The College Solution Blog by Lynn O’Shaughnessy

For those of you who can’t stop thinking about college — even during the Fourth of July weekend — I’m sharing with you the three posts that I wrote this week for my other college blog at CBSMoneyWatch.

1. Ten Hottest Careers for College Graduates

Whether you’re a college student, a recent college grad or looking for a mid-career move, here are some of the most promising careers you’ll find throughout the country.

2. States with the Most and Least College Graduates

I bet you can guess which state produces the most young college graduates. It’s Massachusetts. But where does your state stack up? You’ll find the link to nonprofit website that will provide grad rates for all 50 states as well as a breakdown of every country.

3. Ivy League Endowment Report Card: F Read the rest of this entry »

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Are colleges going  to be the next big bubble that bursts?

College prices continue to rise even as fewer and fewer parents are remotely able to cover the tab. Ever since George Washington University broke the $50,000-a-year barrier awhile ago, a growing number of elite schools now charge at least that much. Imagine that. Or rather, imagine paying that. I figure that the costs of attending a $50,000 schools breaks down to roughly $1,600 a week.

During the past 25 years, higher ed costs have soared by 440% , which is nearly twice the rate of medical care.

In an opinion piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education on Wednesday, a couple of higher ed veterans argue that colleges and universities are careening into their own version of the mortgage/financial markets implosion. A perfect storm does seem to be brewing, but I think schools are largely in denial. I suspect that many college presidents and trustees hope the recession will recede this year so they can return to their old ways.

As I mentioned in my recent college post for CBSMoneyWatch.com, many experts believe that monumental changes will occur. If you are lucky enough to be able to afford a school that charges $50,000 a year, however, you might never notice.

Learn more about evaluating colleges and shrinking the price by reading my book,  The College Solution, and visiting my blog’s archives. Lynn O’Shaughnessy  

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 Here’s another victim of the stubborn recession:  College scholarships.

A recent article in The New York Times concluded that students hoping to win college scholarships are going to experience a much harder time. The newspaper cites dwindling support from corporations, states and philanthropists as the culprits.

While this is unwelcome news, I’d suggest that the reality is not as spooky as the article suggests. Why?

The largest source of financial aid remains the federal government and those programs are not endangered. Another huge source of scholarship money is from the schools themselves. As I mentioned in my post yesterday, private colleges INCREASED their aid for the 2009-2010 school year by 9%.

Much of the focus on the newspaper article was on diminishing private scholarships, but as I’ve mentioned in many previous posts, these college scholarships represents a teeny tiny sliver of the free cash available for college students.

Here’s the bottom line:  the news isn’t quite as scary at The New York Times would have you believe.

Learn how to shrink the cost of college by reading my book, The College Solution, and visiting my other college blog at CBSMoneyWatch.com. Lynn O’Shaughnessy

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If you are stressing about how to pay for your child’s bachelor’s degree, the news today from an association of private colleges and universities isn’t going to make you break out the champagne at dinner tonight.

In a self-congratulatory press release, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, announced that the average tuition increase among private colleges and universities was only 4.3% for the 2009-2010 school year.

If 4.3% sounds high to you, you’re obviously a parent.

To a college administrator, the rate hike is teeny tiny. In fact, private schools haven’t shown this much restraint in holding down tuitions since 1972.

Here is news, however, that’s a little more encouraging. During the same period, private schools increased their financial aid budgets by an average of 9%.

As I mentioned in one of my previous college blog posts, many private schools have tried exceedingly hard to not only maintain their pots of financial aid and merit cash during these tough times, but also fatten them.

Private institutions are petrified that families are going to blindly accept conventional wisdom that state schools are the only way to afford college during this recession. With private colleges discounting tuition like crazy, that’s certainly not true, but reality won’t matter if parents eliminate options before even considering them.

Learn how to cut the cost of private and public college and universities by reading my book, The College Solution. Lynn O’Shaughnessy

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When my husband returned last week from a business trip on the East Coast, he brought home a copy of the Boston Globe that contained a story about layoffs at Harvard.

Harvard is cutting loose 275 people and this comes on top of other recent cuts, including the postponement of an ambitious and very expensive campus expansion.

If Harvard’s in trouble doesn’t that mean that times are far more precarious for colleges that aren’t circling in its orbit?  Not necessarily.

You see Harvard, which is undoubtedly the richest university on the planet, relies heavily on its endowment to pay to keep the lights on. The endowment, which at its height was about $38 billion, kept Harvard fat and happy for years. In fact, some alumni grumbled that Harvard was being piggish for demanding ever more money from its alumni, who could be spreading their wealth to more deserving causes.

But thanks to the financial markets implosion and dubious money management practices, Harvard has lost about one out of every three of its endowment dollars.

