Great College Advice

I find that some parents are stuck on reputation and prestige when they walk into my office and start talking about colleges.  I try to remind them that they are buying not only the reputation, but the educational experience for four years.

I also try to talk to them about class size and accessibility of professors, [...]

President Richard C. Levin of Yale University has announced that the University will construct two new residential college and “expand its footprint” in New Haven. This expansion will alleviate some overcrowding in the current residential colleges, and it will allow the undergraduate student body to grow by about 13 percent. You can read [...]

This was a brutal year for admissions to top colleges. The applicant pool was larger than ever before. Harvard and Princeton did away with their early decision programs. Many elite colleges, including the Ivies, Lafayette, Bowdoin, and Stanford, announced generous new financial aid policies.
And many colleges increased the size of their waiting [...]

Columbia University announced today that it was joining its Ivy League sister institutions in revamping its financial aid policies to make the University more affordable for the middle class. Families with incomes of less than $60,000 will pay nothing. Families with incomes of less than $100,000 will see a significant increase in the [...]

In the wake of similar moves by its sister institutions in the Ivy League, Dartmouth announced today several major enhancements to its financial aid program.
First, it will offer free tuition to families with income below $75,000.
Second, it will replace all loans with scholarships or grants.
Third, it will extend need-blind admissions to international students (which currently [...]

The New York Times reported in an article yesterday that the numbers of applications to Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, and many other colleges are way up this year. Part of this increase is due to demographics, part of it is due to the ease of electronic submissions, and part of it is due to [...]

As I explained in a previous post, I recently asked a group of friends about their experiences in selecting a college or university.
This is one alumna’s account of how she chose the University of Pennsylvania.
“When applying to college I was pre-med, so I looked for schools that had high acceptance rates of their seniors to [...]

An article in today’s New York Times reports that Yale University has followed the lead of Harvard in pumping $24 million into its financial aid budget. This will help reduce the squeeze on middle income families with incomes of less than $200,000. Financial aid packages for a large portion of current and future [...]

As I explained in a previous post, I recently asked a group of friends about their experiences in selecting a college or university.
These words of wisdom come from a gentleman who attended Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, and who later went on to medical school. He is now a well-known plastic surgeon, and [...]

As I explained in a previous post, I recently asked a variety of friends and acquaintances how they selected the college they attended.
This respondent attended Harvard as an undergraduate in the mid-1980s. He is now a lawyer living in Michigan. His story is interesting because it demonstrates that serendipity can have an important [...]