This is the time of year when college students are making plans to study overseas in the fall.

Many students attend colleges overseas during their junior year. Curiously enough, most of those students are women. Young men only represent about a third of the 270,600 American students studying overseas. That percentage, by the way, has remained about the same for more than two decades.

I thought my son Ben was going to be among the young men who remained in the U.S. for college. Before he started college, he insisted that he had zero interest in pursuing a semester abroad. Even after a family trip to visit our daughter, who was spending two semesters at the University of Barcelona, Ben was insistent that he wasn’t going anywhere.

During his first semester in college, however, Ben slowly started to change his mind. His academic advisor urged him to consider an experience abroad and he said he might be open to studying abroad, but only in an English-speaking country. Ireland, England, Australia or New Zealand were on his list.

My husband and I were surprised when he called us recently to tell us that he would be studying in Budapest, Hungary in the fall!  Hungary offered the classes in math and art that interested him.

I can think of a couple of reasons why Ben relented.

No. 1. He likes his academic advisor and the professor was persuasive.

No. 2. Many of this friends will be studying abroad in the fall and he didn’t want to be left behind.

Why Men Don’t Study Abroad

Insiders offer plenty of reason why young men are more interested in staying put for college.

Fifty seven percent of American colleges students are women so they are going to represent the majority of students overseas, but that still doesn’t explain the large gender disparity.

Some suggest that young men gravitate to majors that haven’t traditionally gone overseas such as business and engineering, but business majors now represent the second-largest group studying abroad after social science majors. Engineering majors heading abroad has experienced record growth. When adjusted for the gender imbalance in these majors, women still predominate.

Some study-abroad administrators also suggest that men are less willing to leave their friends behind. Interest in studying in another country is greater among men if they have been involved in diverse experiences at their schools.

Parents are much more likely to influence their daughters into studying overseas than their sons, who are more apt to take their cues from their friends.

Universities have been encouraging men to attend school abroad by targeting them with a different message. At Michigan State, for instance, women receive the traditional message that emphasizes the cultural and experiential benefits. In contrast, men are told that studying aboard can help boost their job prospects. Some schools are even offering internships abroad, which are particularly appealing to men.

If you want to learn more about this subject, here is a lengthy article that appeared this week in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

In Study Abroad, Men Are Hard to Find

 Read More About Studying Abroad

Studying Abroad: 7 Things Parents Need to Know

5 Study Abroad Tips for Parents

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and she also writes a college blog for CBSMoneyWatch. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

What are the most generous colleges and universities in the country?

US News & World Report attempts to answer that question every year when it rolls out its lists of institutions that self report that they meet 100% of each student’s financial need.

Today I’m sharing the latest list that US News released last week. Not surprisingly, highly elite schools predominate. On the honor roll you’ll find members of the Ivy Leagues, for instance, as well as other prestigious universities like Rice, Stanford and Cal Tech along with prestigious liberal arts colleges such as Haverford, Middlebury, Smith and Carlton.

62 Most Generous Colleges and Universities

Winning the Educational Lottery

If you need money to go to college and you are accepted into one of these tough-to-crack institutions, you are an incredibly lucky person. In fact, you will have won the educational equivalent of the lottery. Most schools in this country, however, don’t possess the financial resources to meet anywhere approaching 100% of a person’s need.

If you’re confused about what meeting 100% of financial need actually means, here’s a quick explanation:

Any school will routinely base your need on what your Expected Family Contribution is. Your EFC is the dollar figure that at a minimum a college will expect you to kick in for one year of schooling. So if your EFC is $20,000 and the university costs $55,000, ideally you’ll get $35,000 in aid. At the schools on the list, you’d get that. At most of these schools, you’d receive all the aid in grants (free money),but some schools will include a small subsidized loan or work study.

At other colleges and universities, might get get 80% of your need filled or 68% or 93%. It’s going to be all over the board. You’ll have to judge just how generous all these other schools are by using the kind of tools that I’ve mentioned many times on this college blog. Here is one of those posts:

Measuring the Generosity of Colleges

Bottom Line:

By the time teenagers are seniors in high school, many of them chase after private scholarships after they realize that they will need help with college. As I’ve said many times before, this is the least lucrative source of college money. A dead-end for many. The most generous source of cash are the colleges themselves and to be in line for the biggest helping of grants and scholarships , you need to be the best student possible. The top way to help pay for college is to be an excellent student.

Thank You!

I want to extend a big thank you to everyone who over the weekend preordered a copy of the second edition of my book, The College Solution: A Guide for Everyone Looking for the Right School at the Right Price, which is about 90% new. A lot of you did!

If you want to learn more about the book, here is a post that I wrote last week about the new edition:

What I’ve Been Up To Lately

My husband took this picture of me and Minerva, my office assistant, yesterday in my horribly messy office. I thought it would help illustrate what I’ve been doing for the past few months.

My office is a wreck because I’ve been totally preoccupied with writing the second edition of The College Solution: A Guide for Everyone Looking for the Right School at the Right Price.

