This department reports on the state of the collegiate market -- costs, conventional solutions (that rarely work as advertised), and realities.

You need to know the truth in order to be sufficiently motivated to start looking seriously for ways around the collegiate economic cartel.

I suggest that you read this horror story on the economic and psychological burden of student loans. Then have your child read it.

Next, as a parent, do you want to spend $40,000 to $200,000 to send your child to Indoctrinate U? For an introduction, click here.

The best ways around the system are found in my manual, America's Lowest Cost Colleges: How to Earn An Accredited College Degree for Pennies on the Dollar. For details, click here: http://www.garynorth.com/products/item7.cfm

If you are planning to attend college or pay for a child to attend college, you need counsel. You need counsel from someone who has been through the system, beaten the system, and is no longer part of the system or being paid for by the system.

I qualify.

This Department is devoted to monitoring the high costs of college and reporting on ways to beat the system.

It also offers suggestions about what to do after you enroll to get your money's worth.

There is also a question and answer forum on this site that deals with strategies and techniques to reduce the time and money required to earn a degree. Here, you can ask questions about getting through college -- not academic questions (how to do classroom assignments), but institutional questions relating to getting in and getting out, fast and cheap. You will normally get an answer in your e-mail box within 24 hours.

College is a huge investment. For most students, it costs tens of thousands of dollars and takes five years or more.

If you want to read a horror story on the debt burden that college graduates begin their careers with, read this.

This is unnecessary. You can get the same kind of B.A. degree from an accredited university for about $15,000 in three years. I know of one man who did it for $5,000 in six months.

Before you spend a dime on college, read this article from Forbes.

Then read this from the New York Times. It was written by a novelist who was writing a satire on how colleges prostitute themselves. He found that every outrageous compromise he could think of was already being done, sometimes by major universities. Click here.