The College Solution: A Guide for Everyone Looking for the Right School at the Right Price (2nd Edition)

Though I'm not a certified college counselor, college admissions is a passion, and I know enough to say this book is excellent. It's the first I've seen that combines the tested wisdom of books by Loren Pope, John Palladino, Jay Matthews, and the people at Fiske that details the best ways to find a college with a unique plan of attack designed to combat the insane cost of higher education. All of the highly respected college advice books I'm familiar with were released before the crisis of student debt came to the nation's attention. So The College Solution puts much more emphasis on practicality. In addition, the eye-roll inducing "Go to College for Free!" financing guides focus on ridiculously unlikely private scholarship while O'Shaughnessy provides much more realistic approaches.I could go on for pages why this book is great, but I'll keep it to a few points.1 The importance of the "newness" of this book cannot be overstated. There are important resources just becoming available now. For example, the government will be requiring Net Price Calculators so students will know what an individual college will really cost. Another new trend is "tuning". O'Shaughnessy reveals how the extreme high cost has led some schools (particularly flagship state universities) to realize parents will soon demand better results. Thus, some institutions are "tuning" their degree programs with help from the Lumina Foundation ("educational good guys" according to O'Shaughnessy) and major employers to ensure students graduate with what they need to succeed. This now makes, for example, the public universities in Utah a great place to consider while other states like Texas are doing a sharp job choosing vital majors like math and science to "tune". Checking the various "coming soon" and "just starting" aspects O'Shaughnessy mentions may make this book just as valuable to someone with a sophomore or junior in high school as a rising senior.2 The author confirms the work done by Loren Pope and other experts, but provides additional insights. She agrees that small liberal arts colleges often do the best job educating undergrads as they can provide ample personal attention, resulting in far better writing, critical thinking, and public speaking skills. However, these schools are usually private and expensive, and few schools can still afford to be "need blind".To make private liberal arts colleges a more likely possibility, O'Shaughnessy explains strategies involving going beyond your region to work a "geographic hook" and focusing on schools where your student will be in the top third of the applicant pool as opposed to "impossible dreams schools". She also weighs other options that might offer smaller classes (and more attention) such as community colleges, research university honors programs, public liberal arts colleges, and even a small number of colleges that are tuition-free or close to free if students work on campus. There are also numerous resources she's discovered to find out how good a school's financial aid really is or how large their scholarships usually are before you even apply.3 Continuing with the importance of what is new, the internet has revolutionized the college "industry" in countless ways. I don't think I've seen any book as conscious of that as this one. Using the internet to do college searches is a start, but there are websites that can help students reach out to athletic coaches or music/fine art professors and thus, discover schools they might not have considered previously that are not only great matches but would actually want to recruit them through scholarships . Because of the college rankings craze, it's vital to show a school how interested you are in attending. This book discusses several ways to show interest without even leaving your computer.This book is not 100% perfect although it's pretty darn close. When I started reading, I had a bit of an objection to the author's view of merit scholarships, but she has good points. They aren't exactly fair if schools are giving money to "rich" students because of their high SATS when they are "gapping" students with actual financial need instead of giving them with they deserve. I agree with O'Shaughnessy when she points out that public schools should be ashamed of themselves for competing for "stars" that will improve their ranking when they aren't also adequately serving the state residents who need them. However, there are thousands of students whose families may be too affluent to be considered needy but cannot easily afford the insane cost of college. So giving merit scholarships for years of hard work sounds fair to me, and at one point, O'Shaughnessy does say that if there are schools that are likely to offer your child a merit scholarship, you should go for it - much wiser to aim for good schools that are willing to fight for your student than waste time on a reach school that possibly won't offer admission, and if it does, most likely won't offer merit aid or even do its best to make itself affordable.My bigger problem isn't huge, but here it is: The Forbes Rankings are awful and O'Shaughnessy trumpets them over U.S. News. She is right on when she slams US News for putting so much emphasis on a "reputation ranking" determined by presidents and counselors who couldn't possibly know enough about two hundred to four hundred institutions to judge them accurately. However, paragraphs could be written about the problems with Forbes' rankings. They see nothing wrong with their system when numerous schools vault or sink by dozens or even hundreds of places from their spots on last year's list. Second, many of their metrics are determined from user-input websites that have insufficient data on more than half the schools they rank. It's apparent they don't know what they're doing, but they don't care. Having rankings earns them money, and, as the president of Stanford point out (about U.S. News), the fact schools nearly never change dramatically in quality over the space of one year doesn't concern Forbes at all. Even more than U.S. News, Forbes is guilty of irresponsible journalism.One final quibble. I bought a finished edition of the Kindle version of this book in addition to the Amazon Vine copy for the sake of seeing what links were available, so I will mention that the editors at FT Press need to check how words like "loath/loathe" and "tantamount/paramount" should be used. I know I'm not a fantastic writer, but a book written about education and for people interested in education will lose some credibility when readers catch misused words.That said, this is now my favorite book on college admissions and the one I recommend first. I still love the Fiske Guide to Colleges for people who want an overview of the different prominent schools, and I don't believe (as of yet) you can get the same access to the information in Fiske on the internet unless you spend a lot of time researching. Also, I think looking at Loren Pope's books can still be helpful and if your student has "mid-range" B or C grades, then John Palladino's book is definitely still a necessity.But Lynn O'Shaughnessy's book is now the one I'm telling people to get. It's a great resource.

If you or your child is about to apply to college, do yourself a favor and read this book - and follow its advice.Thanks to this book, both my daughter and also her boyfriend applied to and were recently admitted to several of the Colleges That Change Lives, receiving both merit aid and need-based aid that reduced the total cost of attendance by 75% and close to 100%, respectively. Yes, they are both very good students, but had they done what most everyone else does - apply to a flagship state university (in our case, UCLA or UC Berkeley), they may well have been rejected. Even if accepted, they would have paid full or close to full price - for a college that by all meaningful measures does not provide as good of an education as a small liberal arts college.I also found the book extremely easy, even fun, to read, well organized, thorough, and, well, eye-opening. The college application process can be mind-blowing and it's easy to come away with the impression that there is just no away around taking out massive loans to pay for college. As O'Shaughnessy points out, most people never really consider a private school, especially out of state, because they think a private school would be way too expensive. So they apply exclusively to in-state schools - where in most cases they get little or no financial aid. That's no surprise since a state school has tens of thousands of students and is funded by tax payer money. States just don't have the funds to give every student, or even most students, the financial aid they need.But it doesn't have to be that way. As O'Shaughnessy explains, there a lots of excellent small private colleges all around the country which, thanks to a much, much smaller student body, DO have the funds to give every or almost every student the financial aid they need. Many of these schools also give out generous merit-aid, and not just to one or two geniuses.Sadly, even most HS college counselor are largely unfamiliar with this information. The reason may be that college counselors are more concerned with how to get students into college and less with how to pay for college. So they tell students to apply to a handful of schools where they have a good chance to get accepted, in many cases well-known in-state institutions, without worrying about the price tag since, presumably, an in-state school will always be the best deal. That may have been OK when college tuition was still affordable for most, but today it's a disservice to both students and parents. In-state schools are NO LONGER the best deal. Nor do they provide the best undergraduate education.So, read "The College Solution" and then, if you want more details about particular schools, read "Colleges That Change Lives" by Loren Pope as recently updated by Hillary Masell Oswald.

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