School

Almost everything about beginning the college experience can be stressful and overwhelming. From choosing which college to go to and what to study, to dealing with roommates, to deciding exactly which college movie one's higher learning experience should emulate ("Revenge of the Nerds?" Or perhaps "Animal House"?), there are a seemingly endless series of decisions to make.

Preparing some serious financial plans are the hallmark of beginning any college experience, and figuring out exactly how to pay for college is probably among one of the most important long-term decisions you'll make, with consequences that can follow you well into adult life.

Welcome to adulthood. Won't this be fun? You know it will...

High schools with bank branches, ATMs and tellers to help students withdraw money? Can we trust teenagers with these just down the hall from chem lab? I gave it some thought last week when I went to pick up my cousin Cate, who I blogged about recently regarding her pondering the merits of public versus private colleges. She needed a ride home from her high school, but I needed to stop on the way and withdraw some cash from an ATM. "No problem," Cate told me. "You can do it here."

What? "Yeah, my school has a bank branch here," Cate said.

She led me down a hallway of classrooms to the newest branch of the Golden 1 Credit Union, opened last fall. It's a tiny room but it's stocked with computer screens, brochures on the credit union's checking and savings accounts, and student bank tellers working behind the counter.

The College on a Dime series is written by Zac Bissonnette, a junior at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His book College On a Dime will be published by Penguin in the fall.

With employers hiring 21.6% fewer graduates in 2009 and few signs of improvement on the horizon, more than a few recent college grads have become boomerang kids -- sleeping on their parents' couches, finding that their six-figure college educations still can't get them jobs that don't involve fryalators.

Enter Lesley Mitler, a Wall Street recruiter/CPA turned $400/hour career coach for recent college grads, profiled in a recent New York Times piece. Her company, Priority Candidates, Inc., will school your college graduate on the Seven Step Program: The Seven Steps To Prepare To Get Hired, Starting Now which is service marked, perhaps to distinguish it from Joel Osteen's 7 Steps to Living At Your Full Potential and the Seven Stages of Cocaine Addiction.

No word yet on whether she can train your kid on how to get a job as $400/hour career coach. If she can, her fee just might be worth it.

How to explain what Rick and Megan Prelinger are up to? The California couple searches out all that stuff you probably saw and read in your childhood -- films about corn production, home movies of Detroit, propaganda manuals about good manners -- and collects it. When a library has to get rid of a roomful of old books because of budget cuts or to expand its computer center, it's the Prelingers to the rescue.

WalletPop's Jason Cochran visited their 5-year-old library in San Francisco to give you a closer look:



"Public libraries are under enormous pressure for how to use space," says co-founder Megan Prelinger. "They very often have to get rid of something old every time something new comes in." Often, they dump publications that have to do with business, industry, landscape, land use -- all things that can still be useful to us as we figure out how to plan for tomorrow.

"Libraries have to throw things away for many reasons, and it's almost never because the material isn't valuable," she says.

My young cousin Cate is a senior in high school and debating what college or university to pick for the fall. She has been wanting to go to UC Berkeley for years, as her dad is an alumnus, but after recent student protests at UC and Cal State campuses over tuition increases, reduced classes and budget cuts, Cate has definitely been having second thoughts about enrolling in the state's tarnished school system.

Many people seem to be confused about my last post about Sallie Mae and student loans. I am not asking for a hand-out. I am asking that loans with interest rates above 7% (I will even concede to 8%) be deemed illegal.

You heard me: ILLEGAL.

There is absolutely no good reason why any loan taken out from any bank should have an interest rate approaching 10%. The interest rate for my loan should NOT be similar to the current unemployment rate in America. That high interest rate can be described as criminal in today's job market.

Over the past 10 years, for-profit colleges -- which are different from private colleges, most of which are operated as non-profits -- have tripled their enrollment to 1.4 million, with annual revenue of $26 billion.

Leading for-profit colleges include the University of Phoenix, Devry, The Art Institutes, and Kaplan University, where students can study many of the same things they do at more traditional institutions.

But is that growth good for students?

Attention, beleaguered parents! If you're trying to save for your kids' college education, this little news item may be for you.

Sallie Mae, the nation's largest lender of college student loans, has just unveiled two ways to save: certificates of deposit and an FDIC-insured, online savings account. Let me quickly review the details on what Sallie Mae is offering.

If you're like most college students, you're probably receiving some type of financial aid. Much of your tuition may be covered by scholarships, grants, or other awards.

However, we all know that there are daily expenses that scholarships and grants simply don't cover. Nearly every college student could use an extra source of income, and that's where your college's Federal Work-Study program (FWS) comes in.

Senior year in high school is full of stress. You're filling out college applications, studying for the semester exams and now you have to find a way to help mom and dad pay for college?

FAFSA might net you some break in tuition, but there are other ways to get help:

If you can call the most ducks in 90 seconds (using the four calls of hail, feed, comeback, and mating), you have a chance at a first prize of $2,000 from the Chick and Sophie Major Memorial Duck Calling Contest.

For the first time in a long time, I contributed money to my daughters' college funds this week.

In case my action inspires anyone, I thought I'd tell my little tale. Besides, it's a fitting time to discuss saving money: As you'll hopefully hear quite a few times over the next several days, if you hang around WalletPop, this is America Saves Week.

Some states are cutting back on promised funding for their prepaid tuition plans, leaving parents and grandparents footing the bill for uncovered costs.

Many states offer prepaid tuition plans, sometimes called 529 plans, as a way for parents and grandparents to save up for tuition costs. The plans allow parents to lock in current college tuition rates, and promises to cover the difference between current and future tuition.

But the recession is causing severe funding shortfalls in the plans. States like Alabama are now trying to reneg on paying the whole tuition bill, instead possibly forcing schools and families to make up the difference.

For now, states are paying tuition as promised, but some are using the fine print in the contracts to try and get out of paying tuition as agreed.

How can you avoid being burned? You need to read the fine print.

Five state plans are backed fully by the state. Others, including Illinois and Maryland, are required by law to consider covering the funds if there is a potential shortfall. But states including Alabama, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Tennessee are backed by the funds' assets, which means if the funds run dry states don't need to rescue them.

Puzzles are often fun, but not this one: With credit scores plunging and loans in short supply, how do you go about paying for college these days?

It's a question you'd think might almost be easy for Scott Gamm. Granted, in many ways, he's just another high school kid, about to turn 18 and headed to college this fall (New York University's Stern School of Business). But in many ways, he isn't a typical high school kid: He's the founder of HelpSaveMyDollars.com, a personal finance website that he began in July, 2009.

We recently wrote about how to watch out for bogus online degree programs. Now we're going to have a little fun. In the list below, we have linked the names of each of these bogus ivory towers to one of a number of sources saying it's a diploma or degree mill, or unaccredited:

• Almeda University
• Amstead University
• Belford University (you can remind yourself about Belford from the last column)
• Bennington University (not to be confused with Bennington College)
• Rochville University
• St. Regis University
• Williamstown University

It's bad enough that college tuition will cause most students to land in debt for years after they graduate. But when each new semester begins, college students around the country cringe, knowing that they will have to watch their debt rise with each swipe of their credit card while purchasing textbooks. They will be shelling out hundreds of dollars for textbooks that will only be used for a few months -- often for classes some didn't even choose or want to take in the first place.