In contrast, most colleges in this country have never gotten to live as large as Harvard and a few of its elite peers. They just don’t possess mega-bucks endowments. Consequently, most private colleges have always had to depend heavily on tuition to pay their yearly expenses, which means they have to be more disciplined to live within their means.

Ironically, you’ll find many schools with far more modest financial resources that aren’t suffering as much as Harvard. At least not yet.

You’ll learn how to shrink the cost of college by reading my book, The College Solution, and my other college blog at CBSMoneyWatch.com.  Lynn O’Shaughnessy

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I wanted to share with you three college posts that I wrote this week for my other college blog  at CBSMoneyWatch. Hope you enjoy them!

1. Shrinking Your Federal Student Loans

A great federal program will begin this coming Wednesday that will provide relief to many borrowers who are struggling with repaying their federal student loans.

2. Declawing the FAFSA

I feel extremely fortunate that I haven’t had to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. I haven’t had to take out a federal student loan — at least not yet — so I’ve been able to skip this dreaded chore. Millions of parents haven’t been so lucky, but the good news is that the federal government is going to simplify the form beginning in January.

3. What College Will Look Like in 2020

According to a study by The Chronicle of Higher Education, the college experience is going to look much, much different in 11 years.

Learn more about shrinking the cost of college by visiting my college blog archive and reading my book, The College Solution. — Lynn O’Shaughnessy

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When I’m giving a college talk, I’m always amazed at how many parents ask me about college gap year opportunities.

I’m surprised because I happen to be focused on getting my teenagers out of college in four years. It never occurred to me to delay the inevitable.

That said,  there legitimate reasons why teenagers and their parents might be interested in a gap year between high school graduation and the start of college.

College admission officers have told me that boys have the most compelling reason to delay entering college. That’s because the typical teenage boy isn’t as mature as their female classmates. I had a admission dean at an elite liberal arts school recently tell me that ideally boys should start college when they are 20, but girls could enroll at age 18.

If you are exploring college gap possibilities, you’ll find lots to mull over in this article from The Daily Beast. But here is one word of caution: Read the rest of this entry »

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Hallelujah. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is getting simplified.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan  announced plans to make the FAFSA, which includes 135 questions on assets and income, more user friendly today.

The news isn’t surprising. At his confirmation hearing, Duncan had this to say about the FAFSA: “You basically have to have a Ph.D. to figure that thing out.”

The new FAFSA application, which will debut in January, is expected to shrink by about 20%.

Despite how difficult the FAFSA is to file out, filings jumped 12% this year thanks to the hideous economy.

Learn more about financial aid by reading the The College Solution and visiting my blog’s financial aid archive.

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With state universities overflowing with students and applicants maybe this will be the wave of the future….

The president-elect of the Arizona Board of Regents, just released a report that urges the state’s three public universities — University of Arizona, Arizona State and Northern University — to launch programs that would allow its students to spend three years at a community college before transferring.

These 3-1 programs would help relieve some of the overcrowding at Arizona’s four-year institutions. It would also shrink the cost of a bachelor’s degree. Tuition at Arizona community colleges is $2,200 versus around $6,800 at the state universities, which doesn’t count the bigger room-and-board expense.

According to the plan, the universities would only offer a 3-1 option to a few highly popular majors, such as education.

This Arizona proposal is part of a trend to keep students in community colleges longer as they work towards a bachelor’s degree. For instance, Miami Dade College, which is the largest institution of higher learning in the country,  happens to be a community college, but it is now offering a variety of low-cost bachelor’s degrees including those in law enforcement.

I think you will see more and more of this happening across the country as the cost of college makes the traditional route to a college degree impossible for many families.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and she also write a college blog at CBSMoneyWatch.com.

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I’m lousy at math. As my son and daughter started venturing into analytic trigonomtry, precalculus and then calculus, I was utterly useless as a resource.

For parents, whose children need help with math homework, there is now a remarkable resource available that is making math teachers across the country both excited and nervous. It’s called WolframAlpha.

WolframAlpha, which was released on the Web last month, is a computational knowledge engine. In contrast to Google, WolframAlpha provides answers by doing computations internally rather than searching the web and producing links.

The new search engine contains more than 10 trillion pieces of data and 50,000+ types of algorithms and models.

You can plug any math problem into WolframAlpha and not only receive the answer, but also obtain all the steps it took to obtain it. Here is an example of WolframAlpha providing the answer to a  trigonometry calculation.

According to some math professors, WolframAlpha has the potential to make a bigger impact on math instruction than the graphing calculator. A teacher who maintains a blog at TeachingCollegeMath.com, however, suggests that WolframAlpha could encourage cheaters. (Duh.) Read the rest of this entry »

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