The College Solutions Blog

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

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Thinking Outside the College Box

How do you generate ideas for a college list that doesn’t look like everybody else’s? Students typically end up looking at a fairly narrow lineup of schools, which is not always a smart strategy if you want to find good academic fits, as well as colleges that will be more affordable. Today I want to share the following three helpful...

Comparing the Right Graduation Rates

When I give talks about finding and affording colleges in California, the audiences often gasp when I share grad rates for some extremely popular state schools. Here are some of the four-year grad rates that shock parents: San Jose State University 7.9% Cal State University-Long Beach 12.3% San Francisco State University 14. 2% Cal State University-Fullerton 16.5% Low Grad Rates...

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...

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...

Email from a Happy Mom

Over the last 24-hours, I received a lot of great comments and some emails in reaction to this college blog post: An Email from a Disillusioned Mom If you haven’t read the post, I’d urge you to do so. The email came from a mother of a very bright girl from an affluent family, who received little to no merit...

February 13, 2012

Getting Ideas for a College List

It’s intimidating when families hear that there are thousands of colleges and universities in this country. It’s equally unnerving when families try to grapple with this question: Where do you find ideas? This week I hope to share some suggestions on web resources that can help you start collecting college candidates. The first one to the plate is College Results...

January 16, 2012

The Shocking Truth About Graduation Rates

I met a teenage girl during the fall who was excited about applying to Hampshire College. She had visited the campus in Amherst, MA, had met professors and talked with students. She was smitten. She and her mother felt good that they had done their due diligence on the college, but then I asked them a question that drew a...

Will Your Child Graduate from College in 4 Years?

One of the best ways to cut the cost of college is to graduate in four years. This might seem like a no-brainer, but most college students can’t pull it off. Just over 50% of students, who started out as full-time freshmen, end up graduating in six years. In general, private schools do a better job than state schools of...

8 Ways to Cut College Costs

College costs sure are daunting, but the sticker prices are meaningless. I recently wrote about how my son and the other two boys in his high school carpool shrank their college costs dramatically. The tuition for the three boys for the coming year totaled a whopping $136,500, but they received grants from their respective liberal arts colleges for the 2010-11...