Yesterday I wrote about colleges teaming up with textbook publishers to screw students out of just a little bit more of their hard-earned money.

Not wanting to miss out on the orgy of exploitation, credit card companies are also collaborating with colleges on misleading credit card offers loaded with undisclosed conflicts of interest. Basically, credit card companies are paying colleges in exchange for student information, and working out licensing deals that put colleges in a position to prosper by trapping their undergrads into a cycle of debt. Find out more about this sordid tale in this BusinessWeek story.

Here's how students can avoid this trap: if you receive a credit card offer in the mail, throw it in the trash. College students should never have more than one credit card -- there's just no reason to and, given that they're new at this, there's no reason for them to complicate their lives juggling multiple accounts. Log-on to creditcards.com's special card finder for college students, pick one with no annual fee, and pay off your balance every month.

If you know any college students, forward this post to them and save them some agony.

Public-private partnerships are a favorite of politicians -- what's better than people working together for the public good?

But a recent Wall Street Journal piece (subscription required) exposed a disturbing trend: public colleges and textbook publishers teaming up to ripoff students. Here's how the scam -- and there's noting else to call it -- works: The University of Alabama requires freshman composition students to buy a writing textbook called "A Writer's Reference," by Diana Hacker.

But: not just any edition will do, they have to buy the special edition for the school for $59.35, when the regular edition could be had for half that price used. Worse still, the campus bookstore won't buy back or sell the special edition. The only difference is a special cover and a writing guide that's available free on the college's website.

What can college students do? Ignore the directions and purchase a regular used copy. What could possibly be so special about the college edition? In all probability, everything you need will be in the original book or in the professor's presentations and, if for some reason you actually do need something from the special edition, they'll have a copy of it at the library.

A lot of people have been complaining about the dumbing down of America's colleges, alleging that our great universities have turned into amusement parks where students drink and slack, learning very little of any value.

Others, including this blogger, have said that the current "student loan crisis" is a myth, asserting that many students are taking out loans instead of choosing less expensive schools or, heaven forbid, working more and spending less.

There's no better proof that both of these allegations are true than Amazon's latest sale: Off to College with Video Games.

What follows is a page of "bargains" on video games. NCAA Football 2009? $59.99, because intramural sports burn too many calories, and what would freshman year be without "the freshman 15." Guitar Hero Aerosmith Wireless Bundle? $99.99 because displaying the work ethic to actually learn an instrument is sooo 20th century.

We should have a rule: no one who blows money on video games should be allowed to whine about the rising cost of college. And if you're taking out student loans, that means that you can't afford to waste money on trash like this.

Senate Democrats have introduced a bill that would require lenders that participate in the federal loan program to lend money to any eligible student, without taking into account factors like income or the kind of college a student is attending. The bill is being introduced after outcry over the number of lenders that have elected to stop offering student loans for community college.

This is wrong in a bunch of ways. As Pat Watkins, director of financial aid at Eckerd College, told the New York Times, "Banks are not philanthropic agencies" and that if banks are required to make unprofitable loans, "a lot of the banks will just say, we're out of the business completely, you pushed us out."

That won't do a lot to help the "student lending crisis" that is making national headlines. In the long run, strong arming private companies into making loans they don't want to make won't do a lot to help anyone, and is likely to hurt the people it is designed to help: students.

But, as I recently wrote, a decline in the availability of loans for community colleges might actually be good for some students, as they'll pay for college in better ways: working more and being frugal. But in the meantime, lenders should be allowed to make the loans that make sense, and shouldn't be forced to make bad loans or no loans at all.

After she graduated from high school, high-achieving student Lauren Clark decided to take a year off before heading to college. In a piece in The New York Times, she describes her gap year. She taught English and helped build a library in Ghana and then studied art in Venice. In Ghana she discovered a passion for development and studied economics, Africa and international relations when she began her studies at Tufts the following year. Now she is pursuing a career in microfinance, and will be moving to India. Her career path was forged during her gap year and she has found something she loves. Taking a year off worked for her.

Should you, or your child, consider this? Perhaps. But the problem is that students who will want to pursue a gap year are probably not well-suited to it. The ambitious types who would benefit and not suffer from it are likely to be more hesitant. As Clark writes, "Family friends were afraid that I would never go to college and get a good job if I chose a gap year. But I knew I was committed." The problem is that many people who decide to "take a year off" have a a way of taking a life off, and suffering the consequences.

But there's a lot to be said for taking a year off to do something interesting abroad. Julie Tilsner recently made the case for youth as the time for travel, and she has some great points. To look into programs, try this search engine.

The Chandler quintuplets are going to college! (And their older brother just finished college.) They're heading to University of New England, Ripon College (yay Wisconsin!), Concordia University Nebraska, Norris University, and Regis University. They'll be in different states and studying different things, ranging from nursing to criminal justice.

Check out the video below to see how mom and dad are handling becoming empty-nestera, as well as the financial burden. The kids are getting scholarships and grants, and the family still hasn't decided how to pay the balance, but they're relying on their faith to help them find a solution. (Note that I think it's not the end of the world if the kids take student loans and work while they're going to school. I did it!)


Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Accounting, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.

When Ashley Overhouse's parents found out that the cost of her first year at the University of California-Santa Cruz would be almost 8% higher than they'd thought, she says they had an understandable reaction: "They freaked."

Ashley's parents aren't alone. As tuitions and fees continue to rise both in California and nationwide, there is increasing pressure on college-bound members of the class of 2008 and their families to fill the gap between what they can get in federal and state financial aid and what a higher education will actually cost them.

