The College Solutions Blog

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

Ivy League
September 4, 2009

College Blog Roundup: College Ranking Shenanigans, Women’s Colleges and Swine Flu!

Here is my latest weekend roundup of the college blog posts that I wrote this week for CBSMoneyWatch.com. Are Ivy League Schools Fudging Their Numbers? This is the post that I was most intrigued by because it explored one of my favorite topics — the insane obsession with college rankings. I wrote that some of the statistics that Ivy League...
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August 25, 2009

Playing the College Admissions Game

Now here’s a shocker:  College admissions are getting even more competitive at Ivy League schools and other highly elite colleges. That’s the conclusion of a new study, Playing the Admissions Game: Student Reactions to Increasing College Competition, which was written by profs at Harvard and the University of Michigan. Reading the report would make many parents think that their children...
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August 4, 2009

How to Get Into the Ivy League: Be a Legacy

How do you get into the Ivy League?  Be a legacy applicant. A friend of my blog, Lee Bierer, an education columnist for the Charlotte Observer and an independent college counselor, writes about Ivy League legacy chances in her latest column. Here’s where you can check out her take on Ivy League admissions for legacies. It’s clear that legacies enjoy...
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July 9, 2009

What's the Matter With Harvard?

I had lunch this week with a professor of medicine at Stanford University. Mercifully, the conversation didn’t dwell on his specialty (urology), but the professor did feel the need to gripe about Stanford’s endowment, which has cratered. In an attempt to cheer him up, I mentioned that Stanford’s endowment problem looks like a mosquito bite compared to Harvard University’s endowment’s...
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June 20, 2009

Weekend College Blog Roundup

Today I’m providing links to the three posts that I wrote this week for CBSMoneyWatch.com where I also write about college. Hey, why be a slave to one time-consuming college blog when you can have two?? 1. Three-Year College Degree In this post, I wrote about what may be a nascent trend — the three-year college degree. Since I’ve been...
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January 2, 2009

The Argument Against Snobby Ivy League Schools

It was a rare morning because I spent it eating breakfast out instead of nibbling on toast at my computer. A friend of my husband’s was interested in talking about the stock market over French toast and Mexican scrambled eggs and ultimately the conversation veered to college. His son had just gotten his SAT scores back and he was worried...
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September 20, 2008

Gaming the System: College Legacy Admissions

Everybody knows how ridiculously hard it is to claw your way into an elite school like Harvard, Princeton or Notre Dame. Every year though plenty of students who possess lower grades and less impressive resumes find a way to game the system. What’s their secret? They’ve got the right parents. Schools hate to talk about the students who saunter through...
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