For years you’ve been working toward the ultimate goal: college. It’s within range of reality that some high school students have been working toward college since they were still pooping in their pants and their parents were politely crushing any toddler standing in the way of their kiddo’s spot at Kids-Who-Finger-Paint-Here-Get-Into-Yale Preschool.

Now you’ve attended all the right schools, you played the sports, you joined and led the clubs, you’ve taken prep courses and passed any standardized test the system could think up, your grades are stellar, your letters of recommendation are plentiful and glowing. You’re almost there. One more bit, kid. The penultimate act before the ultimate goal is reached: choosing the perfect college.

I know, right? You’ve done everything, haven’t you?! You’ve been thinking about little else but sex and college for years now. How can you possi

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Should parents help pay for college?

For a lot of people who visit my college blog this is going to seem like a no brainer. There are, however, parents who are determined to foist the whole cost of college onto their kids.

I can certainly understand why a mom or dad, who makes little money, couldn’t help. But you can find this mentality even among affluent parents who can contribute to a child’s education.

Marketplace on American Public Radio ran a piece exploring this issue over the weekend, which included an interview with me. I’m pasting in part of the piece below:

Marketplace radio piece

Marketplace asked listeners to weigh in on whether or not parents should save for their kids’ college education. Here are some of the reasons people give for not saving.

My kids will value their education more if they pay for it.

Many parents who said this had to pay their own way through school. They be

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I’ve been cranking out college blog posts for the past two years. (It makes me tired just thinking about it.) During this time, I’ve been pretty much picking college topics to write about that interest me as a mom and journalist.

I hope that the topics that I’ve chosen, including scholarships, college costs,  financial aid, SAT and ACT tests, college rankings, have been helpful to all of you who have dropped by. I am assuming that I’m on target at least some of the time since the number of my blog visitors continues to grow.

Yesterday, however, it occurred to me that I should ask my college blog readers what they’d like me to cover.  I figured this is a good time to pose this question because I will be attending a huge college conference late next week in St. Louis (my hometown). The annual

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How can you tell if a college or university will cut the price for your child?

You can get an idea by looking at a school’s Common Data Set.

If you don’t know what a Common Data Set is, you’ll want to read the posts that I wrote last week on this valuable document:

Researching Colleges With the Common Data Set

Common Data Set 101

Today I want to focus on the financial aid section of any school’s Common Data Set. You’ll find all the financial aid information located in Section H of the document.  I’m going to use Macalester College in St. Paul for my example simply because I learned from Alexa, which ranks websites by Internet traffic, that the biggest concentration of people visiting my blog come from Minneapolis-St. Paul. Who knew?

To obtain Macalester College’s Common Data Set, I just Googled the school’s name and Common Data Set. Macalester has i

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Some of you already know that I write a weekly college blog post for US News & World Report.

While the magazine’s website contains a treasure trove of valuable information about college, I hate it’s college rankings. This put me in an uncomfortable position when the 2011 college rankings were released with tremendous fanfare last week.

To coincide with the release of the best college rankings, I wrote a post for US News that focused on the colleges and universities that are always stuck in the college rankings basement. I’m sharing that post with you today:

Schools With Lousy College Rankings

The schools that attract the most attention on the day that U.S.News & World Report unveils its much-anticipated rankings are the ones that command the top spots.

Today, however, I’d like to focus on the schools that never get to bask in the bright lights of the college rankings hoopla. I’m tal

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