More about college for your kids

My last post regarding paying for kids' college expenses seemed to generate some interest, so I thought I would follow that up with what I hope are a couple of helpful resources. In the last two years, when our sons were seniors in high school, we learned A TON about researching various colleges, applying for college, and then paying for college.

I have to say, before we went through this with our boys, my wife and I THOUGHT we knew all about it. After all, I've been a high school teacher for over 20 years, and we have 4 (soon to be 5) college degrees between the two of us. But the landscape of college applications and financing is very, very different from what it was 10 years ago, as we found out.

And as much as I hate to say it, the Boise State University online degree program in which I am currently enrolled is...not a good indicator of what students just out of high school are going to go through regarding applications and financing.

So, based on everything I learned over the past 2-3 years about researching, applying, and financing college for your kids, these are the THREE BEST RESOURCES I have come across:

• College Confidential Just about any question you could EVER ask about researching, applying, and financing college can be answered on the hundreds of thousands of discussion forums at CollegeConfidential.com. Staggering amounts of honest (sometimes blunt) commentary. An absolutely invaluable resource.

• Cappex This is a great website for researching colleges. Easy to read, accurate data about admissions, majors, etc. for just about every college. The graphs, charts, and comments from current students and faculty are very helpful.

• US Government's easy-to-use "Paying for college" worksheet This is a great tool from the federal government's consumer finance department. You input the colleges you are interested in, and it gives you a comparison of how much you will pay to attend each college. If you know them, you can also input your sources of scholarships, aid and savings, and it will figure those into the calculations. 

There are other websites you will need to know about: the common application website, the FAFSA website, collegeboard.com, and the websites of the colleges your children are interested in. But those are sort of obvious. The three I listed above are a little lesser-known, and infinitely more useful.

The two photos at the top of this post, by the way, are where both of our boys ended up going, which is Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University.