve: Picking Colleges by Size What’s more important, I argued, is a school’s mission. Today, I want to explore a...