The College Solutions Blog

Valuable insights from Lynn O’Shaughnessy
a nationally recognized college expert.

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Featured image for “Scholarships for Students With a 3.4 GPA”
July 27, 2015

Scholarships for Students With a 3.4 GPA

Today I’m rerunning a previous post that I’ve updated that I hope will reduce the stress level of many parents reading it. I initially wrote the post in reaction to the dilemma of a teenager with a 3.4 GPA who failed to capture a scholarship from any of the schools where he applied. This is hard to do when you...
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Featured image for “Getting Stiffed By Syracuse University”
June 7, 2013

Getting Stiffed By Syracuse University

When students are shopping for colleges, admission representatives typically urge them to ignore the sticker price. Here’s what these college reps routinely say:  We’ve got lots of financial aid and scholarships. Just APPLY! I was reminded of why applying blind is such a reckless strategy when a mom contacted me after her husband, who is a financial advisor, heard me...
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Featured image for “The New Federal College Scorecard”
February 13, 2013

The New Federal College Scorecard

In his State of the Union address last night, President Obama struck a blow for higher-ed transparency. In his address, Obama announced the release of a new College Scorecard that, he said,  “parents and students can use to compare schools based on a simple criteria: where you can get the most bang for your educational buck.” Every school now has...
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August 21, 2012

12 Ways to Find and Research Colleges

How do you locate good colleges and universities? I get that question a lot. Today I want to share some online resources to find and research schools. In no particular order, here are resources to check out: 1. Do-It-Yourself College Rankings. Do-It-Yourself College Rankings is the creation of Michelle Kretzschmar, the mother of a college student, who has a background...
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May 29, 2012

Do-It-Yourself College Rankings

It’s not often that I stumble across a college blog that I can get really excited about. Today I am happy to share a great resource that stands out from the crowd. I urge everyone to check out DIYCollegeRankings. DIYCollegeRankings (the DIY stands for Do It Yourself), which was created by Michelle Kretzschmar, a former data analyst and the mom...
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April 10, 2012

10 Ways to Pick a College

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’ve been getting questions from parents who are agonizing about where their teenagers should attend college. It’s a tough decision and time is running out to pick the winners. The national deposit day for freshman is May 1. Here are some of choices facing a family that contacted me yesterday: College of Wooster, University...
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February 15, 2012

8 Ways to Build A College List

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...
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November 16, 2011

What Colleges Offer the Right Majors?

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...
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August 8, 2011

What Colleges Have Your Major?

I got an email yesterday from a mom whose teenage daughter wants to become a registered nurse. The mother wanted to know how her daughter could find a list of colleges and universities that offer nursing degrees. This is a great question and the answer is relevant to anybody who wants to cast a wider net when looking for colleges....
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February 17, 2011

College Navigator: Checking a College's Generosity

There are many websites that you can research the financial aid practices of individual schools. Today I’m going to focus on an especially helpful site — the federal College Navigator. The College Navigator is not flashy, but it contains incredible tools that tap into the US Department of Education’s vast college database. The College Navigator provides information on individual schools...
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