To finance her freshman year of college this fall, Ashley has secured a $5,000 Cal Grant, two scholarships and two loans from UCSC. Even with all this in place, she's still looking at ways to cover costs. "My scholarships are for $400 and $1,000," Ashley says. "That'll pay for my books."

According to a recent article in the Ventura County Star, business is now the number one major among college students.

That's up from, say, the 1970s, when business was a distant third. This is information that comes from the National Center for Education Statistics and the Princeton Review.

A lot of theories are offered in the article penned by Jean Cowden Moore, and she sums them up in this key paragraph: "Educators say today's students might not be as idealistic as their counterparts in the 1960s. Plus, they've grown up more coddled than past generations. Now that they're college students, they want to continue the lifestyle they grew up with, and they see business as a major that will give them a stable income."

Welcome to WalletPop's series "You've graduated. Now what?" Our bloggers have a wealth of suggestions to help you find you way through that time of amazing transformation, from student to working stiff.

I still had my diploma in one hand when my father handed me a bill totaling up all that I owed the family for my four years of higher education. He's the sarcastic type, so I thought he was joking, but he was actually serious. I was taking on some of the debt burden, but my parents had taken out loans as well and he figured they were my responsibility. My mom had to talk him down and let him give me a little time to get on my feet -- interest free -- before I started making payments.

They also ended up co-signing my first rental lease and fronting the broker's fee and first month's rent when I moved to New York for an internship that paid $5 an hour (just to give a sign of the declining times: A few years later, that internship paid nothing at all, and the company went out of business last year). So it wasn't just Sallie Mae that I owed.

It's graduation season, and another year's worth of college students will be paroled from the dorms, thrust into the scary world of trying to pay off the student loan debt they accumulated.

MSNBC has put together a video featuring clips from The Today Show experts giving tips to outgoing college students: the best cities for graduates, mastering the job market, succeeding in the interview, managing money and, heaven forbid, moving in with your parents.

Forward this post to any seniors you know who are graduating this year.

Do you have an eco-conscience high school grad walking to pomp and circumstance this spring? Maybe a patchouli and Birkenstock loving college grad ready to wrestle corporate America for our nations future? What better way to show them your support and give them a graduation gift they will remember, than erasing the carbon footprint they have left over their short life. Worldchanging.com in coordination with TerraPass, a carbon offsetting company, have teamed up to offer a clean slate gift program in which a donor can buy the carbon offsets to essentially displace the carbon footprint for graduates from high school through working adults.

The program is not cheap, but if you want to make a difference going green this way is likely to make a bigger difference than a pack of CFL light bulbs for the graduates first apartment. To offset the carbon footprint of a high school graduate, $6,000 in offsets would need to be purchased. For a college graduate the cost would be $7,500 and for a working adult the price jumps up to $25,000! The prices are high but even if you can't afford to offset your favorite grad's carbon footprint for life you can purchase offsets in smaller amounts by donating to Terrapass in honor of the graduate.

Looking down the barrel at a costly college education, many students might want to ask what, exactly, they are getting for their money. After all, even the cheapest state schools run a few thousand dollars per year, and pricey private colleges top out at more than $30 grand. Add in room and board, and you're talking about $40,000+ for a single year of school. Multiply that over 4-5 years, throw in a few thousand for a semester overseas, and the price of an education moves into the Rolls Royce range.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the purpose of a college education; as I mentioned then, the most important skill that college can develop is the ability to think critically. Since I've been out of the academy, I've talked to a large number of people who are working (and hiring other workers) in the "real world." I've repeatedly heard that companies want their college-educated employees to be able to think independently, to be able to come to their own conclusions, and to be capable of understanding the consequences of a course of action. In other words, they want employees who are able to think critically. Unfortunately, however, this highly-important skill is in incredibly short supply.

There are a lot of reasons that students aren't being taught to be critical and independent thinkers. First off, it's a very hard thing to teach, and many professors aren't up to the challenge. Also, the hierarchical nature of the classroom makes it difficult to create free thinkers. Most importantly, though, universities have increasingly become bastions of dogma, the sworn enemy of free thought. In other words, rather than learn to evaluate the truth and value of a perspective, students are being inundated with the unevaluated and untested prejudices of their professors.

Just because those with higher education have lower death rates doesn't mean that bachelor's degrees are all they are cracked up to be either. In an column for the Chronicle of Higher Education Marty Nemko, a college consultant and author, shares his view that the bachelor's degree may be the most overrated product in America. Marty cites many factors and studies in reaching this conclusion but the key factor seems to be under-prepared students. Thankfully Nemko provides more than a headline by linking to supporting facts and most importantly offering suggestions to fix the problem!

Doesn't the under-preperation of students for college speak more about the job high schools are able to do than the job that colleges are doing? Not that I can blame the high schools who have to spend a significant chunk of time on standardized test taking rather than instilling knowledge in children. Sadly even a high percentage of students who are prepared coming out of high school won't make enough in the long run to justify the cost of a bachelor's degree. Another one of the facts Nemko cites is that the literacy rate amongst college graduates is currently declining. Take a second to absorb that; the number of illiterate college graduates is rising!

According to BusinessWeek, "In recent months, peer-to-peer lending sites such as Prosper and Virgin Money USA have introduced student loans or started marketing existing offerings to families looking for college funds. Others, including startups GreenNote and Fynanz, are focused exclusively on making college loans."

It's not a surprising development. Peer-to-peer lending has been growing in popularity for years and the tightened credit market is making it tougher for some students to secure loans for college.

There may be a future in peer-to-peer student loans but I don't see it happening anytime soon. Here's why:

• Subsidized student loans are always preferable. Before exploring any private loans, college students should complete the FAFSA form and take steps to see how much they can borrow at artificially low interest rates.