Kiplingers has some great tools that look at public colleges and private colleges to find the best value. Not the schools with the best reputations or the ones with the best rankings, the ones with the best bang for the buck. This is a great idea, and and in my opinion, a much more fruitful way to look at higher education. One of the particularly interesting things is the statistic that you can see how much debt the average student has after graduation.
As I wrote previously, I don’t think isn’t the obligation of parents to provide their children with the best education possible. It is the responsibility of parents to provide their children with an education that will be a blessing both to everyone. This could be picking up the entire bill for four years at Harvard or providing room and board while your child pays their way through community college or trade school. If a student (or a parent) can’t afford a certain school without going into debt, then perhaps it is time to start looking at better options, with the help of tools like these.