I finished the book yesterday though technically I still have to write the acknowledgment page and I will have proofs to read, which won’t be tough. Every time I write a book it’s a challenge (I’ve written 7 if you count the two financial books that I ghost wrote), but this was a particular bear because I had less time to write it and I had lots more to say!

Practically an Entirely New Book

I am extremely proud of this book, which I estimate contains 90% new material. I wrote the original book back in 2007 when my daughter Caitlin was a college freshman so you can imagine that I’ve learned so much more since then.

My publisher expected me to perhaps replace a third of the book, but I ended up tearing it apart and redoing the whole darn thing. The 10% that I didn’t change much is at the back of the book and covers nuts and bolts stuff like college essays, college visits, interviews, admission timelines, which lots of other college books cover ad nauseum. In this back section, however, I did write entirely new chapters about high school counselors and independent college counselors, which I hope you find worthwhile.

My No. 1 aim of the new book (which is my favorite of all the ones that I’ve written) is to help parents and students become empowered consumers when they are weighing decisions for an investment that could be the second biggest ticket item of their lives. Sadly few families embark on this college odyssey knowing what the heck they are doing! My book, however, shows families how they can find wonderful schools and make them more affordable.

Here is what the cover of the second edition looks like:

 If you’re wondering what school is on the cover, it’s Rhodes College in Memphis. Having lived in Memphis for three years right out of college, I was familiar with Rhodes’ beautiful campus with its collegiate architecture. My publisher wanted to go with a stock photo and kept sending me suggestions, but all of them were awful as far as I was concerned. I appreciate the good folks at Rhodes letting me use this photo that I found on The Colleges That Change Lives website.

The official release date of the second edition of The College Solution is May 24  and, if you’re interested,  it’s available on Amazon for preorders for dirt cheap. The sticker price is $23.99, but it’s selling right now on Amazon for $12.61!

FYI, the information on Amazon about the second edition needs to be scrapped. Somebody just took the wording from my old book and slapped it on the new page. Getting that information updated is on my list of things to do.

With the book finished, this weekend I am so looking forward to cleaning my office!

About a third of students begin college expecting to major in a STEM discipline – science, technology, engineering and math. Less than half of them manage to leave with a STEM degree. At some point, most students switch to an easier major.

A couple of years ago UCLA released a study that broke down by race and ethnicity just how difficult it is to obtain these degrees. For instance, among white and Asian-American students, who were freshmen in 2004, only 24.5% and 33% of them had earned a college degree in a STEM major within four years.

I recap the UCLA results at my CBS MoneyWatch college blog:

Engineering Degrees: How Tough Is It To Get One?

My son Ben is a math major so I have some familiarity with how challenging these STEM disciplines can be. A single math problem will routinely take him an hour to complete. (Ben, who is a sophomore, is also an art major and that discipline is even more of a time suck!)

As if the STEM subjects aren’t hard enough, professors are discouraging students from persevering with these majors because of the way they teach them. For the first couple of years and sometimes longer, math, science and engineering classes are typically delivered up in large lecture halls.

I was encouraged today, however, when I read an article by a higher-ed writer at the Washington Post who talked about how STEM departments at some universities are ditching or modifying the lecture as a style of teaching.

The Post article, mentioned universities which have joined the anti-lecture movement in its backyard.

Initiatives at American, Catholic and George Washington universities, along with the University of Maryland are attempting to break the lectures down into smaller classes. Lecture halls, however, are never going away, but universities are exploring ways to make lectures less of a passive learning experience such as using instant surveys, clicks and ask-your-neighbor discussions. You can learn more specifics of how schools trying to make these here:

Colleges Looking Beyond the Lecture

When you are evaluating universities, it’s always wise to get a sense of what the size of classes will be, particularly in a student’s intended major. You also want to obtain an idea of how committed a school is to its undergraduates, who often get short shrift at research universities.

Of course, one way that students can avoid nearly all lecture-hall classes is to attend a college instead of a university. By their very nature, colleges are smaller and their focus is on undergrads — not professor research and the education of PhD candidates.

Last fall my son, who attends Beloit College, told me that there were a lot of kids in his real analysis (math) class. On parent weekend my husband and I got to sit in on his math class, which is taught by Ben’s favorite teacher, and I counted the number of students. There were just 21 students. Only at a liberal arts colleges, would a teenager think that a class with less than a two dozen students is large!

Read More on The College Solution:

Colleges Where the Professors Are Easy Graders

The Colleges Where PhD’s Get Their Start

Rushing to Get a Graduate Degree

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and she also writes a college blog for CBSMoneyWatch. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

During the last two days on my college blog, I’ve shared ways to generate schools for your college list. Here they are if you missed them:

Finding Hidden Gems for Your College List

Getting Ideas For a College List

Today I’m sharing 8 more ways to search for schools.

1. Use the federal college search engines.

The most massive database of the bunch is the federal College Navigator search engine, which is operated by the U.S. Department of Education.  To locate potential schools, you can select criteria such as private and public institutions, costs, majors, admission selectivity, religious affiliation, sports and much more.

