NPR has an excerpt of of Jeffrey Selingo's book College Unbound, which economist Tyler Cowen says he liked so much that he read it in a single sitting.

Leobardo Espinoza Jr. is a student at Topeka High School in Kansas, and I've been following his posts on The Choice Blog as he decides where he'll go to college—especially when he posted that he received a full academic scholarship to one of his fallback schools back in January (The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Kansas).

Semi-related to our discussion yesterday about college prestige: Propublica's look at how colleges game their numbers.

>The Times's Choice blog is answering a few questions this morning about choosing between colleges after students have been accepted into a handful of them, and it's bringing back those memories from back when (dream schools, safety schools, financial aid packages!).

How should colleges balance merit aid for talented students who may not need the money with financial aid for students who come from low-income families?

Does the college major matter?

The Times debates: Choose the college with a more affordable sticker price, or pay top dollar for the one with a prestigious name?

I like the initial premise of this piece by Kevin Carey, the policy director of a think tank named Education Sector, in The New Republic—the idea that media outlets like to post sad stories about college graduates who are unable to find jobs in their fields of studies so they end up accepting work that doesn't necessarily require a college degree (i.e. bartending, barista-ing), which ultimately devalues what a college degree is worth these days.

Jonathan Zimmerman takes a look at the "college as country club" in an opinion piece for The Los Angeles Times.

Penn State's literacy program says: "The real problem is not the rising cost of education, it is in the lack of financial planning and lack of financial literacy skills of making sound financial decisions." Um, really?