Today I will be reviewing Lynn O’Shaughnessy’s new book: Shrinking the Cost of College–152 ways to cut the cost of a bachelors degree.
Lynn O’Shaughnessy, is an author, a college blogger and speaker. She writes about college strategies for TheCollegeSolutionBlog and CBSMoneyWatch. She gives presentations about college strategies for schools, companies and financial advisory firms. Lynn also wrote The College Solution, which is an Amazon.com bestseller.
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Using facts and figures, Lynn explains clearly and simply where college money comes from and how to maximize your efforts to get the most money for a college education.
In the introduction of her book, Lynn states:
Billions of dollars of aid are available to students who attend college. About two out of three full-time college students receive grants, otherwise known as scholarships, to attend school. At private colleges, a whopping 82% receive scholarships…Most people look in the wrong place for help when they begin contemplating the looming college tab.
Her book systematically explains how the system works and how every parent can arm their arsenal of knowledge to help find and maximize the money that is out there. At the end of each chapter is a “To Do List” to point you in the right direction and help you gather all the information necessary to make the best financial decisions. Each chapter provides tips and “bottom line” information making it easy to apply and carry out each step in the process.
Lynn explains state grants, government grants, and private college scholarships. Her explanation of financial aid and how it works makes it easy to understand the most complicated of formulas. She explains where to find the data and how to analyze it to find the colleges that will provide the maximum financial aid to your college-bound teen. As a parent, this one tip alone will make the college application process less stressful and help to ease the college sticker price fears.
And finally, she explains the financial aid award letter and what to do when the letter arrives; walking you through how to analyze the award and how to handle an appeal for more money.
Here are just 10 tips from the book that will help you shrink the cost of college:
- Learn which 60 schools offer the best financial aid packages.
- Discover where you will find the biggest source of scholarship cash.
- Find out why 82% of students at private schools receive merit scholarships and how your child can.
- Learn why college sticker prices are meaningless and what that means for you.
- Understand how teens can win academic scholarships despite mediocre SAT/ACT scores.
- Get the list of 800+ colleges that don’t care about test scores.
- Discover how to attend out-of-state public universities for in-state prices.
- The most expensive colleges can be cheaper than your own state universities.
- You can make $200,000 and still qualify for significant need-based aid at pricey colleges.
- Students can win college money by using geography.
Every parent should grab a copy of this Ebook to add to their arsenal of college information. You can also chat with Lynn live on Twitter during an upcoming #CollegeChat June 1 at 6PM PST.
Good points, but the problem I have with her advice is her often restrictive audience – the wealthy. She doesn’t aim her advice exclusively to middle class parents, which is standard fare for writers in our field. Would you ever see a column from her on how to use Caller ID when asking for more financial aid? Not in our lifetime. She writes a column for the Wall Street Journal and CBS, with audiences in the upper income brackets. So many of her points above will not apply to the majority of parents who are struggling to make ends meet, let alone pay for college.
She does specifically speak to middle class families in this book. Perhaps not all tips are helpful to them and she does not address in great detail appeal specifics. But she does give good tips on how to collect, analyze and use data from the colleges to determine their award histories. For me, that was helpful and useful.
Hi Suzanne–
Thanks so much for mentioning the upcoming #CollegeChat on June 1 with Lynn as our guest. I also found her book really helpful afound new information I wasn’t aware of. One of her tips is to get a financial aid pre-read from a college your student is considering. I knew that colleges will do this with prospective athletes but didn’t realize it was available outside of their online calculators. Lynn’s book also stresses that if your family finances change you can also appeal your financial aid decision–definitely good advice in these challenging times.