The College Solutions Blog

October 21, 2010

If you want to attend an elite college or university, you can increase your chances if you apply early decision. That’s one of the conclusions that you can draw from a new annual study released by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, The State of College Admission 2010. Highly selective colleges are increasingly relying on early decision applications to...

January 6, 2010

If you plan to apply to college as a “stealth candidate” listen up. Stealth candidates are teenagers who never contact a college before sending in their application. Stealth college applications used to be rare.  Most teenagers contact colleges through traditional means such as requesting materials, talking to admission counselors at college fairs and visiting schools. Today, however, teenagers can learn...

December 29, 2009

What happens if your teenagers has made a bad mistake during his or her high school years? I’m talking about a suspension from school. A drunk driving ticket. A cheating incident. How do you handle these kinds of mistakes on your college application? Lee Bierer, an independent college counselor in Charlotte, NC, and a syndicated columnist, tackled this thorny college...

December 27, 2009

Which universities spend more on sports than classroom instruction?  In my latest college blog post for CBSMoneyWatch, I shared the list of the Division 1-A schools that spend the greatest percentage of its revenue on sports. On the list, you’ll find the top 10 college sports cash hogs, as well as the 10 schools that spend the smallest percentage of...

December 17, 2009

Want to know what college admission officers are really thinking? The Wall Street Journal and Unigo managed to get admission deans from eight prestigious schools, including Bryn Mawr College, Grinnell College,  Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania and Weslyan University to parpticipate in a panel discussion that touched on many issues that are relevant to collegebound teenagers. You can watch the...

August 27, 2009

The other day I brought up the “E” word with my son. Ben is about to start his senior year in high school and he needs to begin thinking about the college admission essay that he’s going to write. Ben’s reaction was typical of a lot of seniors:  He groaned. Undeterred, I  told him that he really needed to start...

November 20, 2008

It was my morning to drive the carpool and since there was one high school senior slumped in the back seat of my aging Volvo station wagon, the topic of college applications arose. Shannon began stressing out loud about the essay she had to write for her application to a University of California campus. Like all other teenagers that I’ve...

October 9, 2008

Tis the season of the cursed college admission essay. You can tell that simply by looking at what’s selling on Amazon.com. One of the brisk sellers on Amazon today is a book that was published in 1987: On Writing the College Application Essay: The Key to Acceptance and the College of your Choice. I hope the college essay advice is...