The College Solutions Blog

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

Financial aid
Featured image for “How Home Equity Impacts Financial Aid”
January 13, 2018

How Home Equity Impacts Financial Aid

Have you given any thought to how home equity might hurt your child’s chances for financial aid? Luckily, at most state and private colleges and universities, the equity in your primary home is a non-issue. That’s because most schools only require families to complete the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) when applying for financial aid, which doesn’t even...
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Featured image for “9 Signs That Your Teen Graduates with Student Loans”
November 11, 2016

9 Signs That Your Teen Graduates with Student Loans

Today I’m happy to share a guest blog post by Michelle Kretzschmar, who is the creator of an incredibly helpful website called DIYCollegeRankings. If you’re looking for colleges and wondering how you’re going to pay for them, I’d urge you to visit Michelle’s website! Lynn O’Shaughnessy By Michelle Kretzschmar Many people don’t know how much they’ve borrowed from college until...
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December 30, 2015

Happy New Year

Happy New Year’s to you! I hope you had a lovely holiday. My husband and I were fortunate to be able to spend this time with our daughter Caitlin and our son Ben over the break. The photo you see is of our family earlier this week at the lighthouse at the Point Reyes National Seashore, which is the windiest...
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Featured image for “A Troubling Financial Aid Wrinkle”
August 17, 2015

A Troubling Financial Aid Wrinkle

Parents are often worried about how their assets will impact their chances for financial aid. Often their fears are overblown because financial aid formulas don’t penalize families for all their assets. But it is true that families are now experiencing a harder time protecting their assets from financial aid calculations because of a horribly flawed federal formula that needs to...
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Featured image for “Would You Pay $47,000 for the University of Oregon?”
April 20, 2015

Would You Pay $47,000 for the University of Oregon?

Last week at the exercise boot camp that I attend on Sunday mornings, I saw a mom who hadn’t been coming to the workouts for several months. The mom is divorced and is trying to support herself as a manicurist. Her son is a high school senior so I had been giving her some college advice before she stopped showing...
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Featured image for “Answering Your FAFSA Questions”
January 12, 2015

Answering Your FAFSA Questions

Now that we’re officially into the 2015-2016 FAFSA season, I wanted to share some questions that I’ve gotten about financial aid forms via my blog and my popular online courses for professionals and for parents. If you have your own questions, please leave them in the comment box below. To avoid costly FAFSA mistakes, I’d recommend downloading an invaluable new...
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Featured image for “Avoid These FAFSA Mistakes”
December 24, 2014

Avoid These FAFSA Mistakes

Happy holidays everyone! While I’m spending Christmas with family in Colorado, I decided to share this post about avoiding mistakes when completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Parents can start filing the FAFSA beginning January 1. If you missed it, here is another post I shared about the FAFSA earlier this month: Getting Ready to Tackle the FAFSA...
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Featured image for “Don’t Let Colleges Snooker You”
October 7, 2014

Don’t Let Colleges Snooker You

For many students the biggest source of money will be from the colleges themselves. That’s why it’s important for you to understand what would motivate any school to give your child one of its awards. Schools don’t dispense grants and scholarships to be nice. They give awards because they expect to get something valuable from a student in return. To...
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Featured image for “A Quick Way to Find Generous Colleges”
July 6, 2014

A Quick Way to Find Generous Colleges

How can you find the most generous colleges and universities? I’m talking about the institutions that meet 100% of financial need or close to it? And what about the schools that provide merit scholarships for affluent students who don’t qualify for need-based aid? How can you find schools that provide a large number of these scholarships? In the six-minute video...
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Featured image for “A Great New Financial Aid Website”
June 30, 2014

A Great New Financial Aid Website

If you’ve ever spent time  on FinAid, the popular website stuffed with information about financial aid, you’ll definitely want to bookmark a new website called Edvisors. Mark Kantrowitz, the founder of FinAid, and a nationally recognized financial-aid expert, left the site last year to create a new online resource at Edvisors for anyone interested in how to pay for college....
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