Creative Holiday Spending
Submitted by: Todd Woodlee, Regional Director
National Student Loan Program

The holidays are quickly approaching and so is the temptation for students to use their credit cards to finance holiday gifts for family and friends. Encourage your students to replace their credit cards with creativity when it comes to holiday giving. Here are inexpensive holiday gift ideas:

Giant cookies
Make a large batch of cookie mix. Instead of using regular cookie cutters, use an 8-inch cake tin to make the shape. Cook and cool, then decorate with icing using the recipient’s name. Wrap in cellophane.

Flavored spoons
Buy a package of plastic spoons in holiday colors. Dip them in chocolate (melted chocolate chips work well) and shake off the excess. Place them on waxed paper and sprinkle with crushed peppermint candy. After they dry, wrap them in cellophane and tie with a ribbon. Put a few spoons in a coffee mug along with individual hot cocoa or coffee packets.

Teacup candle
Scour garage sales, flea markets, and your mom’s cabinets for inexpensive but interesting teacups. Melt down old candle ends and pour the wax into the cup. Add a wick (they’re cheap by the yard at craft stores) and you’re set.

Picture frames
Many craft stores carry a “base” for a frame made out of cardboard. Paint the frame, glue on trinkets or glitter, seal it with varnish, and put in a picture of family, friends, or pets.

A family “night in”
Buy gift certificates from a video store and put them in baskets with movie-size candy and microwave popcorn. Get the baskets from garage sales and the popcorn and candy from discount stores. Wrap them with plastic wrap and a nice bow. This is an inexpensive gift for an entire family.

Creativity adds a special touch to holiday gifts. Best of all, your students don’t have to touch their credit cards to create lasting memories.

Most Expensive College
By: Gordon T. Anderson, CNN/Money contributing writer
(November 5, 2003 Reprint)

New York (CNN/Money) – Even by the standards of normal educational sticker shock, this year’s tuition bill was a doozy. In October, the College Board announced that the cost of attending a public college or university rose by 9.8 percent, the larges annual increase in 30 years. Private schools were just a bit more restrained, with total costs rising 6.7 percent.
With the average university price tag rising far faster than inflation, tuition and fees at the most expensive schools pushed higher, too. Such institutions showed relatively little price restraint, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the premier trade publication covering the business of colleges and universities. The publication recently survey tuition prices—just tuition, not including room, board, and the various student fees that bump college costs even higher—across the nation and came up with a list of the 10 most expensive schools in the land. Most of those identified are small, elite liberal arts colleges in the Northeast.

Landmark College, Putney, VT, $35,300, increase $2.9%; Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY, $30,824, 5.0%; Kenyon College, Gambier, OH, #0,330, 5.6%; Trinity College, Hartford, CN, $30,230, 5.7%; Hamilton College, Clinton, NY, $30,200, 5.0%; Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME, $30,120, 5.0%; Brown University, Providence, RI, 5.65; Wesleyan University, Middletown CN, 5.9%; Colgate University, Hamilton, NY, $29,940, 5.6%; Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, $9.857, 6.l1%.

A few are relatively young. The priciest, Landmark, was founded in 1983 and targets smart kids who have learning disabilities. Brandeis, founded in 1948, is a more traditional research university with lofty (read: expensive) academic ambitions. With the cost of providing higher education rising, many larger, elite universities have used fat endowments as a buffer. That’s not possible with some of the schools on this list. Sarah Lawrence’s tiny endowment, for example works out to about $33,000 per student. Rivals Williams and Swarthmore boats coffers about 20 times larger.

With more limited sources of financial support, tuition tends to make up a relatively greater part of the budgets at schools. Up in Maine, about 50 percent of Bowdoin’s annual revenue comes from tuition. Less than one-third of well-endowed Harvard’s money, in contrast, comes form tuition. (Disclaimer)