The College Solutions Blog

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

STEM majors
Featured image for “Is Your Child Prepared to Major in a STEM?”
February 7, 2014

Is Your Child Prepared to Major in a STEM?

Teenagers often pick college major without knowing much  about what they entail or whether they can handle the work. I was thinking about this today when I read a new report from ACT Inc., entitled, The Condition of STEM 2013. The report shared statistics on the number of high school students in the 2013 graduating class, who were interested in...
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Featured image for “Picking a College Major for the Money”
February 4, 2014

Picking a College Major for the Money

Is your child interested in picking a college major based on those ubiquitous lists of the country’s highest-paying college degrees? Plenty of students are pursuing degrees that they perceive will generate the biggest salaries. I assume that’s why business is the most popular major – more than one out of every five students select it. I can’t resist mentioning that...
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Featured image for “Do STEM Majors Really Enjoy an Advantage?”
November 13, 2013

Do STEM Majors Really Enjoy an Advantage?

I’m sure a lot of you out there are relieved if your children intend to major in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) field, which represent just six percent of the current American workforce. STEM majors find the job market much easier because too few Americans are receiving degrees in these difficult disciplines. And STEM majors make more money than...
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February 16, 2012

The Rise of the Anti-Lecture?

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...
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March 2, 2010

What You Don't Know About Liberal Arts Colleges

Yesterday I wrote this post about liberal arts colleges: Which is Better: A Liberal Arts College or a University? At the time, I promised that I’d summarize a thoughtful op-ed piece that Sanford J. Ungar, the president of Goucher College, wrote for the special liberal arts report that ran in The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Unfortunately, only Chronicle subscribers can...
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