The College Solutions Blog

September 7, 2012

Today I wanted to share some pictures taken before and after my husband and I took our son Ben to the airport. Ben, who is a junior at Beloit College, is spending the semester in Hungary through St. Olaf College’s Budapest Semesters in Mathematics program. A week after quitting his summer job working at a restaurant at Sea World, Ben...

August 6, 2012

Below you’ll find a guest blog that Bob Bessette, the father of a rising senior at Bowdoin College in Maine, wrote. This post first appeared on my college blog in December when Bessette’s daughter  was finishing up her semester abroad in Ireland. I am rerunning this blog post primarily because my own son Ben, who is a rising junior at...

February 22, 2012

This is the time of year when college students are making plans to study overseas in the fall. Many students attend colleges overseas during their junior year. Curiously enough, most of those students are women. Young men only represent about a third of the 270,600 American students studying overseas. That percentage, by the way, has remained about the same for...

December 27, 2010

If your child plans to study abroad while while in college, you need to prepare yourself. I wrote an blog post for CBS MoneyWatch that discusses what parents and students need to know about studying abroad based on the experience of my own daughter Caitlin, who attended the University of Barcelona for a year. You can find all the advice...

October 6, 2008

I’ve always been a nag about college rankings. It’s unfortunate that the first yardstick that many families grab when they are measuring schools is the annual US college rankings by U.S. News & World Reports. Simply whining about college rankings, however, isn’t very helpful, which is why I’m excited about a new report that was released today by the Association...