Click on the icon of the U.S. map on the home page and you’ll be able to designate the states and/or regions that you’d like to explore. Here are a couple of previous posts that I’ve written about the College Navigator:

What Colleges Have the Right Majors?

Checking a College’s Generosity

2. Or check out these helpful search engines:

COLLEGEdata

College Board

Princeton Review 

StudentAdvisor

3. Take  Zinch and Cappex for a spin.

These free online college matchmakers have borrowed features from Facebook that should appeal to teenagers. On both sites, for instance, teens can create their own profiles and showcase their talents, activities, passions and goals to a audience of hundreds of colleges and universities.  Colleges use the search function to look for promising applicants whether they are flutists, computer wizards, soccer players or students from distant time zones.

 4. Check out Unigo  and College Prowler

Unigo provides comments and videos from current students who share their opinions about their schools. The students’ observations are valuable because the schools can’t whitewash them. You can also find student reviews of schools on the website of College Prowler.

5. Use guidebooks.

The annual Fiske Guide to Colleges and The Princeton Review’s Best Colleges guides provide backgrounds on hundreds of schools.

6. Head to College Majors 1011.

This is a wonderful resource to research college majors. For instance, what can you do with an environmental science degree? On this site you can also find schools that offer particular majors, as well as view major-specific videos that schools create. In addition, you can generate ideas by discovering on the site what schools are winning competitions in particular fields of study.

7. Use CollegeWeekLive

This website, which bills itself as the world’s largest college fair, connects hundreds of schools with students through live streaming video presentations. You can find the calendar of events by heading to its website.

8. Visit schools virtually.

Lots of schools provide virtual tours on their websites. You can also check out videos of many schools at YOUniversityTV.com.

One more thing…

On StudentAdvisor.com, I ran across some amusing videos of students receiving their college acceptances  from schools ranging from Central Michigan University to MIT. Just scroll down to the bottom of the page to watch.

Yesterday I described how you can use College Results Online to help you generate a promising list of college. If you missed it, here it is:

Getting Ideas For a College List

Here’s another idea:  Head to The Center for College Affordability and Productivity, which is the think tank that generates Forbes magazine’s annual college rankings.

On the center’s site you can find the schools that Forbes thinks are the best, as well as other lists that are broken down by region, type of schools and more. Forbes ranks 650 colleges and universities.

Forbes magazine’s rankings are imperfect (all rankings are), but they represent an improvement over US News’ scorecards because the magazine at least makes a stab at addressing what kind of return on investment that students and their parents can expect from schools.

Forbes’ rankings aim to measure the sort of educational experience that students are receiving, as well as their success in obtaining jobs after graduation. Forbes also evaluates schools based on how much debt their students must grapple with after graduation.  Strangely enough, US News doesn’t use any of these measures.

Inside the Rankings

The Forbes rankings measure these five areas:

•   Student satisfaction (A big factor is RateMyProfessor.com evaluations.)
•   Post-graduate success (Graduates’ salaries compiled by PayScale.com.
•    Student debt (How much students owe upon graduation.)
•    Four-year grad rate (Most students don’t graduate in four years.)
•    Student competitive awards (Includes Rhodes, Fulbright, Watson and more.)

Here is where you can find an exhaustive explanation of the methodology.

Uncovering Hidden Gems

What I like about the magazine’s rankings is it can help you uncover colleges that you didn’t know exist. When you look at the master list, lots of prestige schools rise to the top, but so do little-known institutions that do extremely well. In contrast, some hot brand names like Cornell, USC,  Penn, NYU and Washington University in St. Louis don’t fare nearly as well as you’d expect if you believe that the rankings over at US News are gospel. (Please don’t!)

Schools that fared better in the Forbes rankings than some of those heavy hitters included such institutions as:

• Centre College (KY)
• St. Michael’s College (VT)
• Transylvania University (KY)
• St. Norbert College (WI)
• Westmont College (CA)
• University of Redlands (CA)
• St. Olaf College (MN)
• Hobart and William Smith Colleges (NY)
• University of Minnesota at Morris

By the way, the University of Minnesota at Morris is a public liberal arts college which gives in-state tuition ($12,o91) to all students! The school in Morris edged out the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Here are all the ways the Forbes slices and dices the master list. This is a screen shot so you will have to go to the site to access these lists.

Hunt by Region

The lists that I particularly like are the ones broken down by region because most students do not stray outside their region. I’m using the Midwest list as example because these schools are often a better value than those on the coasts. Also, there isn’t as much competition to get into wonderful schools in the Midwest because few families outside the region even know about them! It’s the same story in the South.

There are 163 institutions on the Midwest list, and I’m sharing with you the schools at the top:

I bet it didn’t take you long to stop recognizing the Midwestern schools on this list. And that’s why I shared it. There are amazing schools in this country that just need discovering. What you should resist doing is believing the No. 1 is better than No. 19 and No. 25 has to be than No. 50. Just use these lists as idea generators!

If you’re a real numbers person, you might also want to check out the center’s component rankings list, where you can tease out such things as the schools where the students are happiest with the teaching, earn the highest salaries upon graduation and more.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and she also writes a college blog for CBSMoneyWatch. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.