A guide to assist families with making critical decisions about what to pay for college discusses the complex financial aid system, how to determine good value, and setting financial goals while figuring out how to save, borrow, and bargain for a better deal.

"In 1981, a new executive at Sallie Mae took home the company's financial documents to review. "You've got to be shitting me," he later told the company's CEO. "This place is a gold mine." Over the next four decades, the student loan industry that Sallie Mae and Congress created blew up into a crisis that would submerge a generation of Americans in $1.5 trillion in student debt. In The Debt Trap, Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Mitchell tells the...

"A resource for collegebound students and their parents on college financial aid, scholarships, loans, and grants. Provides strategies for finding and winning scholarships, tax credits, asking for more financial aid, saving, student loan forgiveness, financial aid applications, state financial aid, military service, adult students, graduate students, and internships"--